The Long Drive Home

At the end of the Russian course we had thirty days leave before shipping overseas according to the language we had studied: Europeans (German, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, etc.) from New York to Germany; Asiatics (Chinese, Korean, Japanese, etc.) from San Francisco to Tokyo — for further assignment. Spanish wasn't taught; I guess we had more than enough Spanish speakers at home. We received travel expenses to home, New York for me. The expenses were calculated according to distance, so we could either use the money to buy an airline ticket, for example, or drive by car, if you had one, and save the money. Someone — I'll call him Sgt. Krankenhauser because I forget his name — put a notice on the bulletin board that he was driving to New York and could take two passengers to share gas costs and driving time. I jumped at it. Sgt. Krankenhauser said okay, he was leaving in two days, did I know anyone else. I was the only one who answered. I told Jim McCrea, who said sure, he could take a bus or train for the short trip from New York to Washington. We intended to drive the northern route across the United States. But on the day before we were to leave a tremendous snowstorm hit most of the northern United States making it impossible to drive across safely for at least a week. Sgt. Krankenhauser said that he had intended to go via the north because the highways are better, but since that is no longer possible, we can go via the southern route. He realized that this could be problematic due to Jim's color, but if we all drove, we could drive right across without stopping. I was fine with that because I had no idea what it meant. Jim was unsure, but finally agreed, thereby showing his confidence in us.

We had to stop outside Phoenix to fix a tire. While Sgt. Krankenhauser waited while the tire was being fixed, Jim and I went into a bar. We were the only customers. I said to the bartender: “Two beers, please.” He replied, without looking at us, “We don't serve colored people here.” I was shocked. My God, I thought, and this is Arizona, cowboys and Indians, not the deep south. We walked out and back to the car.

The idea of all three driving, without stopping to sleep in a bed is one thing and the reality is another thing. While only one is driving, it doesn't necessarily mean that the other two are sleeping sitting up. Our first stop was in New Mexico in a nice looking “Motel for Negro Travelers.” It was on the highway, that is, not in a city. We asked if all three of us could stay there for one night. The manager-owner, a Black lady said of course we could. The next morning at breakfast she asked if we intended traveling together farther into the South. We told her we were going to the east coast. She told us we would really need the “Negro Traveler's Green Book.” She handed me the book, a magazine really, with a list of all the hotels, motels and private homes, where Negros could stay overnight. Remember, this was 1952, before Martin Luther King was even known, and the South was totally segregated. The movement for racial justice still had a decade to go.

We thanked the lady and drove on and on. When we stopped to eat, Jim stayed in the car while Sgt. Krankenhauser and I entered the restaurant and ordered three meals with drinks to go, and we ate together in the car. Even the toilets and drinking fountains were segregated. “For white,” and “For colored.” I had heard or read about such things but experiencing them is different and much stronger. And what was Jim feeling? He didn't say anything, nor did we. What could we say? It's just the way it was.

The next place we stopped was Jackson, Mississippi, of all places. You couldn't get any deeper into the deep south. There were only two addresses in the Green Book. It was late at night, and we were exhausted, although Sgt. Krankenhauser did most of the driving. He didn't really like others driving his precious car, although I doubt it would have made any difference if he did. You can't really sleep sitting up at 75 miles an hour. We seemed to be on the main drag. After a few blocks we came to an all-night diner. We can ask here, Krankenhauser said. "Why don't you go in and ask, Smitty?" So, I went in. There were a few men at the counter, eating or drinking coffee or beer, and a few more seated in booths. And a counterman, also the cook I supposed. Country music coming from a jukebox. A bell tinkled when I entered and closed the door. Everyone stopped talking, turned to look at me, then turned back to whatever they were doing.

“Yes sah, what can I do for you? Don't have much left this time a night. Ham or bacon and eggs anyway you want 'em”

“No thanks. Can you please tell me where Lee Street is?”

His welcoming smile dropped away. He called out to the rest: “Lee Street, that's in nigger town, ain't it?”

“Yeah,” a guy said from a booth. “That your car out there?” He pointed with his thumb out a window at the only car with lights on.

“Yes, can you tell me how to get to Lee Street?” My Yankee accent sounded like guilt. They were all watching me now.

