Air Force Brat

by Kiernan-Lewis, Susan

  There is an argument to be made that this was simply a manifestation of the time we lived in. My husband, who spent his entire childhood living in one American city in the fifties and sixties, experienced much the same freedom of being able to ride his bike miles from home, or certainly over to a pal’s house, unencumbered by the need for cell phones, pagers, or having to check in with various minders. But even so, it is totally mind-blowing for me today to think that I, a dreamy-eyed nine-year old girl, frequently roamed alone for hours over a foreign landscape. Or that two little boys, aged seven and eight, with only each other as logistic or moral compasses, often did the same. (On the other hand, it’s less shocking to think of Tommy going off on his own since he was always so formidable. Tommy, like my father, had a bigger-than-life quality about him that tended to mitigate the necessity of worrying about his safety.)

  I used to roam with my two younger brothers in tow for hours around Paris or Nuremburg or Berlin. Often at night since that was the time my parents were most ready for adult relaxation and socialization in the various restaurants and pubs. We spent many wonderful hours looking in shop windows, discovering alleyways and cobblestone mews, riding the buses, watching the bateau mouche go up and down the Seine. We spent most of our money at patisseries, once went to the cinema to watch largely incomprehensible (and more than somewhat rude) gibberish, lay on the grass in the beautiful city parks, and fed the thousands and thousands of pigeons the ubiquitous crumbs from the remnant pain chocolat that we were rarely without.

  I remember sitting with the two of them at the back of Notre Dame Cathedral when it was cool and quiet inside and too hot and summery outside. I remember bargaining one snowy November with the sellers at the Christkindlmarkets in Nuremburg, the golden fairy lights dancing above my head on magical, invisible strings that seemed to hold the whole toy market together, and huge snow flakes falling in slow motion all around.

  In our new home in Ars, we children made friends quickly with the other French children and sucked up the language from the first day. (One of my mother’s favorite early anecdotes involves my youngest brother, Terry, playing tag on the day of our arrival in the village and walking up to a French kid, tapping him on the shoulder and saying: “Vous it.”)

  For my older brother, an intense and brilliant (if decidedly quirky) boy of eleven, this meant a serious and determined raid on the French countryside for any and all war artifacts, or what he ominously called his “souvenirs.” Tom’s hallmark at the time was his obsessiveness. This may have been what is today diagnosed as ADD but, in those days, simply appeared to be chronically, single-mindedly bad behavior. His obsessions ruled him. Mostly, these involved aviation, guns, bombs, World War II history, and (scarily) a few imaginary friends. He was highly uncommunicative with his siblings and lived, happily, (for him and us) in a world of his own. During our time in France, Tommy quickly developed a reputation for his exploits and weapons plundering. Later in the year, when my father became Acting Commanding Officer of the airbase, Tommy’s tenacity and inability to give up his munitions raids would prove to be one of the more difficult and frustrating footnotes of my father’s rule.

  Besides the lack of structure, the other important discovery we made about our new country was the fact that aside from a few inadequate attempts at farming, the main thing that had been done to the countryside in recent history was that it had been frequently and consistently bombed. This translated into a treasure hunt for adventurous American children who had been taught the value of curiosity and adventure—unlike our petites French counterparts—and to whom the fairly recent events of World War II—in all their glamour—was adventure at its zenith.

  There were unexploded bombs all over the place.

  Our village, Ars, was very close to the city of Metz and, historically, was an important Roman city with plenty of evidence of its Roman roots. There was a humongous great aqueduct built in the fourth century which looms over a hundred feet on the outskirts of Ars. The stone was dragged from Gravelotte, nearly twenty miles away. This aqueduct was used for centuries and is in remarkable shape for a ruin. Its construction must have been a gargantuan task performed by the Roman army and led by hydraulic engineers of the time.

