Velma

Laying out weekend plans when I didn't have duty, Karen and I would pick a point on the map--Zurich or Baden-Baden or Paris or Amsterdam--and hunker down over Michelin guides and other books, mapping out our course.

I'd grab some bedrolls at the kaserne (even though we almost always landed in a bed and breakfast) and she would launch the weekend late on Friday by driving up next to my office window. From the ledge, I'd toss out gear to throw in Velma's back end. Other than loose luggage, our main provisions were gas stamps and paper marks, lush and important-looking, and army personnel cross-border papers a friend in S-1 would set up for us.

Velma, a 1966 VW station wagon I bought for something like $600 within a month of joining the unit, clearly made three for the road, all of whom had to cooperate to reach any kind of cartographic objective. If the wind or weather didn't suit we'd have to purr encouragements to her in French, English or German in hopes of cresting the next rise or finding the next gas station. She was German but she had the soul of a French woman--unpredictable, clever and disarming.

On her maiden voyage of consequence--to pick up Karen in Frankfurt--she demonstrated initial jealousy by suddenly, for no apparent reason, setting up a constant blast of her horn outside B Battery barracks. There were probably some soldiers that day who thought it was a sickly version of a hit-the-decks siren prior to nuclear attack. For the boys in the motor pool, however, it was a no-brainer fix and I eventually got on the autobahn, having messed with Velma a good hour, running a good hour late. In a fortuitous synchronicity, Karen's plane was also off schedule, so I made it, flowers in hand, just in the nick of time for her first steps on European soil.

In subsequent months, Velma ran through two engines and began to show serious signs of undercarriage salt damage. A veteran of a number of winter expeditions into the Black Forest and Swiss Alps, she began to show some spectacular rusted sections. We decided to hide the "see through zones" with bondo and a new paint job inspired by the color of Manhattan taxis.

Toward the end of the Velma era, after a long night in the Hofbrau tent at Octoberfest in Munich, hung-over in the middle of the night, I woke up, sat bolt upright, and knocked myself out on the rear door frame.

I bought a second car during our two years in Germany--a well-used Porsche named Maurice--though we clung to Velma for a good while and eventually sold her to another G.I. It's still worth pondering if a car of such stubbornness could ever actually die. That same question has also trailed after a number of French women with no clear answer.