“Straight ahead to the traffic light, turn right two blocks, and that's it.”

“Thanks.” I hurried out before he could ask why I wanted to go to a street in nigger town.

“Straight ahead to the traffic light, then right two blocks.” I said to Krankenhauser trying to sound calm, which I wasn't.

“How far is it to the traffic light?” Krankenhauser asked in his German accent.

“I don't know, just go please.” He looked at me, understood and went.

Through deserted streets and after turning right at the traffic light we drove two blocks and were suddenly in the Negro section, poor with ramshackle houses and broken sidewalks and potholed streets. At least there was some life though. The first address in the Green Book was a dilapidated, dirty-looking two-story house with the upstairs windows without glass. We drove on. The second place looked better, even had a sign hanging on the front porch reading “Hotel rest-a-body.” We stopped and Jim went in. He came out and said it was okay, gave me his wallet, said he'd paid in advance. I said we'd pick him up in the morning early. Sgt. Krankenhauser and I drove back out of town to a roadside motel he'd spotted on the way in. Swimming pool and all. I felt like crying from shame. The next morning after breakfast we brought a plastic cup of coffee and a couple of croissants with us for Jim. He was sitting on the steps of the porch of the hotel when we drove up. I gave him back his wallet. He said he'd already had breakfast, which was pretty good, but he'd take what we brought anyway.

The next overnight was in Macon, Georgia. The Negro neighborhood was much better than the one in Jackson, what we saw of it at least. There were several hotels. Jim picked one and we went through the same procedure — like veterans.

The next evening, we finally got to Washington DC, where we dropped Jim off. I don't remember the rest of the trip to New York or exactly where Sgt. Krankenhauser left me.

The thirty-day leave in my Brooklyn neighborhood is also mostly a blur, except for the tearfully dramatic scene of Dottie's (my girlfriend after Patricia) and my final break-up. Her mistake was to offer to wait for me after climax rather than before. And the softball game in the vacant lot across from the Holy Innocents Church, where I hit a ground-rule double off the garage roof in the outfield, which won the game. We had all donated a dime (the price of a glass of draft beer at Clancy's across the street) to the pot, so my team drank our beer free financed by the losing team. It was great fun with no hard feelings.

Germany

All I remember about the crossing to Germany in a so-called “Liberty ship,” a World War Two relic that bounced over the North Atlantic Ocean like a cork for two weeks, is us grunts piled below sea-level miserably seasick. I'd rather not think about it.

In the port city of Bremerhaven, I found myself again in a Classification and Assignment office. But this time it was a huge hall where the whole boatload of us grunts had to be classified and assigned. So, it took a while to get to the desk of a corporal who stuck out his hand without looking at me. I handed him my orders. He wrote in the name of an infantry unit somewhere in Germany and handed it back still without looking at me and called for the next guy.

I saw Jim McCrea in the coffee shop. We'd arrived in the same tub called a ship. We compared orders to see if we'd been assigned to the same unit. The answer was no, Jim had been assigned to a military intelligence unit and I to the infantry. He said that couldn't be, that because of our Russian language training we should both be in military intelligence; if he was then I should also be. He said I should go back to that unseeing corporal and tell him he made a mistake — but I shouldn't mention Jim, in case the mistake was his assignment. He said that wouldn't surprise him, being Black that is.

So, I went back and jumped the line and handed the corporal my original orders and the one he had given me and said, “Looks like there's a mistake here Corporal, I graduated from the Army Language School so I should be in an M.I. unit.” I spoke as if I knew what I was talking about when all I really knew was what Jim told me. The corporal looked up at me for the first and only time. Then he sighed and crumpled up the orders he had given me and threw it into his overflowing wastepaper basket. He took another form paper, wrote the name of an M.I. Unit in Frankfurt on it and handed it back without looking at me and called for the next guy. I didn't even have time to say thank you, which I wouldn't have done anyway.

Jim McCrea’s military intelligence unit was responsible for delivering “confidential supplies” (cigarettes and whiskey for spies) from Frankfurt to Berlin. Jim drove a truck once a week to Berlin over the one road allowed by the Russians through East Germany. He stayed over a few days enjoying Berlin, where most of the girls didn’t care what color he was, then headed back to Frankfurt to start over again. “Best job in the army,” he said, smiling broadly. Going back to the corporal like that was absolutely necessary for my future, as you will soon see, but it wasn't a true choice of my own. I was only doing what Jim told me to do. But what the hell, “a choice is a choice.”

