by R. M. Ryan
I really didn’t do much in the Second World War. I mostly pushed papers.
And then the subject would get changed, often to the dangers of Communism, and then Diener would explain that Hitler, while a man of many failures, was a staunch anti-Communist, just like, as he said, “unsere vier.” We four.
“Ja, ja,” Hellman would add, “Hitler hat nur einen Fehler gemacht.”
Hellman smiled as he said this, raising his eyebrows, certain of his wit.
“Hitler only made one mistake,” he said and paused for a beat.
“He invaded Russia.”
I never knew how to react when Hellman said this—as he often did. I thought, briefly, of mentioning the Jews, but I figured such a comment would get me in trouble somehow, so I said nothing. Goldberg, who was Jewish, looked down at his beer.
Sometimes Hellman would pat my cheek.
“Ach, ja, Herr Ryan, Sie sind einer von uns. Sie würden der Hitlerzeit genossen haben.”
Ah, Mister Ryan, you are one of us. You would have enjoyed the Hitler era.
My time in Germany, from 1970 to 1972, was also the time of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, and they were making people pretty nervous.
The Baader-Meinhof Gang was a group of young German anarchists led by Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, and Gundrun Ensslin. They went around killing German officials and setting off bombs.
Wanted posters with pictures of nineteen Baader-Meinhof gang members were all over Germany in those days. On construction walls, on kiosks, in trains, on power-line poles—all those black-and-white faces of a little anarchist army became wallpaper for the times. The wanted ones stared at those of us who enforced the empire’s laws, and their glowering faces made us more than a little worried, as if one of us might be next in the sights of their automatic weapons.
“What kind of bullshit is this?”
Sergeant Perkins keeps shaking his head after we tell him what’s going on. “What are we talking about here? Five cartons of cigarettes? I can give my girlfriend a gift, can’t I? Ushi here likes to smoke, don’t you, baby?”
The blonde woman, sitting in her chair, looks up through the bangs of her hair.
“Haben Sie vieleicht Taschen?”
That’s Herr Diener, always decorous, a little embarrassed, bowing as he asks for bags to put the evidence in.
“Who the fuck did you say you guys are?”
“Customs police. Twenty-Second MP Customs Unit.”
Sergeant Perkins looks at Goldberg and me.
“Customs police? What kind of bullshit is that?”
“This kind of bullshit,” Goldberg says and starts reading Sergeant Perkins his rights.
“You have the right to remain silent,” he tells him.
Sergeant Perkins looks at me with disgust.
“Five fucking cartons of cigarettes and some butter for Ushi’s dad. It was a gift. He’s a baker. Come on, man, give me a break.”
“Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.”
We arrested Sergeant Perkins in the spring of 1972.
The Baader-Meinhof Gruppe was also pretty busy in those days.
In late 1971, Andreas Baader shot and killed a policeman over a routine traffic stop. A little while later, the gang stole a small fortune in cash from a bank in Kaiserslautern. In May of 1972, about the time of Sergeant Perkins’s arrest, the action really heated up. The gang blew up the entrance to the US Army-owned IG Farben building in Frankfurt, killing an American army officer. The next day they set off bombs in the Augsburg Police Department. A few days after that they blew up a judge’s car and wounded his wife.
Their violence was so brutal that they made left-wing groups in the United States look like Cub Scouts. Everyone in Germany was both terrified and spellbound by these romantic and murderous criminals. I dreamed of bombs exploding. I could feel the blast cutting off my arms and legs. I lay on the ground, bleeding and helpless.
All of us on US Army bases looked around nervously, scared that we might be their next targets. They might kill us for carrying out an imperialistic war in Vietnam.
A comment of Ulrike Meinhof’s, published in Der Spiegel, made our culpability perfectly clear.
“We say,” she wrote, “the man in uniform’s a pig, not a human being.”
Imagine, all those good-hearted Americans trying to promote law and order: pigs? Since I was really a uniformed sergeant beneath my Harris Tweed sport coat, was I a pig, too?
