There's a Man With a Gun Over There (28 page)

The next week, going to the PX at Fort Ord to buy a Bob Dylan record, I passed a scraggly little group set up 100 yards from the main entrance to the post. The heavy girl was there holding up a sign that read, BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW!

The PX didn't have any Bob Dylan records, but they did have one from Jimi Hendrix with a Dylan song, “All Along the Watchtower”:

Two riders were approaching

And the wind began to howl

42.

H
err Engeler, Herr Engeler. A slumping bear of a man in a baggy suit. His ties, unlike those of Herr Schefke, always hung loose and askew. He usually arrived late to Room 250 with papers sticking out of his accordion-like briefcase. He sat down with a sigh, as if the world weighed heavily on him, and his briefcase hit the floor a moment later like a punctuation mark.

“
Na, ja
,” he said most days, his hair falling across his face. Oh dear.

He looked down at the linoleum squares on the floor for a moment, gathering his thoughts. Then he looked up, combing his hair back with his fingers. He looked wistful, with a little smile, as if he shared a secret with us. The other instructors were so brisk, getting our German ready, polishing us for our days in the
Vaterland
, but Herr Engeler seemed like he was preparing us for something else. He seemed to feel sorry for us.

Again, he ran his fingers through his hair, pulling it back over his head. He pointed at one of us.

“
Ach, ja, wir beginnen jetzt mit Ihnen
.”

We begin with you.

He pointed at PFC Chuck Quarles, in the back row. Blushing, Chuck said his part.

Wie heißt die Strasse hier?

Herr Engeler pointed at Renner next.

Die Zeil, die Hauptgeschäftsstraße von Frankfurt.

Sentence by sentence, we went through the dialogue in the first hour, each of us taking a turn. While this is the normal routine of our mornings, Herr Engeler seemed to have his mind elsewhere.

It was the end of April, and our course ended in July. We were all beginning to feel jittery. The bargain we'd made with the army was coming to an end. In July the army could do whatever it wanted with us. Vietnam was always a possibility.

Early on, Lee Rasmussen had reminded us of that. He started with us in September, chattering away during the breaks outside of Nisei Hall.

“Gonna get me one of those Porsche automobiles over there in ole Deutschland,” he said. “Gonna drive me up and down those ole autobahns like no one's ever driven them before.”

He had the thumb and index finger of his right hand on the knot of his black GI necktie and wiggled it back and forth, as if it were too tight or too loose or too something. A nervous tic.

“Gonna have me some of that good life over there in Germany.”

In the mornings, though, when we were supposed to repeat the dialogues, Lee couldn't talk. All he could do was smile and wiggle that tie knot back and forth. It was quite strange, really. Even the career sergeants, who weren't very smart, could sputter out a few phrases, but not Lee. Pretty soon he disappeared from our class and was put on permanent KP while he awaited reassignment.

The last time I saw Lee he was wiping off tables in the company mess hall. Then Lee was gone. We heard he'd been sent to combat radioman's school and, we supposed, to one of the most dangerous jobs of all in the Vietnam War—going through the jungle with fifty pounds of radio on his back. When the radio was set up, it had a giant whip antenna attached that said to the enemy, “Here I am. Come and get me.”

Years later, I looked up his name on a list of those commemorated by the Vietnam war memorial.

God.

There he was. Specialist Four Lee S. Rasmussen.

Casualty was on May 5, 1970
in BINH THUAN, SOUTH VIETNAM
HOSTILE, GROUND CASUALTY
MULTIPLE FRAGMENTATION WOUNDS

Or maybe it was another Lee S. Rasmussen. The truth is, I'll never know the truth.

Perhaps that's the truth of those terrible times.

We'll never know the truth.

We moved through our days at the Defense Language Institute like men walking beneath a long row of swords dangling from threads attached to the ceiling. One could fall at any time, though, God knows, I tried to forget about the army. I went for walks along the coast at Big Sur and camped in the hills. I dreamed of Europe. I imagined myself lounging at sidewalk cafés with a glass of beer, or sitting at a table covered by pristine white linens as I speeded by train across the European countryside.

