I was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1965, and after training, I spent eighteen months on an eerie little post in the much-trampled Palatinate area of West Germany, near the French border. I was an MP assigned to a company whose motto was “Serving Proudly on Freedom’s Frontier”. Its mission was to provide security for a company of ordnance troops whose own mission was the care and feeding of tactical nuclear weapons which didn’t officially exist. I don’t think the ordnance company had a motto.
When I arrived at the post the security officer took me into his office and rolled down a large map. It was a highly-detailed plat of our cozy little corner of of Germany, with concentric target circles around our base. The words on the map were in the Cyrillic alphabet.
“This,” the security officer told me, “is a CIA copy of a Soviet military map of our home away from home. The Russkies know exactly where we are, and they know exactly what we’re up to, and if the Big Red Balloon goes up they can hit us with an Intermediate Range Nuclear Ballistic Missile from Czechoslovakia about a minute and a half after they launch it. We have no launch capability here. We’re strictly maintenance. Welcome to the unit, and don’t write home about any of that.”
I was in Germany instead of Viet Nam because the U.S. Army didn’t differentiate between warm bodies drafted into its ranks at the time, any more than Oscar Meyer differentiates between wieners. I was assigned to the Military Police because the Army was short of MPs, not because I’d demonstrated any particular aptitude or affinity for police work during basic training. In the last week of my MP training cycle at Fort Gordon, Georgia, my entire outfit, Charlie Company, received orders for Vietnam. I was a very inept soldier, and I knew that at that escalating phase of the war, with regular infantry troops getting killed all over the place, and not being replaced steadily, MPs in Viet Nam could hardly hope to wind up wearing Class-A uniforms with white hats and tooling around Saigon in sedans chasing AWOLs out of bars and whorehouses. In fact Charlie Company had already been designated “field MPs,” meaning that we’d be attached to combat units out in the boonies, presumably to impress the Viet Cong with our skill at traffic-direction and riot control.
In 1965 the Army hadn’t yet begun flying troops to Viet Nam in chartered commercial airliners. My company’s orders involved a military flight to San Francisco, where we’d board a troop ship, part of a big Navy convoy bringing more stuff for the war effort, after Lyndon Johnson had pledged 50,000 more troops that August. So we’d have quite a few days to think about where we were going.
Army training is exactly the same for everyone, of course. Delta Company, right down the battalion street from us, were also field MPs. But they were exactly 24 hours behind us in the training cycle. And they had orders for Germany. Because nothing is really secret on a military base, Delta knew Charlie was going to the war. So the guys in Delta had a couple of days to taunt us about how they were going to be drinking beer and fucking fraüleins while we got our asses shot off by Victor Charles.
But the troop ship that was supposed to take us to Viet Nam was delayed by a storm in the Pacific, while it was on its way back to San Francisco after delivering its last load of wieners. The delay lasted exactly 24 hours. Long enough for Delta Company to finish its training cycle. Meanwhile, Charlie Company was just taking up space in a busy wiener-processing plant, and the military airplanes were good to go – for Germany.
So we went to Germany, and Delta went to Nam. They caught hell there, too; despite the taunting and the rivalry, I had some friends in Delta Company, and I kept in touch. Some of their names are on the Wall in Washington.
The security officer’s briefing was peculiar, certainly, but so was the whole post. It was basically a hill just outside a village of maybe a thousand taciturn farmers who raised cows and pigs. Our MP company occupied the top of the hill, in four World-War-Two-era barracks and a headquarters shack, all of them icy in winter and stifling in summer (no AC and not much heat). We were guards, and we pulled round-the-clock guard duty in six towers ranged around the top of the hill, carrying obsolete M-14 rifles. It was rumored that there was an M-60 machine gun somewhere, and a couple of M-79 grenade launchers, but we never saw them.
The towers were surrounded by a double row of twelve-foot-high electrified chain-link fences surmounted by bayonet-wire. From time to time one of the village cows would blunder into the outer perimeter fence and get zapped. The farmers were usually delighted, because they could charge the Army not only for the worth of the dead cow, but for the worth of her potential calves, into the fourth or fifth generation. Naturally the farmers regularly shooed their worthless old dry bossies into the fence.
The Ordnance company occupied the bottom of the hill, which was also where the motor pool, the mess hall, the supply room and the administrative offices were located. There was a wooden flight of exactly three hundred and seventy-nine steps linking the bottom to the top of the hill. Without formal exercise we MPs kept fit simply because we had to go up and down the stairs four or five times a day, sometimes six times when we had to pull duty at the main gate of the post. It was a pretty climb, in every season, because the hill was forested all the way to its cleared top. Indeed, the whole rolling countryside was calendar-art pretty, and from our towers we had a grand view of the pastures and copses, the blue slate rooftops of the village, and the 17th century spire of its Lutheran church.