  Another example of the Roman occupation is seen in the great wide boulevards leading to and from the major towns of the region: Nancy, Toul, Lyons, Verdun, Reims. They’re not only wide and flat but shaded by wonderful sycamores to cool the marching Roman armies. I always thought of the soldiers, first planting the trees and then trudging beneath them, every time we sailed under their leafy branches on the way to the base.

  It seemed that Metz was constantly being fought over. It was defeated in 59 BC by Julius Caesar and was one of the last Roman cities, in 451, to surrender to Attila the Hun, after which it became German. During the War of Metz in 1324, cannons were first used in Western Europe. Throughout its history it ping-ponged back and forth between France and Germany. One of the reasons for this is that Metz is in Lorraine, the only French region to share borders with three other countries: Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany. (Belgium and Luxembourg always behaved themselves, it seems.) Since its location made it a strategic asset as a crossroads of four countries, it was always switching hands. Plus, it has no less than four major rivers running though it: the Rhine, the Moselle, the Meurthe and the Meuse.

  With more than 1,350,000 killed in this area in World War I and another 700,000 in World War II, there definitely should have been plenty of ghosts visiting our playgrounds at night.

  Anyway, Metz was taken over by the Germans during the last world war and was important enough to serve as a Nazi stronghold full of Nazi party members, and officials. When things started to get hairy towards the end of the war, Hitler actually gave orders to hold Metz and “fight to the last man.” In order to fulfill this wish of der Fuehrer, the 17th SS panzer Grenadier Division joined the 1215th Regiment to defend the town against the obstreperous and very determined Allies. This was in November 1945. We’d taken Normandy seventeen months earlier and were painstakingly moving our way from the coast, through Paris, and on toward Berlin.

  Metz sits exactly between Paris and Berlin.

  On November 9, 1945, the Eighth Air Force put 1,299 planes, mostly B-17’s and B-24’s, into the task of liberating Metz. 1,233 of them reached the target zone (our new playground a mere seventeen years later) and dropped a total of 3,753 tons of 1,000 and 2,000-pound bombs. It’s no wonder we kids found so many unexploded bombs in the area. In one day, the sky literally rained upwards of five thousand of them. Most of the heavy bombers released their loads from a height of more than 20,000 feet with their targets often totally invisible through the clouds. As a result, most of the payload ended up in the fields and pastures that day with the effort marked, largely, by volume of bombing rather than accuracy. (The liberation of Metz was done by the foot soldier.)

  In any case, the battle for Metz involved several skirmishes between the Nazis and the Allies which extended to the fields and vineyards surrounding Ars-sur-Moselle and environs. In fact, the route my older brother’s school bus took every day to the airbase tracked some of the most vicious fighting as it migrated from village to village…Argonne, Arnaville, Thionville, all bombed-out, shuttered near-ghosttowns in 1962, (although inhabited), were ground zero for this terrible battle as the Allies pushed to take Metz.

  As recently as 1990, a tractor clearing some brush in a field outside Verdun dug up the skeleton of a German soldier, complete with dog tags and helmet. My mother remembers watching a French farmer on a tractor in 1962 carefully plow around a gigantic unexploded bomb in the middle of his field—as he had done for the preceding seventeen years. So it’s hardly surprising that a bunch of inquisitive, adventure-mad, ten-year old Baby Boomers would find war booty just seventeen years after the war.

  Another interesting point about how history came alive for us was the fact that the entire area was a rabbit warren of tunnels connecting the many Nazi forts. The Germ
ans were able to appear and disappear in order to harass the forward companies of the 379th Infantry. Later my brother Tommy would happily reopen some of these tunnels—at least the ones not crammed full of adders or snarling foxes or lynxs. (And more than a few that were.)

  My maternal Grandfather fought at Verdun as a doughboy in 1917 during the First World War after the famous Battle of Verdun—waged 48 years before the last gasp at Metz at the end of World War II. Verdun is situated due west of Metz. The Battle of Verdun is considered the longest single battle in world history. It lasted from February 21, 1916 to December 19 of that same year, causing over 700,000 causalities.

