Bier! Bier! Bier!!!! It was a really different life style for me… It was a cold, frosty morning and I was staying close to the diesel stove. It was about 4am and I was working the midnight to 8am shift. I could hear the sound of French Army vehicles moving past the front gate. I looked out the front window and confirmed that they were going to the end of our Mountain/Hill on which we were stationed, to set up a temporary camp for an exercise. It was cold and the stove was warm if you sat on top of it, or sat in a chair really close to it. I chose the chair and the warmth started to make me very drowsy. I was glad I wasn’t out there in the cold with the French Army. The gate buzzer started insistently calling me, demanding that I rouse myself and go to the front gate – Who in the world would be out in the woods at this time of the morning ringing our buzzer? It was really cold and as I shook myself and rubbed my face so that I would not appear to have been drowsing, I stepped out the front door. The cold hit me, jarring my senses to the bone. I felt really frustrated and angry – Who was it and what could they possibly want? I was suddenly jolted wide awake!!! The French Army had stopped in front of our site with a huge cannon mounted on a trailer. They had pulled out the outriggers on the trailer and swung the cannon over the top of our 8 foot fence with barbed wire on top. The canon pointed directly at me. As I was walking out of our Quonset Hut, rubbing my eyes, I took about 4 or 5 steps and stopped in mid stride with my mouth open. I was frozen in shock!!! The 6 French Army troops on top of the canon all started laughing and chanting, “Bier! Bier! Bier! As soon as I recovered myself. I went back inside and got them each a beer, on me. After all, how many other people would be able to tell their grandchildren, Well, If you think your story is good, I was once held up by the French Army with a canon. This story is true… You can’t make up something like this. And I will always remember the 1141st, and the often strange things that happened to me. Bob Panten SMALL WORLD ‘LOOP’ CLOSED
During the mid-twentieth century, it was often repeated that by standing in front of the main New York City Library, eventually you’d see someone you knew. In a sense, you made contact, closed a loop.
A little background
In 1959-60, I was stationed at NATO’s 2 ATAF airbase, called Hauptquartier, just outside Mönchengladbach Germany. Since there was no US base nearby, I rented a room with a German family.
In 1966, my wife and I visited my old landlord’s son, Helmut, in Mönchengladbach, and saw his new son, born that year. In the Fall of 2005, an Internet search for a German researcher to research the name ‘Herzfeld’ brought an answer from a Herzfeld descendant in Viersen, Germany, whose lineage seemed quite close to mine. It was soon decided that the families were descended from a common ancestor in 1715. Viersen is about 30 kilometers from Mönchengladbach.
The Small World
Shortly after we contacted this newfound cousin, a former European client of mine offered me an assignment requiring travel to Europe. We spent the ugliest, coldest, wettest, windiest month of March 2006, visiting my client’s customers in six countries.
However, it was a great opportunity to visit my cousin, Ralf, and his family in Viersen, Germany. Ralf picked us up in Dusseldorf one morning and we spent the day meeting new relatives. In the late afternoon, Ralf offered to drive us past the NATO base where I worked in 1960, on the way back to Dusseldorf, and also past the home in which I’d lived for eight months, as well as home across the street where Helmut, now lived. Seeing Helmut’s business’ name still on what had been his house in 1966, we stopped and rang the bell. He was glad to see us and very hospitable, even calling one of his three adult children to come to meet us. When Betty reminded Helmut of our 1966 visit with him, and asked how his first child was now doing, my cousin Ralf realized he and that son were the same age. In fact, they had attended technical school together 25 years earlier and had no contact since! It’s a small world, and the loops keep closing…
Dick Herzfeld. dick.herzfeld@ieee.org My earliest memory ... of France is arriving at Cherbourg on the USNS Gordon, a troop transport ship. It was a eight day voyage from Norfolk, Virginia in the fall of the year. The time when the North Atlantic is at its roughest. There were about three thousand of us on that trip. Needless to say it was a terrible way to travel and sea sickness was something the majority experienced. To while away the time on such a boring cruise we were given little books to study. Those going to France were issued French-English books, and those continuing on to Bremerhaven, Germany were issued German-English books. Food was available to us each meal, but being seasick not many could eat. Arriving in Cherbourg we were loaded onto a train for Paris to be sent to our assignments from there. Feeling much better on land and not eating for a few days we were all very hungry. While waiting for the train to leave the station I saw an old French lady with a push cart. Not knowing what she was selling, but remembering a few phrases from the French-English book I asked, "Qu 'est ce que c'est madam? (what is it) She said, "sandwich jambon et coca-cola (ham sandwich)" I said," un s'il vous plait" (one please) Now, those were the only words in French that I could speak, but when the troops saw the jambon sandwich and coke that