Me responsible for the war in Vietnam? Imagine.
Me, the graduate student.
The boy who studied Emerson.
“Fuck it,” Sergeant Perkins finally said. “Where do I sign those papers?”
It took three hours of sitting in our waiting room for him to ask that question. It usually took just two.
Then I read him his rights. As I said, I was scrupulous about that.
You see. It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t my fault at all. He signed the confession form, didn’t he?
Boom, boom, snare.
3.
I got to meet Albert Speer in the Heidelberg Post Office. I was with my colleagues from German Customs on our way to their office at the back of the building. They introduced me to Speer.
Remember him? Reichsminister Speer? Head of Armaments and Munitions for Hitler. One of the few members of the Nazi High Command not executed by the Americans in Nuremberg at the end of the war. He served twenty years in Spandau Prison and afterward wrote a best-selling book called Inside the Third Reich. The day I met him, he had a suntan and wore an expensive wool suit. He looked like a retired bank president or college professor. An elegant man picking up his mail.
“Speer,” the postal clerks hissed. They drew the vowels out: Spaaayer.
“Spaaayer, Spaaayer, Spaaayer,” they whispered, lingering on the vowels. They sounded like a Greek chorus.
“Ach, Herr Ryan: das hört sich wie Rhein an,” Speer said to me when we were introduced. He bowed when he spoke. A modest-appearing man.
Ah, Mister Ryan, that sounds like “Rhein.”
The German word for purity. The fabled river of Wagner and the fairy tales his operas are based on.
“Mit einem Namen wie Rhein, müssen Sie ein Held sein.”
With a name like Purity you must be some kind of hero.
I blushed when he said that. He patted me on the arm and smiled.
It never occurred to me that, later on, people would think that I was a war criminal. Me, a criminal—imagine that.
Boom, boom, snare.
Boom, boom, snare.
4.
That meeting with Albert Speer happened decades ago, but I still think about it as if it were yesterday. All the pieces of this story keep repeating in my mind. They won’t go away.
Just this afternoon, for instance, when I went out jogging along the California coast, in the stunning light of late afternoon, I found myself chanting the rhymes I learned while marching in army basic training more than forty years ago.
“I want to be an Airborne Ranger,” I sang to myself. “I want to lead a life of danger.”
I learned that from Drill Sergeant Yankovic in July 1969 as I marched along in the middle of Company B with my M-14 rifle, marched across the sandy, red soil of Fort Polk, Louisiana, in the dawn light.
I want to be an Airborne Ranger.
I want to lead a life of danger.
Of course that song’s a lie. No one in his right mind would want to be an Airborne Ranger and jump out of airplanes into the dark, shrapnel-filled skies over a battlefield.
“Skies like razors, ground that’ll blow your guts out,” is how Drill Sergeant Yankovic described the war as he sat on the stoop of the barrack, his uniform soaked with the sweat from a malaria attack. He oozed war.
I didn’t want to be an Airborne Ranger. I didn’t want to lead a life of danger. I was a coward then, and I am a coward now. The Vietnam War terrified me, but there I was, in July of 1969, marching along in the brightenin
g light of what would become another scorching hot Louisiana morning, affirming just those things I didn’t believe. I want to be an Airborne Ranger. I want to live a life of danger. Airborne! Airborne! Airborne!
How did this happen to me? I keep asking myself this question over and over, and suddenly I’m back in school, walking up the steps of Marshall Junior High in Janesville, Wisconsin.
After Sputnik was launched in 1957, the Russians were on everyone’s minds. In 1958, twenty-three of us eighth graders were chosen to learn algebra early.
“You’re Janesville’s brightest, and you’re going to be America’s first line of attack against the Russians,” Mrs. Downy, the math teacher, told us as she smoothed out the wrinkles in her skirt.
If you look on page twenty-four of the 1958-59 Marshall Junior High Minor Memories yearbook, you can see us there.
“Janesville’s Algebra Squad,” the caption reads.
