Surreal…Bizarre…Unprecedented
Words like those above pour out of every television newscast and almost every conversation during this most unusual time. Some of the feelings associated with those words came back to me this week. I’ve had them once, and only once, a long time ago.
About five years back, I began a project that I never completed. When Helen and I returned home after an Army assignment in Europe, we brought with us over 1,300 slides sitting in trays and locked up to gather dust in the attic. I discovered those slides when we downsized and realized that I needed to preserve them, or a lot of great memories would be lost. After I purchased a slide converter from Amazon, I started the process and converted 500 of the slides to JPEG digital images and stopped there, promising to complete the task within a few days. A few days lasted five years.
We had rainy weather on Thursday, and I decided to look for the slides and complete my unfulfilled promise. They were in a box under some blankets destined for the Rescue Mission. I pulled out 300 of them, thinking that would be enough for the day. I found the slide converter in a closet in the Man Cave and plugged it in—all the lights came on, and the SD card was in good condition. Game on! The first slides I converted in this batch were from a trip to Tangiers, in Morocco in 1974.
Before I get into a description of the remaining slides, I should provide a frame of reference for the period covered by the images I want to show to Easin’ Along readers. Please forgive the grainy photos. Some were taken with a Kodak Instamatic.
In 1972 Helen and I moved to Germany after graduation from the University of Tennessee. I received a commission as a 2nd Lieutenant through Army ROTC. We both were very excited about the adventure that lay ahead. After all, the world was at relative peace, the pay and benefits were good, and I needed a job to support my new bride of four months.
After two years and a delightful variety of assignments within the 3rd Infantry Division in Wurzburg, Germany (Northern Bavaria), the Division Commander, MGen Sam S. Walker, selected me to serve as his Junior Aide-de-Camp. General Walker, a no-nonsense kind of a guy, proved to be a challenge to work for, but I considered the selection as an honor and jumped right in at the ripe young age of 23.
Within a few weeks, General Walker received an assignment to serve as the US Commander of Berlin. He wanted Helen and me to go with him. Although we loved Wurzburg and the friends we made there, the opportunity to serve in a quasi-diplomatic post near the heartbeat of the Cold War appealed to me greatly, and we climbed aboard.
My first task was to drive the General’s car through Communist East German checkpoints and on to Berlin. The General and Mrs. Walker took the train. At Checkpoint Alpha, I was waved into a parking spot by an East German soldier and directed to enter a small guardhouse to have my papers scrutinized. Carefully, I gathered my ID’s, Passport, and the registration for the General’s car. I had read too many spy novels by this time, and I was confident that the East German and Soviet soldiers standing around knew that I represented a high ranking American official. At any moment, they would pull me into the rear of the guardhouse and beat me with a rubber hose until I spilled all the Top Secret information entrusted to me. I passed my papers through a hole in an obscure window to a pair of waiting hands.
Suddenly, a door beside the window opened, and a Russian soldier came and stood next to me. He was tall with a shaved head. His thigh-high black boots shined almost mirror-like, and he looked very young…maybe 18 at best. I looked down to see if he had cuffs or a rubber hose. Seeing none, I breathed easier and waited for the return of my papers. As I waited, the young Russian began to make hand motions to his lips while staring at me. At first, I had no idea what he was doing, but he began uttering a soft hissing sound almost stuttering. Finally, that hissing sound became a very butchered pronunciation of the word “cigarette.” The young Russian wanted a Marlboro, and I did not have one to give him. He was very disappointed, but handed me back my papers and sent me on my way—no cuffs needed. We made it through Checkpoint Bravo and on into Berlin without incident—except for the East German guard at Bravo, who asked me for a Playboy magazine, and if I’d I had one, I would have given it to him. We were now behind the Iron Curtain.
That story takes me to the slides I mentioned at the beginning. As I worked through them on Thursday, I came to the slides from Berlin, and I once again felt the feelings that were always in the background there. The Berlin Wall was not far from our quarters–and my pregnant young wife. Tanks would roll down the street in the middle of the night, rattling our windows. Almost weekly, the news would come over Armed Forces Radio detailing the killing of an East German fleeing oppression and attempting to make it over that wall. I made many trips to the wall and to Checkpoint Charlie to try and understand the need to keep a country’s citizens contained. I wanted to run across the border and ask the “why” question, but barriers, barbed-wire, and the threat of bullets prevented that.
There was no need for social distancing back then, and, as energetic young people, we socialized and made the very best of a life lived behind a wall, much like we do today while standing six feet apart. We wore uniforms, not masks, and every one of us stood together, doing our part to deter and defeat an enemy we barely understood. We did it one day at a time. We’re in a fight against a different enemy now.
Helen and I were long gone when that wall fell and life improved for the East Germans. The circumstances now are much different, although death is among the potential outcomes. This wall will crumble too. It will require all of us to work together, but it will happen. When this barrier drops, life is sure to be different, hopefully for the better. Maybe we will no longer have to hear words like surreal, bizarre, and unprecedented.
We’re stayin’ home, but we’re still Easin’ Along.