was passed to me through the window, they all wanted one. Of course they thought I was very fluent in French so I had to order for them all. Madam sold out her cart (about 100 sandwiches) and left very happy. Everyone on the train was happy too, it was the first food they could hold down in quite some time. I am sure they went on to eat many jambon sandwiches during their tour in France. I know I did. Howard Collins, paperinsp@aol.com | No Man Ever Forgets ... ... his first visit to Paris. Whether it be the springtime Paris of songs and nature’s renewing face, or the wine and women, it is a never forgotten memory. Not even the practiced rudeness of the people can ever erase the Parisian moods every visitor instinctively stores away. <This is a fictionalized account of a true story, heard first-hand by the author, the names being changed to protect…> When Tuffy (Bob Tuffson) tripped drunkenly from the evening’s last Lyon-Paris train that early, early Sunday morning in Paris’ Gare de Lyon, had you seen him you’d have doubted his ability to remember even his name. Tuffy had been in France less than a week; his wife and kids were still in the States, awaiting a decision by the US Air Force naming his posting after he finished the school he was attending in Fontainebleau. He started drinking, this time, in the Fontainebleau Airman’s Lounge after the early, 16:00 hours dinner sitting. He now finds himself, at 02:15, looking for an entrance to Le Metropolitan, every visitor’s lifeline in Paris. Speaking no French, it took only a half hour to find the nearest entrance, just across from the train station’s entrance. The Metro had shut down for the evening, perhaps a hour earlier. Having as little knowledge of the City as he had of the language, he headed in a direction he hoped would lead to an open cafe that was still serving drinks. One inexplicable Parisian phenomenon is the unerring homing instinct American servicemen seem to acquire upon arrival in the sprawling French capital. Drunk as Tuffy was, by 03:00 he was sitting in the Blue Train, a GI favorite on Rue Pigalle. If "Rue Pigalle" has no meaning to the reader, let it be said that there a drunken GI is a very desirable prey. They are known to spend more on the girls who look even more beautiful to the drunken eye; in fact, it’s often easier to get their money without getting into bed, and at least once nightly many of the bar girls there manage to roll a drunken GI. Tuffy had no trouble finding a drink, or for that matter, getting to know some girls... Sometime later, he found himself in a third floor walk-up room in one of the many hotels that line Rue Pigalle and its tributaries. Actually, it was quite close to the Blue Train, just across the street and up the block. He remembered some sort of argument in the Hotel Lobby: "Hell no, I’m not going to pay 4 mille for your baby-raping room!" Tuffy had his own cursing vocabulary, which attacked such basically sacred things that made people shudder at the thought of whatever he chose to use. "Why that’s as much as this panther-pissin’ whore’s getting for an all-nighter!" But he must have paid the usage fee; he doesn’t remember. There are other things, however, he does remember: not her name hiding her skirt under the mattress; he thought he might want to catch a nap, and didn’t want her sneaking out on him there had been a party in the room above there was a toilet right in the middle of the room The toilet across from the bed had amused him; he’d been in cheap hotels where the rooms were so small that one had to walk down the hall to use a toilet. Sure, he’d been to bed with the girl, yet taking a shit is something personal. Well, he was in France, so he might as well get used to things French – or "Frog" as he’d heard the guys in the Blue Train calling everybody and everything French. With that, they had gotten into bed. When she had expended all Tuffy had in him, she went over to the toilet and sat down, facing the wall. "That’s funny," Tuffy thought; "you sit on French toilets backwards?!" Maybe its something like an ostrich with its head in the sand," he deduced. "Oh, well. I’ll stand anyway." When she got back in bed, he stumbled out of bed and over to the toilet. He looked at the toilet: "These Frog toilets really are odd – there’s no flush handle," he thought; "just those two faucet-like handles." The room was too dark for Tuffy to see the writing on the handles. Even if he could have seen them, "Chaud’ and "Froid’ would have meant nothing to him. He was having trouble standing still, but it wasn’t the first time he had emptied his bladder while drunk, and usually most of it went into the toilet. Suddenly, the gal was beating on his back: "Vous etes la Vache! Vat yew tink yew doinink?" she screamed at him. She kept beating him on the back – she was too short to reach his head – and was pushing him away from the toilet. ‘What the hell you doin’, bitch – you made me piss all over the floor! Damn! I got piss on my hands and feet, too! But she kept pushing and screaming. He finished. And noticed the whore had opened a door to another room; it had a toilet, a more conventional type. "What the hell," he thought; "do they have separate toilets in hotel rooms here..?!" Tuffy didn’t understand these crazy French, but he knew he was tired. As he dropped on the bed, the last thing he remembered was the "whore cleaning the python-suckin’ toilet." It’s one of Tuffy’s favorite stories, never failing to get a laugh. I wonder if he realizes yet that his audience is laughing at him, and not with him. <This probably was written in the mid- to-late sixties.