Wedged between war and peace

I remember yellow-green, rounded, lantern-lit grassy knolls pearled by moonlight--the well-tended grounds of a U.S. Army hospital in Stuttgart in the early spring of 1971.

A friend, Fred Walker, and I had just arrived in Europe from the states as army privates. With a weekend off, we caught a train to Stuttgart to experience heavy mugs of German beer and the bright excitement of a major city carnival. That night we stayed in hospital beds, arranged by corpsmen we befriended at a "whoohoo" mini car circuit.

It was grand to be loose and not know what might happen. Suddenly, so it seemed, in Europe, with two years ahead of us split off from family, uncorked from whatever had gone down in a previous life, for better or for worse, on the other side of a great divide.

At the same time, in a place far away, the Vietnam War shuffled on, leaving in its tracks a debris of death and dark karma. Jimmy Farmer, left tackle when I was a senior at Virginia High School, died in the jungle. So did Jack Ruggles, a childhood friend who I hugely admired. And so many others.

To be in the army in Europe in the early seventies, connected to Vietnam by a chain of command, meant that you shared, because you were American and in uniform, in a bitter, enormously fucked up cause.

Older Germans, the ones who had lived through Hitler--after all they’d experienced--seemed genuinely glad to have NATO troops as close-by neighbors. They lived with memories of an apocryphal time.

The younger Europeans, in their late teens and twenties, wanted the Americans out of Vietnam (as did most everyone I knew), and out of West Germany, along with the Canadians, the British, the Aussies, the Italians, the Turks or any other foreign force. As a consequence, being in Europe was partly about living with a split in the generations.

At the same time, on a different level, it was about simply living--and using up every spare moment in the most creative, richly imagined way possible.