Frankfurt

I was first sent to the Gutleut Kaserne — a huge German Wehrmacht fortress a block or two from the main train station — doing nothing except walking around Frankfurt with no money to speak of, until one day the Master Sergeant told me to get a car in the motor pool and drive to the airport wearing civilian clothes. He interrupted himself to ask me if I knew where the airport is. I said sure, which was true as I had passed it several times on the autobahn leading to and from Frankfurt. I was to pick up two “sources” — our word for spies — a German couple, Herr und Frau Goebels, on the 9 P.M. flight from Berlin. Frau Goebels would be carrying a copy of the news magazine “Der Spiegel” in her left hand. I thought it kind of strange that I was driving a military Opel car wearing civilian clothes. But it was just one of many dumb contradictions I was to experience in the future. I drove to the airport and saw that TWA had flights from Berlin at 9 and 10 P.M. The sources didn't arrive on the 9 o'clock flight so I waited for the 10 o'clock flight which they weren't on either, so I called the sergeant and told him they hadn't arrived, what should I do? “Come back,” he growled. “They're here, they took a taxi.”

I guess I hadn't made a very good impression. I found out later that the Frankfurt airport has two sides, one civilian, where I was, and one military, where I was not. So, the two sources had of course arrived on the military flight at 9 P.M. Well, how was I to know if nobody told me? I asked myself. I was then sent to Oberammergau in Bavaria to attend two weeks of spy training at the Army Intelligence and Military Police School. (It's where I found out about the airport.) Most memorable was a weekend bus-trip to Venice organized by the USO and guided by two pretty and pleasant American young ladies.

But something else happened, which may have had an effect on my future. As part of my training, after How To Follow someone and not be followed by anyone, I was sent by myself to a town a few miles outside Munich, and then another town farther away. I was to find out about a bridge in the first town and foreigners in the second. I was given bus fare and a Minox camera, a gadget about the size of a pack of cigarettes, in fact disguised as one. The problem was that I spoke no German. I found the bridge all right. But so what! I crossed it, crawled down through the underbrush on the other side and snapped a few pictures. Of course, I could have taken the pictures in the open without getting dirty and scratched, but I figured that could be suspicious. I'd seen too many movies.

I took the bus again to the next town where I entered into a Gasthaus and sat at the bar next to a friendly looking guy. I ordered ein Bier, bitte in an accent that identified me at once as an American.

“You American?” the guy asked. He was red-cheeked, pot-bellied and obviously spent too much time in bars.

“Yes. You?”

He laughed: “German, from ass to elbow. But I been in da States.”

“Oh really, whereabouts”?

“Oregon, a prisoner of war. I like it there, want to stay, but they release me and send me back. Someday I go back to Oregon ... maybe.”

“Good luck. Er ... any other foreigners here, I mean besides myself?”

“Not like you, not American, fuckin' Polacks.”Oh, you mean Poles?” I looked at my watch, I was already supposed to be back in the safe house reporting what I found out. I bought the guy a beer, said Auf wiedersehen and boarded a bus back to Munich. The second lieutenant wasn't happy. You're an hour late and you didn't salute,” he yelled.

“I'm in civies, so I shouldn't salute.” (asshole) I gave him the camera, told him there were Poles in the second town, and left without saluting or calling him “sir.” I found out later that one of the other guys — who spoke German — discovered that the bridge was mined in case the Russians invaded so it could be blown up, and that here was a company of Polish refugees who worked for the Americans somehow in the second town. Kind of brilliant compared to my meager report. I mention this, because it turns out to be important later, because that lieutenant wrote in my file: "doesn't obey orders.”

Then I was sent to a place called Camp King in Oberursel, a suburb of Frankfurt, as a trained intelligence analyst, according to the army. This is where I began to learn German. My method was simple. I bought a book, studied the grammar, which is complicated compared to English, but child's play compared to Russian. To study a foreign language in the country where the natives actually speak it is an incomparable advantage. I started by memorizing a simple phrase. (Pronunciation was easy because German is phonetic, as opposed to English and French, for example. Although the accent doesn't go away.)