A little platoon of kids on the steps of the school beside Mrs. Downy in her harlequin glasses. How serious we all look. There we are—Judy Stryker, Roger Polanski, Jane Martin, Ralph Witfield and sixteen others—squinting into the sunlight of the future. Look at the boys in their pressed chinos and the girls in their buttoned-up blouses. We look like extras from Leave It to Beaver.
“The future,” Mrs. Downy told us, “belongs to you.”
But that future also worried us. Would there be enough fallout shelters to protect all of us in the event of a nuclear attack? Would there be enough of those green drums with yellow triangles labeled EMERGENCY SUPPLIES?
At school, we whispered to each other that someone . . . who? . . . someone important . . . someone had seen lists of cities the Russians planned on attacking once they built a space station with all the satellites they would shoot into the air, and Janesville was a prime target. We were marked for death.
Janesville, while not the absolute first city to be attacked, was near the top of the list, not far below Chicago. We were, someone told us with authority, the thirty-fourth most important target in the country. I would look out the window of my room before I went to bed and, on clear nights, stare at the stars in their slow circle overhead.
Sputnik was up there, people said, shooting by, night after night, sending its secret signals back to Russia.
In the summer of 1959, Marshall Junior High School offered its first summer-school course in Russian History, and Mrs. Downy recommended that we take it.
“In the future, when we go to war against the Russians, we will understand them first and then blow them to pieces with our superior knowledge of algebra. History and math will be the weapons of the next war.”
“Russia is a huge, poor country,” Mr. Niederman said on the first morning of our summer school Russian History class. “A country with great writers, a country trying to escape itself by moving ever westward.”
“So Russia really is coming to Janesville,” Judy Stryker said, underlining “westward” in her notebook and circling it with stars.
Mr. Niederman was short and harried. His glasses had the gray plastic frames that I would later know as GI glasses. A chain-smoker, he pulled out a pack of Lucky Strikes from his coat pocket and locked himself in the closet of the classroom during the ten-minute breaks between the hours of the class, which lasted all morning. At the end of each break, he emerged in a haze of smoke, as if his enthusiasm had set him on fire.
We had to memorize the dates and the names of Russian leaders in a fat history book, identify cities on a variety of historic and contemporary maps, and read The Brothers Karamazov.
“I went into the army when I was eighteen,” Mr. Niederman said one day, about halfway through the course. When he spoke he nodded, encouraging people to agree with him. As he did so, his glasses kept slipping down his nose, and he pushed them back up.
“I went to Korea, in the infantry. Oh, how cold it was. You couldn’t ever get warm.”
His voice floated off in his reverie.
“They shot me. That’s why I majored in history when I came back and went to college on the GI Bill. I wanted to find out what happened to me. I wanted to understand why I got shot and why my friends got killed.”
That day, Mr. Niederman had brought in a slide projector. He pulled the heavy black window shades down.
“Is Korea part of Russia?” Judy Stryker raised her hand and asked. Judy liked to line up her facts.
Mr. Niederman didn’t seem to hear the question. Grainy black-and-white images flickered on the wall. Mr. Niederman kept changing the focus on the projector, but the people remained a blur.
“That’s Tom Riley there. See. Charpentier is to his right. See the other guy with the BAR? The big gun. That’s a Browning Automatic Rifle. See it there? Johnson’s holding it. He was my best friend. A mortar shot got him about ten minutes later. See him with that goofy grin, waving—how blurred his hand is.”
“Are these Russian soldiers?” Judy Stryker asked, as if she were an inspector from the Board of Education.
“There. See,” Mr. Niederman said. The slide stuck, and the next slide gave the blurred images of Johnson and the rest a different background. “It’s a little bakery just set up along the road by some peasants. We had cakes and tea after Johnson died.”
Mr. Niederman sobbed then, his breath came in heaves.
“Mr. Niederman, Mr. Niederman,” Judy Stryker asked, “are you all right? Should we take a break now? Do you want to go in the closet and have a cigarette?”