  Although we kids had been to Gettysburg battlefield back home, the Civil War always felt a lot like looking for Indian arrowheads—too far in the past to feel real to us. World War II was real to Boomer children. Even civilian kids were taught that the epitome of evil was Hitler. The cartoons we watched still showed goose-stepping despots as the bad guy. (Poor Germany sure took it on the chin in popular culture in America for a very long time.) To us, the war was very recent. And in 1962, living in still-war-torn France, we felt like we were right in the middle of it. Right in the middle of the stories our uncles told, right in the middle of America’s greatest triumph as the rescuing good guys. It was great to be an American in postwar France.

  Chapter Three

  The Unique Benefits of Life “On the Economy”

  Like most American girls in the sixties, I played with Barbie and Ken dolls, read Nancy Drew mysteries, and loved the TV show “National Velvet.” I was also shot at three times before I turned ten years old—as were each of my three brothers. In some ways, my experiences growing up as a military dependent abroad can be described not unlike Riviera Meets Appalachia.

  In addition to playing in the vast network of underground sewers in the village, my brothers and I and our French friends often played up in the hills, high above the streets and houses of the village. Row after row of vineyards lined the hilltops of Ars. The vineyards were rife with pit vipers and wild boars and were patrolled by cranky, usually drunk, shotgun-toting French farmers. It was inevitable that we children would adopt the area as our playing field.

  There was this game we loved to play.

  We played it up in the hills, past the vineyards, past the angry farmers and past their birdshot range, so far up you could look down and pick out the tiny orange square of your house rooftop down below. You could see the convent school, looking benign and unsinister from this distance. Nearby the washhouse; a tiny block of concrete where villagers came to beat out their laundry against stones as had been done there for centuries.

  The French kids showed us how to access the remote and rugged hilltop, through a long series of steep steps carved into the hill. But it was the Americans who thought up The Game.

  Whenever I think, today, of how I refused to allow my eight-year old son out of my sight for a nanosecond, how closely I monitored his structured playgroups and playdates, I’m amazed at how close to death and dismemberment I occasionally came during play in France, and how often my little brothers did too—little boys the same age as my well-protected little son of the nineties.

  The game involved three elements: 1) a long, ancient stonewall, 2) our pockets filled with pebbles and sharp rocks; and 3) one or two peacefully grazing wild boars, their tusks like four-inch daggers rooting in the soft earth. The point of the game was not just to torment the boars by throwing stones at them, but to get them to charge at us. And not just to get them to charge, but to get them to run behind you so closely that you could feel their hot, stinky breath on the back of your legs. Anything less than that and they would not be close enough to run full-tilt into the stonewall when you reached it and vaulted over it. Anything less than right on your heels and the boars would have the sense to reel away at the last minute. And where was the fun in that?

  I remember the time we brought our friend Bernard down the hillside with his calf bleeding badly because he had gotten gored by a boar. He screamed the whole way home and we had to half carry and half drag him there. When we presented him to his mother, she took a broom to us—even the Americans!—until we scattered into the sewer or escaped to our various houses. Even poor Bernard got whacked with the broom, which was certainly not the worst part of his day, since he still had to be stitched up by the severely alcoholic village doctor. Later, sitting in the underground tunnel of the sewer and debriefing, I remember my younger brother, Kevin, his eyes wide with the adventure of it, commenting on how quickly the French forgot what the Americans had done for them. My brothers and I and two other American friends laughed until we couldn’t breathe.

