Torn, spat at, burned, trampled angrily under foot, the Stars and
Stripes were having a tough year in 1969. Used as a partisan symbol,
tugged at by "doves" and "hawks", its very appearance in a public event
could create suspicion or controversy.
Often forgotten at the time, however, was a place where the flag of
the
United States meant the things that most Americans wanted it to mean.
The place was Berlin, the city where responsibility was thrust upon
us,
a battlefield of the mind where three generations of Americans learned
simultaneously that all situations are relative and that some values
are
absolute.
Twenty-five years ago I had just spent a year of waiting and of Army
training thinking that I was headed to Vietnam, trained as a Personnel
Management Specialist at Ft. Ben Harrison. Instead I found myself
in West Berlin, working in the little U.S. Army train station (RTO),
as
a Movements Specialist and On-the-Job-Trainee (OJT) Interpreter.
Through a chain of peculiar circumstances, the Army had accidentally
assigned me to work that I was not trained for, but could learn how
to do.
Berlin Brigade was like that. Within the West side's city of 2 million
people it was a small town of its own, tucked away in various former
German facilities. New arrivals went through some formal training on
the
situation, and then were put to work, usually in jobs for which they
had
little or no training. One thing quickly became clear: our presence
there really did mean something to people.
My roommate, Spec 4 Swanee Flack, and I were assigned to work on the
sealed military trains over the Deutsche Reichsbahn (DR) through what
we
called the Soviet Zone of Germany (the East called it the German
Democratic Republic - GDR). Flack, the first African-American to work
as a
Russian interpreter had come to us from Harvard, and had a hard time
with military "stuff", as did most of us.
The Vietnam war had drained away many of the career military people,
and
Berlin's military activities were often in the hands of one-term
draftees or enlistees. The often-maligned student deferments, when
properly used, had resulted in a number of people like myself who walked
in the door with a four-year degree. The political and military
situation in the divided city was a splash of cold water on people
who
had heard little but criticism of our foreign involvements through
their
college days.
Now, on our nights off, we could see the flares and hear the gunfire
at
the barbed wire segments of the Berlin Wall not too far from our "dorm".
On our nights on the trains we could watch as hard-eyed men with trained
dogs searched under the frame and in the trucks for hidden refugees-
"flightlings" as the Germans called them. The spotlit walk of our Train
Commander (a lieutenant or a captain) and Train Interpreter, two young
American guys just out of college, down the station platform at tiny
Marienborn, the East zone's border town, could be marked by coarse
laughter and the sound behind them of a rifle bolt being clicked back
-
the Red Army's idea of humor.
The situation was full of film noir vignettes. On our uniforms,
we wore
American flags (GI's picked up on the Berliners' dark humor: "so the
cops'll know who to shoot at the border"). I stood on the platform
in
Helmstedt, West Germany (home of little-known Checkpoint Alpha) on
our
midnight turnaround from Berlin, and watched the East-West Express
come
rumbling out of the East Bloc, its bleary passengers awakened by the
border hassle they had just endured. On warm evenings in that summer
I
discovered that there were people who wanted to talk when they saw
the
Stars and Stripes on my shoulder. They snapped down the train windows
and exchanged halting words of English-German-Russian-French, whatever
they and I could piece together. The words meant nothing, but I saw
that it was my flag and a PFC's uniform (Private First Class) that
was
putting a sparkle into sleepy eyes.
On the warmest of those nights, I saw a figure walking, then running
towards me, past the Cyrillic-lettered Moscow-Paris sleeper and the
long
string of dark Second Class coaches. A young man in American clothing
came up to me, out of breath.
"I saw the flag and your uniform. Are we in West Germany?" I told him
"yes". It turned out that he was a rather naive soldier from the U.S.
Army in West Germany, who had thought that he could just buy a regular
train ticket to West Berlin. He had been pulled from the civilian train
by the East German guards and held for hours in Marienborn, without
this being reported to the U.S. military (a violation of international
agreements- he should have been turned over to the Soviets, whose
authority we recognized).
While he had experienced nothing worse than being left alone to watch
East German television for long periods, the Gestapo-mentality of his
captors and the wartime setting of the border station had thoroughly
educated him. After a lecture and some note-taking from me, he
reboarded the westbound train. His unfortunately common story went
into
the files, which bulged with the material for countless thrillers and
spy stories. It seemed that every movie set in Berlin might be true.
Back in the barracks, we noticed the symptoms in each other, not in
ourselves. I pointed out that Flack was polishing his shoes more and
shining up his brass without being reminded to do so. He noticed that
I, the former "C" language student, was cramming Russian and trying
to
learn German at the same time. Flack was surprised when I did not
complain too much about marching in the Fourth of July parade, and
missing the day off. I was more surprised when my un-military comrade
listened to the urgings of a stripe-encrusted sergeant-major and signed
up for Officer Candidate School (OCS).
The Fourth of July parade twenty-five years ago included the clerks,
bakers, mechanics, and even journalists of the Headquarters and Service
Companies. With the war having drained our infantry units, the
lowest-ranking of us "white and blue collar" workers of the Army had
been thrown together and drilled repeatedly on a few simple moves.
We
were warned that we dare not show our "@#$&!-ing, student-deferred"
lack of military bearing to the assembled Allied and Berlin dignitaries
who would be watching.
The handful of "lifers" who had drilled us need not have worried. We
marched down Clayallee and responded to the "eyes right" command at
the
reviewing stand with elan. Each of us had a "Marienborn" or "Helmstedt"
or a "Checkpoint Charlie" in our heads by that time. Even if we had
no
desire to be professionals, in the face of this situation we would
do a good
imitation of soldiering.
A confused America had sent its best to a small corner of Southeast
Asia, and then sent substitutes to the Cold War. We did better than
we
and the Army expected, joining the World War II generation ahead of
us
and the volunteer Army professionals after us in defending ideas and
a
flag that stood for freedom. Had they been paying attention, Americans
would have been proud.
# # #
This article was written for non-military readers, but has been touched
up
with the correct, vintage Berlin Brigade (BBde) terms and abbreviations.
Robert Rynerson was sent to West Berlin in 1969 by the
U.S.
Army, to serve as a Russian-English Interpreter in the
Rail
Transportation Office, after having been trained to be
a Personnel
Management Specialist. Staff shortages resulting
from the Vietnam
War led to his assignment as an on-the-job trainee Russian-English
interpreter, relying on his high school Russian and two
years of
college Russian.