A recent story that appeared in The Guardian reminded
me of some of my past transgressions while spending three years in the US
Army. The story I’m referring to is
about an 86 years old French woman who was arrested recently for an immigration
infraction. Apparently she came to the
US on a 90 day tourist visa to marry an American soldier she had met in the
1950’s. Both she and her new American husband had had previous marriages, and after
those marriages had ended, they re-connected, gotten together, hitched up and were living in Alabama. (French woman in Alabama? That is grist for a William Faulkner novel.) But when
her new husband died, and she stayed past her visa, the ICE Capades came
skating in and threw her 86 year old
bones into a holding tank in Louisiana. The
center could have been anywhere, but God, that’s where Mike Johnson is from. Could it be any worse? Why didn’t they just send her back to
France? Oh, that’s right there are
French speakers in Louisiana. But if I
were Cajun these days, I wouldn’t be speaking that lingo in public. After all those guys’ great-great grandpas and
grandmas all came from what is now Canada and used to be called Acadians. ICE dudes might think they’re some kind of
‘ferriners’ Especially when they play zydeco music.
After having served two years in the Peace Corps from 1965 to
1967 in Tanzania and Kenya I was asked to serve my country some more by going
into the Army. In joining the Peace
Corps in 1965, I had mistakenly assumed that the Viet Nam war would be over by
1968, but I was so wrong. How could the
mighty US of A not have been able to subdue that little country with all the
armaments at its disposal and dropping more bombs on it than we had dropped on
Germany twenty-five years earlier? My
answer to that is a question. How much
chance do you think China would have trying to conquer Eastern Kentucky and taking
over the moonshining business? No
chance whatsoever.
I was also not thinking of another battlefield in Europe, where
something called The Cold War was being fought.
Besides all those guys in Viet Nam trying to save people from the Domino
Effect of Communism, there were a lot of guys in Europe wearing fatigues and
short haircuts. No, kids, I’m not
talking about Domino’s Pizza delivery drivers.
I’m talking about American soldiers and the war that never really came to blows. That’s why they called it the Cold War. At it’s height from about 1960 to 1989, the
US had as many as 300,000 troops stationed in Europe on any given day, hoping the Russians would not try to invade those
‘friendly’ nations. We had basically
divided up Europe with the Commies into two zones of ‘ours’ and ‘theirs’ and
let nothing cross those lines without cutting a lot of red tape, the exception
being a few ballet dancers in tights. To
help maintain that realm of co-existence I was asked to get a short haircut and
wear army green. God it was 1968, long
hair, the Beatles, flower children, peace and love. That was my sacrifice for
my country.
Today’s army is populated with guys and gals who want to be
there. By the end of the Viet Nam war,
which we lost, the Army had learned that it wasn’t going to be easy running a
show with people who didn’t want to be in their organization. So they dreamed up the all-volunteer
army. In my time there were a few men
who were career soldiers. We called them
‘lifers’. The rest of us were putting in
time but not really interested except to know how many days it was until we
were getting out. When you were down to
a couple of months you became a ‘short timer’.
When you woke up each morning you yelled, “Short” to let your
buddies know you were almost there. In
those last weeks, you would get called in by your commanding officer (CO) and
given a re-enlistment speech. He would offer you a bonus to re-up for
another two or three years. The bonus
was usually about enough to by a new car.
Did you ever try to drive a big Oldsmobile or Pontiac through small
towns in Germany? You scraped the
corners off of a lot of buildings.
American car companies would deliver those cars to you in Europe. It must have been financially worth the
effort by the car companies to put a sales staff over there.
I declined the re-enlistment option as I had bought a very
used DKW German car for $40, drove it two years, broke a drive shaft a week
before going home, and sold it as is for $50.
The only car in my life that I ever made money on, a ten dollar profit. That DKW was the precursor of the Audi, but
it had a long way to go to get to that level of vehicular transport. My DKW which
the German public referred to as Das Krankenhaus
Wartet, meaning the Hospital is Waiting, had a three
cylinder, aluminum block, two stroke engine.
You had to add oil as well as gasoline into the fuel tank when you
filled up. Then you had to shake the car
to mix it. It still blew a lot of smoke
out the exhaust, and I had to clean the spark plugs after every two fill ups. It also had a standard transmission but no
clutch pedal. To shift you had to ease
up on the accelerator. Took a bit of
practice. Just like learning to live in
another culture.
Well, to my opening point about the French lady being
arrested. By my second year in Germany,
my life had evolved to the point of getting married to a French lady of
Canadian origin, a Quebecoise to be precise.
We had met briefly in Tanzania five years earlier and had carried on a
torrid correspondence, to the point she had visited me once in Germany in 1969,
and we decided that we would get married a year later there in Germany.
My ‘job’ in the army was
working as an area analyst for a PSYOPs unit. There were more mundane sides to that job, but I won't go into them at this point, apart from keeping my Jeep clean and the ash and trash detail. I had a mate in the unit named Jack, another ex-Peace Corps Volunteer. He had a German wife, Ina who I'd introduced him to a year before. Jack was the only Arabic linguist in the military in
Europe at that time. I spoke Swahili and German, but our usefulness to the forces was
limited by whom we were hooked up with. I think the rationale was that we
might be giving away our country’s secrets while talking in our sleep. In Jack’s case it was particularly bad because we
were there during the Black September uprising in Jordan and were supposed to
go in to help evacuate Americans while King Hussein of Jordan was trying to
kill off as many Palestinian refugees as he could in his country. And
you thought Israel was the first to try to rid itself of Palestinians? This eventually led to the Munich Olympics
fiasco two years later when the Black September movement kidnapped four or five
Israeli athletes, and they were all killed by the Germans while trying to
rescue them. The reaction of our
CO was to hide our Arabic linguist, so no other army units might get him
transferred to their unit, because of his language skills. Our CO made
him go on leave and basically hide in Europe, but to phone in everyday to see
if he should come back in case he was needed by our unit. What the
army ended up doing was sending in a couple of M.A.S.H. units to provide
medical support and get some good publicity for its ‘humanitarian action’.
However not having someone versed in the culture, the field hospitals had painted
big red crosses on their tents and nobody knew what they were. No one came
for medical help. Should have been re-painted with Red
Crescents in the Middle East. Jack could have told them that.
Okay, what does all this have to do with the old French lady
getting bottled up in an ICE detention center?
Well, the co-incidence is back in 1989 when my family by then with two
teenagers was returning from a year of teaching in China, we all entered the US and Marie applied to renew
her Green Card to be able to live in the States with her American husband and
American children. Not knowing she had
to remain in the US while that renewal was being processed, she went to Canada
to visit some of her family members and upon returning to the US, she was
denied re-entry, because she had left the country.
The irony of all this was it happened on the day the Berlin Wall came
down and everybody was crying about the end of Communism and the new freedom in Europe. It took almost a year for that Green Card to
be processed and our family was kept apart, one kid staying with me in the US
and the other staying with Marie in Canada.
It all boils down to the whims of nationalism and politics
and who is in charge at the moment. You Americans, don't forget to vote this November. 'Nough said.
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