> Dick Herzfeld. dick.herzfeld@ieee.org | 1st Impressions of French Life A Mess For a week, we have been doing little more than walking. Walking from Camp Guyenemer to EUCOM and back again. Walking from the USAF Orderly Rooms to the International Orderly Room. Walking from the AP’s building to the International Security Division. It’s a great way to spend our first week in France! I mean it! We walk the back alleys through Avon, the small town between the NATO base where we’re quartered and the US Army base we call EUCOM (European Command). We walk through the magnificent forests which surround Fontainebleau – Foret de Fontainebleau – in their late Fall beauty. Nights we walk some more, into and around Fontainebleau, stopping, now and then, at a small bar, of course. This week, however, we are playing games – War Games. We have a temporary microwave site located at the French Army base in Melun, about 30 km (19 miles) from Camp Guyenemer. Melun, incidentally, is the headquarters of the French Communist Party. Jim and I have the 12-hour day shift with Frank Coleman. Sam drew the night shift, with Skaggs and Dick Shores The first day – the day before yesterday – had been uneventful. Around noon, while sitting on the truck’s rear stairs, we amused ourselves watching a bunch of Frogs running around with scrub buckets. We figured they were recruits having a French GI Party. Jim commented that he sure was glad we had that behind us, and we soon forgot all about the Frog bucket brigade. Yesterday, at noon Jim was sweeping behind the equipment in the microwave truck, and with a new vantage through the window above the truck’s cab, he again noticed the same activity. Only this time he discovered the true use of those buckets. Across the courtyard from the front of our truck, about 100 feet away, was the French mess hall. Those soldiers lined up in front of what we thought was just a small, rear window. Soon the window opened and a ‘cook” started pouring something – perhaps stew, I hoped – right into those pails, and off went each Frog, with grins on their faces! It was a mess hall, but I never discovered whether the mess in those buckets was community property, to be shared with others in a barracks somewhere, or if each Frog had his own pail. A Latrine Today, the third day of the Games, just after lunch, Jim and I walked over to the nearest Barracks. In addition to sleeping quarters on the second floor, the first floor housed several offices, some supply rooms, and as near as we could tell, the only latrine on the entire damn base. Picture a room about 7 meters on a side. Right at one corner is the doorless doorway, right at the intersection of two main corridors. As you enter the room, a wall immediately on your left serves as a communal urinal, with a trough running almost the entire length of the wall. Along the wall to your right are some sort of stalls with doors like little gates, no more than meter-high – something like a restaurant’s swinging doors leading to the kitchen area, only much shorter, and lower. The partitions between each stall rise no more than 4 feet from the floor. There are seven of these stalls, as we might find in a public rest room in America, but these offer little privacy. Opposite the door, about halfway up the wall, hang two large windows. Jim, had he extended his generous, six-foot frame, still could not have reached those grime covered windows – the ceiling is that high! Our first time visiting the latrine, we were in a hurry to get back to the site. Jim stopped about halfway along the wall and I went past him a few feet further into the room, where I, too, spread my feet and took my stance facing the urinaled wall. “They don’ have stools in here, either; did ya see that?” Jim asked. “Yeah, I saw the footprints and the hole-in-the-floor by that stall with the broken door,” I answered. What we call modern plumbing in the States is found only in the best hotels and homes in France. The majority of the toilet plumbing consists of this hole-in-the-floor with two foot prints about eight inches in front of the hole, heels toward the hole. Once your feet are in place, the crouch seems natural, but I hope you’ve brought your own toilet paper, for there’s never any around! I turned to Jim, but immediately forgot what I had intended to say. There, at the end of the trough, just outside the doorless door, was a Frog WAF – watching us! Man! You think I was embarrassed – when Jim looked where my head was nodding, he turned red clear down to his exposed ... Well, anyway, he sure was red. She just stood there! Believe me! I never had so much trouble getting back into my pants! You know, I don’t think I ever noticed what she looked like, I seem to remember only that she was short. There was no running water for washing, so we just started to walk out, when the little Frog walked in, entered one of the stalls, and squatted above the hole-in-the-floor. We were so flustered that we started down the wrong corridor. We turned back, and as we rounded the corner by the doorless doorway, we could see her squatting – easily visible above and below the 3-foot door. On one occasion, I tried the hole-in-the-ground toilet, in Spain. I only had on a swim suit, and I still worried about missing the hole! <probably rewritten in early seventies> Dick Herzfeld. dick.herzfeld@ieee.org | | Your memory here? Return to TOP |
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