There's a Man With a Gun Over There (32 page)

“The Nazis used to make the Jews do this,” a PFC next to me mutters.

No, that part is not on Wikipedia.

51.

P
retty soon, though, I'm done with
Gutleut Kaserne
. A corporal walks me and another GI over to the Frankfurt
Hauptbahnhof
, where we are to catch a train for Heidelberg. The headquarters of the Twenty-Second MP Group is located there.

“Listen up,” a corporal says to me and the other soldier as he leaves us on the train platform. “You're not to speak with any German civilians. Got that? You might give away some secret information. And you, Ryan, no translating, OK?”

I wanted to tell him that I didn't know any secrets, but I kept my opinions to myself.

So we didn't answer the questions of the two German men who also had tickets for our compartment. They began talking about us as if we weren't there.

“
Ist es möglich, daß das Dritte Reich von Soldaten wie diesen zuende gebracht wurde? Dumme wie die, müssen Helfer gehabt haben.
”

They begin to laugh.

“What do you think he's saying, Ryan?”

That they don't think soldiers as dumb as us could have defeated the Third Reich is what he said, but I don't say that. I just shrug.

One of the Germans comes over to look at my name tag and my pistol medal.

“
Ah, der Herr Ryan hier hat ein Eisernes Kreuz, Dritter Klasse. Ich habe auch so was gehabt im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Genau wie er.
”

“What's he talking about?”

“That he was a soldier, just like me, in the Second World War and wore a medal like mine.”

“Well you can just tell him that we won that war and we're not like him.”

But I don't say anything. I look out the window at the backs of the stucco houses streaming by.

“People just don't realize how powerful we are,” the soldier goes on. “We win all of our wars.”

“
Soldaten wie diese haben den Krieg nicht gewonnen. Die Russen haben den Krieg gewonnen
.”

It takes me a minute to translate this, and I keep being thrilled at how much German I know. It's sort of like having money I can spend.

But I decided not to tell my train-car colleague what the Germans actually said.

Soldiers like these didn't win the war. The Russians won the war.

“Did you tell the German that you cheated to get the medal?” Carol asked me.

“No. By then I figured I'd really earned it. By then I was a fraud who didn't know he was a fraud.”

Pretty soon ten of us who'd graduated from the Defense Language Institute and Military Police School were together in a temporary billet at Campbell Barracks in Heidelberg.

I was so excited about being in Germany I put on civilian clothes and headed toward town.

“I think you should stay here,” my friend Steve Goldberg said. “I've heard this unit has some really nice jobs where you don't have to wear a uniform. There's a rumor that someone from headquarters is coming over here to interview us. Don't you think you should hang around?”

“Goldberg,” I said, “I've been waiting to see Europe ever since I read Hemingway. I'm out the door.”

Goldberg, as usual, was right. When I got back in the early evening, after having wandered around the old part of Heidelberg, I learned that the NCO in change of personnel for the Twenty-Second MP Group had, in fact, stopped by the billet on his way home from work just to meet people. Between belches from the beer I'd drunk and sausages I'd eaten, I discovered that the people who weren't there were slated to be assigned to the unit's sole uniformed job—doing customs clearances at Rhein-Main Air Base outside of Frankfurt. My little dream of having an office job was over. I'd missed my chance to work in civilian clothes.

“Shit,” I said.

“Too bad,” Goldberg told me as he packed his duffel bag, preparing for his new job in Mannheim. “I'll see what I can do.”

“Shit.”

And then Goldberg was gone.

I was depressed and a little drunk from the beer. It was warm in the barrack, and we were staying in an attic room, which made the day even warmer. I took a nap.

I woke up a little after sunset, just as the room was getting cool, and saw one other soldier in the area. He was lying on his bunk smoking a cigarette. I could see a shadowed area on the sleeve of his khaki uniform shirt where a Specialist Four emblem had been. I could see the old marks from the stitching. Someone had just ripped the rank marking off the sleeve. I guessed he'd been demoted.

“How's it going?” I said across the room. He went on smoking, ritually bringing his hand back and forth to his mouth. He didn't answer me.

“My name's Ryan,” I said a moment later. “I'm new here. Going to the Twenty-Second MPs, at Rhein-Main. Do you know the unit?”

His arm stopped moving for a moment. The cigarette stayed in midair.

“Oh, yeah,” he said and started smoking again.

“What can you tell me about it?”

“Watch out for Corporal Kravitz, my friend. Corporal Leon Kravitz.” He stubbed out the cigarette on the floor. “Tell him he's a fucking asshole. Tell him Don said so.”

The next morning he was gone, but Corporal Kravitz was there.

“Come on, Ryan, get your ass in gear. You've got a real army job, and you don't want to be late for your future.”

We drove on the autobahn from Heidelberg to Frankfurt in an AMC Ambassador painted army green, a color that resembled algae-green pond scum.

The army seemed to buy the cars the rest of America didn't want, cars that were great going forty miles an hour but terrifying to ride in at autobahn speeds of eighty and ninety miles per hour. Their soft, ship-like suspensions and squishy brakes made them seem like fumble-fingered fat men trying to lace their shoes.

“I want to make something clear, Ryan,” Corporal Kravitz told me on the ride. “I'm making a career of the army, so I want to do a good job. Got that? This isn't some kind of joke. Maybe you met Don Bruzzard at Campbell Barracks. He thought stealing the pornography we confiscated was funny.

“‘Who cares if I keep some of these pictures? I'm not hurting anyone,' he told me,” Corporal Kravitz said. “Well, I cared. I got him busted. He broke the rules. He's going to face the rest of his life with a dishonorable discharge.”

“Yes, Corporal,” I said, coming to a kind of attention while sitting in the passenger seat.

“Oh, Ryan, just remember ‘Filter, Flavor, Flip-Top Box.' ”

“Pardon me.”

“You know, the ad for Marlboro cigarettes. I like to say that. It keeps my mind centered.”

Floating simultaneously back and forth and side to side in that pond-scum green AMC, I held on tight to my manila folders. The stuff in there no longer seemed so close at hand. Jean-Claude Killy, Paris, and Dansk: that's what I say to keep myself focused.

For my job checking people through customs, I was given a white plastic MP hat and a Sam Browne belt covered with black plastic that always looked a little too shiny. I was issued a .45 by the air force MP station at the beginning of my shift, and I turned it back in when I was done. If you've gone through customs anywhere in the world, you've experienced the work I did at Detachment C of the Twenty-Second MP Customs Unit. We looked at faces for lies and at baggage for contraband. We mostly looked for narcotics, pornography, and weapons.