She walked to him. He was bent over, holding on to the podium at the front of the classroom, gagging on his tears. The rest of us looked at our notebooks or walked out of the room.
In the hall, John Rogers said, “What the fuck was that all about?”
“Some war our parents had to fight,” Ron Moriarty said.
“Does this mean we’re not having a test on that novel about the brothers?” Bill Philippi asked.
“What the fuck was that all about?” John Rogers asked again and looked at me.
I didn’t know what to say. Mr. Niederman and the Korean War were unknowns in a kind of algebra I wouldn’t learn about until I got drafted into the army ten years later.
When Judy Stryker walked him away from the podium, those of us in the hall just stared through the doorway at Mr. Niederman as if he were in another world. The features of his face undone by tears, he looked at us as if he hoped we might throw him a lifeline, but we all began to study the floor.
“This is just too weird,” John Rogers whispered.
Yesterday, I looked up Joel Niederman on the Internet and found one in Janesville, at 716 Adams Street, 608-352-2906, so I decided to call him.
The voice that answered was frail, elderly.
“Mr. Niederman?”
“Yes.”
“Mr. Niederman, did you teach at Marshall Junior High School in the fifties and sixties?”
“Who is this?”
“Rick Ryan. I was a student of yours. Do you remember a Russian History course you taught in 1959?”
“Who did you say this is?”
“Rick Ryan, Mr. Niederman. I’m calling about the time you cried. It was 1959, Mr. Niederman. Do you remember 1959? Do you remember that, when you were showing us slides from Korea?”
“Korea?”
“Yes, do you remember?”
“Korea was a long time ago. Are you calling from the Veterans?”
“The Veterans . . . yes, I guess I am. I’m calling to tell you I finally understand.”
“Who did you say you were?”
5.
I didn’t answer him. I didn’t say anything. I just stood there holding the phone, listening to his raspy breath, waiting for him to say something.
Neither of us hung up, and pretty soon I realized that we were both waiting for the other to speak, two veterans across the decades.
And then it hit me: what kind of a story did I have to tell? I’d never been in real combat, though maybe I’d killed someone.
I saw the b
lood stain on the woman’s chest and the blood oozing out from underneath her back and then I got scared and rattled the phone into the receiver and stood there breathing in my own raspy way.
Who was I kidding?
This was all getting too close to home.
Who did you say this is? Who? Who?
6.
The truth is, I don’t know exactly who I am. I’ve been living in made-up skin so long I don’t know what I look like anymore. I walk around in a permanent Halloween costume.
Look: I can tell you who I’m not.
Maybe that’s a good way to start. Yes, let me start there.
I’m not some homeless veteran with his greasy cardboard sign and grocery cart filled with cans and bottles and feces-smeared blankets. I’m not some grimy figure lurking around construction sites to steal pieces of copper.
Not at all. I’m a published poet. I’m a published novelist. I’ve won prizes and, miracle of miracles, I earn a good living, too, though my employer probably wouldn’t enjoy being pulled into this foolish story.
Let’s just say that I have a great day job that supports my poetry habit. I earn a damn good living. I have investments and clients. I own Hickey Freeman suits and Allan Edmonds shoes. I counted the other day. I own $3,000 worth of shoes. I drive a BMW.
I’ve made my dreams come true, but I can’t make the nightmare of the army go away. Those days keep sneaking up on me.
Maybe this all started when we moved earlier in the year, and I had to clean all that stuff out of the attic.
It was terrible work: the past had become an inexplicably literal burden. My wife, Carol, and I had been good children and saved so much of our parents’ stuff. Old quilts that had belonged to great aunts I’d never met, locks of my great-great-grandmother’s hair, deeds to forgotten pieces of property marked CANCELED, my aunt’s high school yearbooks with best wishes from people named Berty and Mugsy—and on and on it went that hot summer afternoon in the attic at 332 East Acacia Road until I came across a box with my army uniform inside.
