Germany
We landed in Frankfurt, Germany and were bused to Sembach Air Force Base. Sembach was located just outside of Kaiserslautern in the Black Forest region of Southwest Germany. Most of my fellow airmen from the Polish class got stationed at Sembach. We were assigned to a Radio Group Mobile unit. But in typical military fashion we didn’t immediately get assigned to the kind of work we were trained for. I worked as a clerk typist for quite awhile in the office section. Each day we would get bused from the air base out to a remote radio site. This was during the Cold War with Russia and we’d often see a car drive by our site and knew it was Russians monitoring our activity. Every once in awhile we would have a practice alert and have to stay a couple of days at the site living in tents. One time I remember it was during the winter and boy can those Black Forest winters be cold. After having been at Sembach for a few months my mother got very ill with lung cancer and I went on leave to visit her. More on traveling to and from seeing her and her illness later. When I got back from my leave I told the commanding officer that I had been told that when I got back from leave I was to be assigned to the foreign language work for which I had been trained. And they did find a opening for me. The only thing, it wasn’t working with Polish but rather they had me working in Russian. I had had a couple of weeks of Russian back in Texas before qualifying for the Polish training at IU.
Our work there at the radio site was classified; so, I can’t say too much about it. I imagine by now no foreign country would be much interested in what we did back then in the late 50’s. Intelligence gathering advancements would make what we did look very archaic. There was one time though that it became very tense for us. That was during the Hungarian Uprising in 1956. There were questions in the air as to whether the United States would intervene in behalf of the Hungarians against the Russians or not. If the US would have entered into that conflict, we would have been too close for comfort there in Germany. The US didn’t intervene and the uprising failed after a short time.
To turn to a lighter side of my tour in Germany, I loved being in Germany. It was my first time to be in a foreign country and the different language, customs and people was very exciting. When I was stationed in Germany it had only been about a decade since World War II and there was still evidence of that conflict. For an example, the autobahn (the German highway system) was for the most part two lanes of highway each direction until it would come to a bridge. They had only rebuilt a bridge for one side of the autobahn; so, they would divert the other lane to that side where traffic in both directions would share one bridge.
Cuckoo clocks – I was very fascinated by them. The Black Forest region was noted for their Cuckoo clocks and I bought one and shipped it home to the family. We had it for quite awhile. It was similar to this one, but the bird and the leaves had color.
It seemed like every little town in Germany had its own brewery; so, beer could be had almost everywhere. The small German towns nestled in among the hills looked very picturesque from a little distance like a page out of a Brothers Grimm fairly tale. But up close the streets were narrow and not quite as picturesque.
In Kaiserslautern I had my first encounter with a double bus. It was two vehicles joined together with an accordion like connection which allowed movement from one car to the other. It had a conductor riding on the bus collecting the fares. Another first for me was that it was common for women to not shave their legs. OK, that’s not too bad, but they would wear stockings and that would mash the hair down on their legs making a poor American male wince with pain. A favorite first was the street vendors that sold “bratwurst”. It was kind of like a hot dog but the meat was a white type of sausage. Put a little mustard on it and “hmmmm-mmmm good! Next chapter we’ll travel Germany and France in Chapter Twenty-Two – Heidelberg.
Editor’s Note: My sister, Ginger, corrected my memory of the bug splat on the windshield story in Chapter Nineteen – The Brown County Players. She remembers me telling it as: “I bet he doesn't have the guts to do that again.” She’s right and it’s a little funnier that way.
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