In all of this I hardly ever thought about Jenny, who trudged off every day in one of her white nylon uniforms to her job in the bakery.

Herr Engeler seemed even more distracted than usual that April. He would lose his place in the dialogue, or begin speaking what we students called real German, the German of our teachers' actual lives. That German, while vaguely familiar, was speeded up and slurred and beyond our powers of recognition.

“Do you think Herr Engeler knows where we're going?” Art Schmid wondered aloud during the break. “Maybe he's seen our orders. Maybe he's afraid to tell us. Maybe we're not going to Germany.”

“I think I'm getting assigned to The Grateful Dead as their translator,” Neil Renner said and whistled.

“Shhh,” Herr Engeler said the next afternoon when he came in the classroom. He clutched his giant briefcase to his chest, as if protecting it. After looking out the window in the classroom door to make sure no one was watching, he set the briefcase on the table at the front of the room.

“Herr Renner, you will stand watch at the door,
bitte schön
, and give us one of your whistles if you see Frau Schneider marching down on us,
verstehen Sie
?”

Renner grinned, probably amused that he would be chosen to guard anything.

Herr Engeler opened the mouth of the briefcase and reached inside, and I shivered. It seemed like he was going to let us in on a secret of some kind.

He set a gray-covered book on the table.
Das Dritte Reich
was the simple title.
The Third Reich
. The Hitler era. Beside it he put an old map, some pictures, and an official-looking document in script.

“
Ich war auch einmal Soldat
,” he said, sitting on the top of the table and brushing the hair out of his face. “
Genau wie Sie
.”

I was also once a soldier. Just like you.

“
Es war einmal ein Krieg
. . .” He looked off in the distance. That's how fairy tales began.

He repeated himself in English: “Once upon a time,
ja
, there was a war.”

“
Hier ist das Haus, wo das Knäbchen Albert Engeler wohnt mit seiner Mutter, seinem Vater, und seiner geliebten Schwester Erika.
”

Here is the house where the young boy Albert Engeler lived with his mother, his father, and his beloved sister Erika.

He passed around an old black-and-white photograph of his childhood house. It was faced with stucco and had a series of figures over the door. That family of four stood on the walkway in front of the house, holding on to one another.

“
Guck' mal
,” Herr Engeler said. “
Oben an der Tür, die Engelsfiguren
.” Angel figures above the door. “
Wie mein Familienname. Engeler ist er, der Engel macht
.” An Engeler is one who makes angels.

“Here, look at this photograph,
bitte sehr
. I was lawyer.
Ich war Jurist
.”

Indeed, there was a younger Herr Engeler, mostly just a thinner version of the man sitting in front of us, with his hair falling across his face, in the black gown of someone graduating from law school. He smiled, a face for the good things of the world. The photograph is small and cracked, as if it had been in someone's wallet.

Herr Engeler then handed around a copy of his diploma with the Gothic lettering. It smelled old, like dead hope.

“But
der
Herr Hitler was interested in me, also, you see. He called me, about this war they were having. I tried begging off. I told them I was busy, but no, they insisted. They made me an aide to a general. Here.”

In this photograph a dour-looking Albert Engeler stands beside an open-topped Mercedes command car in his oversized army uniform. Its sleeves almost cover his hands.

“Look at that car,” Herr Engeler said. “I was the youngest officer and the chauffer and the car polisher.”

He handed around more pictures of himself and his army buddies. He got up then, and glanced out the window of the classroom door.

“
Ja, daß ist das Märchen
,” Herr Engeler said and sighed. “That's certainly the fairy tale.
Es war einmal ein Soldat im Krieg gegen Russland
. Once upon a time there was a soldier in the war against Russia.
Daß war ich
. That was me—headed to the Russian front on the general staff. Here.
Sehen Sie
.”

He unfolded a yellowed map with blue and red and green routes on top of black details. The way from Germany to Russia.
Kriegskarte
was the heading. War Map. Funny, though, the army just took the highway to Russia. Their route looked like the outline of a vacation trip.