I stopped a guy on the street and asked him: Entschuldigen Sie bitte. Können Sie mir bitte sagen, wo der Hauptbahnhof ist? (Excuse me please. Can you please tell me where the main station is?) His reply was sublimely simple: Ja Natürlich. Gerade aus. (Yes of course. Straight ahead.) He pointed, nodded, smiled and continued walking. I of course already knew where the main station was, but I must say that if I wasn't exactly proud, I was certainly satisfied with myself. Camp King turned out to be an interrogation center for East German defectors, mostly military types. They preferred to turn themselves in to us Americans because they thought we were even dumber than we are, and they might doing us a big favor for telling us all they knew about the East German and Soviet armed forces and their intelligence services — most of which we already knew, at least the low-level stuff.

Camp King had been a German facility during the war where they specialized in interrogating American and British aircraft crews who had crashed or parachuted into their arms. It was a great place for practicing the good-cop-bad-cop method. We were much better as good cops, and the Germans were naturals at being bad guys.

I got off the streetcar almost at Camp King's entrance and dragged my duffle bag and myself through an open gate. The guard looked up from whatever he was reading and saluted with his index finger. The security situation didn't impress me. I found the company HQ, where I handed my orders envelope to the company clerk, who glanced at my orders and brought them into the First Sergeant's office.

He looked young to be a First Sergeant, maybe about thirty. He read through my orders, finally looked up at me.

“You're a Russian linguist?” he stated more than asked. “You know what we need here?”

“No.”

“German linguists. Do you know why? Because we interrogate German defectors from East Germany.”

“No Russians?” I asked, just to say something.

He didn't bother answering. “You play basketball?” A surprise question if there ever was one. “Yeah, some.” “Where'd you learn to play?”“Brooklyn, playground, CYO.”

“What's that?”

“Catholic Youth Organization.”

“Be in the gym tomorrow morning 0900.” He waved me out with the back of his hand.

I had no idea what interrogation, Russian or German, had to do with basketball. Could it be some kind of test, a try out? I found out the next morning. I heard the basketball bouncing from the locker room while I was changing. The only player in the gym was the First Sergeant. He threw the ball at me and commanded: “Shoot!” I bounced it a few times and it went in from what's called the three- point range today. The two of us bounced and passed and shot for about fifteen minutes and I realized how out of shape I was.

“You're out of shape, but you can play the game,” the Sgt. said in the locker room after we'd showered and dressed. “Here's the deal, Smith,” he continued, friendlier than during our first meeting. “You can stay here for the rest of your tour of duty playing sports. I presume you can play baseball as well. Right?” I nodded. “We can keep you officially as a Russian linguist just in case a Russian shows up some day, but don't bet on it, because the CIA would grab him first.”

“But what would I do when it's not the baseball or the basketball season?” I asked.

“We have a bunch of administrative stuff you can do; that's not a problem. The problem is that our German linguists are mostly krauts who can't tell the difference between a basketball and a baseball.” He must have noticed my knitted eyebrows. “Think it over and let me know tomorrow. The Old Man's a sports nut and he wants to know ASAP. If you don't want to have the easiest assignment in this man's army, we'll transfer you to Frankfurt where there's an outfit that claims to have a Russian section that uses Russian linguists. You'll go there — toot sweet.”

I nodded meaning that I'd think it over, but I'd already made my choice — probably because of a mixture of romanticism and patriotism, or maybe karma. Anyway, the next day I told the First Sergeant I'd rather go to Frankfurt in order not to waste my Russian training.

A few days later, with my new orders in my pocket, I took the streetcar back to Frankfurt, but not as far as the Gutleut Kaserne. I was assigned to an outfit named “7982 USAEUR Liaison Group.” Just looking at the name, what kind of military outfit was that? Well, “USA” could mean United States Army (which it did) and EUR could mean Europe (which it did). But what does a “Liaison Group” do? With whom does it liaison? Maybe it's a code meaning spying or “wannabe intelligence” (which it did). It also seemed to imply that 7,981 such outfits also existed (which they didn't). Therefore, any self-respecting Soviet so-called intelligence unit would immediately surmise (know) that it was an American so-called intelligence unit. But they wouldn't even have to surmise it; they could merely watch us. We worked in the I.G. Farben building in Frankfurt, which we had taken over from the Germans to contain the army, navy, air force, CIA and whatever other spook outfits may have existed. We wore our uniforms; the officers wore civilian clothes. Why? Probably because they had a clothing allowance and we non- officers didn't.

