Now I was working!
Now I was working!
While I tried to improve on my Russian for work as the back-up interpreter, the Army discovered that they had accidentally obtained someone with an ability for transportation work. Here is my appointment with other recent arrivals in Berlin for work in the Rail Transportation Office. The Army Transportation Corps is a blend of things from military and civilian culture. This order is related to similar documents naming civilians as railway or steamship agents in the 19th and early 20th century.
In practice, we had a huge amount of household goods and baggage to handle, because of the turmoil created by the Vietnam War. Because of people coming and going for the war, personnel and their families often did not stay the full "tour of duty" in Germany. The math of that is that for an equal number of personnel, there was now an increase in the movement of their personal belongings. Even some of our junior Train Commanders were drawn in to help with the paperwork, because they could type.
I enjoyed working with my German colleagues in the rail office; they liked my efforts to study the German and Russian languages, and to learn German railroading. There was one occasionally demoralizing factor for us in this work, however. Most of our customers in the office were going home, and we had just gotten there. Some of the "short-timers" who came to see us could not resist pointing that out, or they had to find a way to show how much more experienced and sophisticated they were in the ways of the world.
This was especially true when I was interviewing soldiers at my desk, while I typed out their homebound household and baggage paperwork. They could see lovely Arnie, our German clerk, bending over the file cabinets in her miniskirt as she worked. I could tell when this was happening, because their eyes would glaze over and they could not answer my questions.
"How can you stand working with her?" they would ask. I would explain that first of all, this was not the infantry-- I was around all kinds of people all day, second and most important, she had a very large, muscular German boyfriend. The second fact made sense to them, and they would settle down and answer my questions.
Thousands of shipments took place without incident, but, of course, we talked about the ones that were strange. In one case, when the paperwork on hold baggage was complete, SP5 Carl White went to slip a copy of the forms into the top of one of the boxes, as was our regular practice. Sitting there inside was an assembled and operable revolver. We were outraged, as the soldier who was shipping this had just signed a document saying that he was not shipping weapons.
"Dump it," White ordered. The short-timer protested, it would take forever to get it packed again, and he had stuff to do. This is where the orders shown above took on real value. We did not care who we inconvenienced if we thought someone was abusing our system. White, backed up by the rest of the baggage room staff, stood his ground, and the disgruntled customer dumped out all his belongings on the floor of the baggage room for an item by item search.
More bizarre was the story of how we deluged the Philadelphia Personnel Support Service Center with Hold Baggage ("items of immediate and personal necessity"). As the workload mounted along with the unbelievable personnel turnover, one of our Train Commanders helped out by typing up baggage paperwork. Unfortunately, the example form which he was following included an address code for this obscure unit in Philadelphia, and he was not familiar enough with the form to recognize that it was a variable entry, rather than a constant one.
Being so new, I quietly went to our Staff Sergeant to warn him of what was happening. He thought for a moment, and then told me to stay silent about it.
"Maybe if things get fouled up badly enough, we can get some more help in here. And, better that it's an officer doing it.... he won't get in trouble for it if he doesn't know what he's doing." And, so it came to pass, a month or so later, when Philadelphia found itself buried in misdirected baggage, that changes were made. I do not believe that any more staff were added, but changes were made to streamline the process, so that fewer people could move more pieces.
The strangest part of this workload boom is that with the arrival of two better Russian-English interpreters (school-trained Swanee Flack, described elsewhere in this website, and a young private from New York City, whose family spoke Russian at home), I was surplus. Thus I went to work every day, put in a full day of effort, in a job which did not exist on the organization chart.
In the strange world of Army personnel actions, my bosses liked my work, they liked the fact that I was still studying Russian so that I could be a back-up interpreter, there was more than enough work to do, I had a knack for it, BUT an Inspector General's personnel inspection was coming. A new job would have to be found for me in September 1969.
[More to come - in the future,
I hope to add another page with the story of the Rail Transportation Office
in the Lichterfelde West Bahnhof. Who could forget working in an
office which had incendiary grenades in the back of each file cabinet drawer?
-- rwr -- ]
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