It was good duty. Knowing we’d get nuked if Dubya Dubya Three started was alarming, but we were all of the Cold War generation, the kids whose third-grade teachers had taught “duck and cover.” And knowing that the ordnance company on any given day were fiddling around with the guidance and arming systems of enough nuclear warheads to blow most of the Palatinate and a good bit of France into the stratosphere, did give us pause, but not for too long. We were young, and so glad to be in Germany instead of Viet Nam, that on my first Christmas, I got out my guitar and the guys in my platoon adapted the Tannenbaum carol to fit our particular precarious happiness:
“We like it here, we like it here!
We do our time and drink our beer!
Although we’re scared of Mister Bomb,
At least we’re not in Viet Nam!
We like it here, we like it here!
Your fucking A we like it here!”
But I’ve saved the eerie part for last. The towers where we pulled our guard duty were wooden structures built by a Waffen SS combat engineering company in 1944, and barely improved since. The barracks we lived in had been built by the same company. The American Army had built the ugly blue-painted administrative building at the bottom of the hill in the 50s, but the ordnance company tinkered with its nuclear warheads in caves. For the hill had been part of the Siegfried Line, Hitler’s last defense against the Allied invasion of the Fatherland after the Normandy landings.
That area of the Palatinate, and of the western Rhineland in general, is honeycombed by natural limestone caves. Hitler had time to hollow out many of the caves to create spaces big enough for die-hard units of Waffen SS troops, complete with supplies, arms and ammunition. His plan was to hide his “Werewolves” and let the Allies advance over the French border, heading for the Rhine. The Undead would then come out of their caves and tunnels and attack the Allies from the rear.
It was a pretty good plan, but Hitler didn’t anticipate the speed of Patton’s Eighth Army. He’d fitted out the caves, but he never had time to get troops into them – and in any case, by that time in the war the Waffen SS were otherwise engaged. So during the Occupation the US Army simply took over the entire honeycomb, to use against the USSR, and very secret and internationally illegal stuff went on in them.
The Army had been in a hurry to secure the caves under our hill, and it never bothered to alter the insignia carved above the two portals. So the Ordnance company walked into the caves every day to work on weapons that weren’t supposed to be there, under the swastika and double-lighting-bolt emblem of the Waffen SS.
More: because the plumbing and wiring of the caves was over twenty years old by 1965, and built to German specs, when a pipe blew or the lights went out, the only people who could repair the problem were the phlegmatic villagers who had rigged the plumbing and wiring to begin with. Every American soldier on the post had gone through some interrogation before being issued a Crypto clearance, a degree higher than Top Secret. Once, when I was on Main Gate duty, I even turned back a Major General because he couldn’t produce a Crypto clearance card. But the grumpy middle-aged German civilians came and went as they pleased. And as you’ve guessed by now, all of the men had been members of the Waffen SS.
I did my time in the Nazi towers, and shivered every time I was ordered to go into the caves under the Nazi insignia to provide security with my useless M-14 rifle for a team of ordnance people loading a repaired nuclear warhead into a cradle for shipment back to wherever the goddamn thing had come from. I got an honorable discharge from the Army, and a month or so after I got back to the States, I attended a dinner party held by my grandparents, staunch Republicans and supporters of the war in Vietnam. One of the guests was a man who had been an Undersecretary of Defense under Kennedy (although he hated Kennedy) and was currently employed by a Pentagon think-tank. He didn’t like the hair I was growing out, or the way I dressed. He asked me if I was some kind of goddamn draft-dodger.
“No sir,” I said. “I was drafted, so I went.”
“Viet Nam?” he asked.
“No sir. Germany.”
He frowned at me and said, “Well, at least you served. What did you do in Germany?”
So I told him exactly what I did there, and I spoke loudly enough so that everyone in the room could hear me. Even before I’d gotten to the Nazi insignia over the cave portals, the man was apoplectic. “Jesus Christ, you’re revealing national secrets! You had a Crypto clearance! I could arrest you right here for treason! Shut up!”
“Sir,” I said, “I got an honorable discharge from the Army, and I don’t believe you are directly connected with the United States Government any more, or are you?
And he clammed up. I should mention that the man had been a close friend of my father’s, and he’d been named my godfather when I was born. I don’t recall that he taught me much about God when I was growing up. I think he knew a bit more about Satan. And although I never heard a shot fired in anger during my time in the Army (well, the old Nazi villagers occasionally loosed a barrel or two of bird-shot at the towers during quail season), I learned a bit about Satan as well. On freedom’s frontier.