  I got my first kiss in a washhouse built by the Romans. Partially underground, the washhouse was situated at the end of our street. While the one in our village was probably built in the third century, there are records of such buildings having been created in France as early as 58 BC. The one in Ars-sur-Moselle was a veritable dungeon, cold, entirely made of stone slabs, and always dark and wet. A set of twenty or so very uneven, wide steps, worn down in the middle over the centuries to be smooth but not level. Once we kids initially investigated it, we found no reason to return to it. It was creepy, and although it was regularly used by the women of the village to clean their clothes, it always seemed to be deserted when we passed by or occasionally poked our heads inside. The women would pound their husbands’ rough denim and coarse woolen clothes against the smooth, sloping sides, grind soap into them, sudse them, and then spend the next thirty minutes attempting to wrench the soap from them. Sometimes we see would see a great black mountain of sodden clothes—usually the ubiquitous French jumpsuits—in a corner waiting like death for some poor woman to come back and deal with it. It was always cold down there, like a grave. And dark, even though there was a gigantic slit in the roof to let the light in.

  So naturally, I chose it as the venue for my first romantic experience.

  Laurent and I slipped down into the basin one afternoon, with the black, murky water in the long trough slapping quietly against the sloping sides. I was shivering from our planned kiss, from the chill coming off the awful wash water, and from the November air pouring in from the roof.

  We were both ten and after the somewhat successful kiss on the lips, never found another reason to repeat the experience, although we were inseparable best friends for the whole of my tenure at Ars and generally considered ourselves to be “boyfriend and girlfriend.”

  I don’t know if kids really do have a special sense about people who are lying or who may intend to hurt them. It seems to me, however, I must’ve still had it when I was ten.

  The incident that makes me think so was on one of the nights that I slipped out of my house in Ars-sur-Moselle—through my bedroom French doors to the balcony and down the drain pipe into the garden—and was met by my little gang de quatre: Laurent, Nicole, Bernard, and Marie-Fleur. Laurent was my “boyfriend,” Bernard, his brother, and two girls from school, one, Marie-Fleur, who was very slow-witted but sweet, and Nicole, really more of a friend of Bernard’s. I wasn’t sure what we would be up to that night. We’d only met up at night one other time, and then not for long, really, I think, just to see if we could. After tonight, I would not slip out again after dark.

  The four of us skirted the canal and wedged into a slight crevice in an ancient stonewall that encircled a stunted stack of square stones somewhat resembling a kind of dwarf castle at the end of my street. None of us had flashlights and there were no streetlights and we quickly reached our destination. Bernard, Laurent’s younger and extremely unpredictable brother, led the way and when we got to the small clearing, there was just enough moonlight to see that there was a small stone table tucked away into a dark recession of the stonewall. In the shadows of the recession, was a boy. An older boy.

  I remember being surprised to see him. None of my friends had mentioned we were going to meet up with him. And also, I didn’t know him. But the rendezvous was clearly
planned. He seemed a playful sort, not shy at all for meeting someone for the first time, and that someone, an American, on top of it. I didn’t tend to laud my village celebrity but the fact that I was American was not only well-known in Ars—from every shopkeeper to every housewife—but considered an extremely positive feature. I wasn’t afraid of the strange boy, but I wasn’t absolutely comfortable either. He became quickly familiar, patting me on the butt, laughing and joking around. While I was a little put off by his obvious lack of awe at my position in the village as the Angelina Jolie of post-war France, I was vaguely considering the possibility that he might be fun to be with.

  That idea expired within minutes.

  With just a few mumbled words to me, Laurent made an excuse that he had to get Marie-Fleur back to her house. He grabbed her hand, turned and disappeared into the darkness. Now, in my memory, he didn’t wait or ask if I was ready to go, too. That may be because he really did leave as quickly as I remember. And that may be because he knew the older boy wanted to be alone with me and Laurent hadn’t the nerve to sabotage that. I don’t know. I do know that in a blink of an eye, I was alone with the older boy and Bernard—the nine-year old that no one in the village was fool enough to believe or trust. It certainly didn’t take any special radar to figure out that Bernard was always up to no good. I was instantly aware that it was dark, that I didn’t know exactly where I was and that my parents thought I was sound asleep in my bed.