We — Leroy Little and George Abrahamian and I — worked in a room on the third floor which was called the translation section. Leroy was a fellow linguist from the Language School and George was an Armenian (all Armenian names end in “ian”) immigrant to the U.S. who joined the army as a shortcut to citizenship. He also spoke fluent everyday but not very literary Russian. He hated Russians almost as much as he hated Turks, so he was probably not a spy for the Soviet Union. On the other hand, the Commanding Officer, a Captain Olshevski, who probably spoke Polish, might have been a Soviet spy because because he seemed to me like a ham actor playing the part of a patriotic American.

In the whole time I was in the translation section we found nothing of any intelligence value. Our room was also called the shithole, for the documents we translated smelled like they did because the Russians soldiers in the East Zone had no toilet paper so used any paper that came to hand and was thrown away after use because they also had no toilets. Our German spies collected the used paper, which automatically became top secret documents. By the time they reached us they were at least dry. They were mostly letters to and from semi-literate mothers and girlfriends from home. After glancing through them, we put them in bags to be burned (we hoped) as classified shit.

I lasted in the 7982 USAEUR Liaison Group for about a year, being passed from the Russian shithole to various other sections, until one day Capt. O called me into his office to advise me that I had committed an unpardonable error, and he was therefore subjecting me to a summary court martial and sentencing me to thirty days confinement to quarters. I was astonished. “That's all, Corporal.” Capt. O said. I left the office without saluting or spitting in his eye.

I knew enough about military justice to remember that I could demand a special court martial which involved a trial of sorts during which the accusing officer must supply evidence of the charge, whereas a summary court martial was for minor offenses and the commanding officer was judge and jury. However, despite knowing that I didn't commit anything wrong, it didn't seem worthwhile to demand the higher court because the penalty could be much more severe if the army really wanted to screw me. Furthermore, “confinement to quarters” was meaningless in my case, because we lived in an apartment in a German civilian building. We were supposed to pass as innocent civilians despite wearing uniforms. It made absolutely no sense, but that's the way it was. So, I could come and go as I pleased. So, my choice was to grin and bear it. Cowardly, but probably for the best. You see, I despised Capt. Olshevski and suspected he was a Russian spy. Maybe I said so in the German bar around the corner from our apartment and maybe it was true and East German spies who also hung out there heard me and tipped Capt. O off. That would certainly be reason enough to get rid of me. Sgt. Roland also frequented that bar. He was a controlled alcoholic who spouted whatever secrets happened to be on his mind. Whether the East German spies could understand his southern accented slurs is another question entirely. Sgt. Roland had a photographic memory. If one of our sources (spies) said, for example, that he saw a certain Russian tank with a certain number painted on it, Sgt. Roland knew immediately if that tank could be where the source said it was. If Roland became convinced that the source was lying, he just said, “Get rid of him.” How he was gotten rid of I never learned; maybe Sgt. Roland didn't either, and didn't care.

One day when I stepped out of the paternoster elevator and bent to sign the in-log, the security officer, a second lieutenant who sat there every day watching us sign in and out (I sometimes wondered why he didn't die of boredom, or at least go mad), handed me an envelope. It contained orders for me to report to some 2nd Armored Division support group. I can't for the life of me remember its name. It was in a town called Bad Kreuznach, which I had never heard of. When I looked it up, I saw that it was located about a hundred miles to the south-west of Frankfurt. I had been transferred there — effective immediately. I wasn't able to find out why. Capt. O refused to see me, which wasn't surprising because he was responsible for the transfer. I really didn't want to go because it would mean leaving my German girlfriend — later my wife — who lived in Frankfurt. I considered accusing Capt. O of spying for the East Germans or the Russians but realized that doing so without evidence would surely make it worse. I packed my duffelbag and took a train to Bad Kreuznach. It was a local, so it took a few hours to get there.