I saw it in their faces the other day, listening to a senior officer briefing several hundred frowning men and women in camouflage. The screen behind him showed the face of a child, covered with smallpox pustules. “I got exactly the same shot you’re about to get,” he told them. “Was I scared I’d infect my wife? Yes. Was I worried about side effects? Yes. Did anything bad happen? No.” Listen, he continued. “We don’t know what that madman has. This is just the right thing to do.” Visiting the chief mortuary-affairs NCO last week, I sat as he told me about the 6,000 coffin tags he purchased the other day. However many bodies arrive from the gulf, he was ready to hold a “fallen soldier” ceremony for each. At this, he took off his glasses and quietly wept.
At the headquarters of the 21st Theater Support Command, a logistics unit where I have spent much of my time waiting to ship out with American forces, hundreds of soldiers know they could at any moment be ordered to board a plane for some undisclosed location on the northern Iraqi border. All are clearly scared, as they pass the hours doing things like standing in line for chem-bio gear.
So it stopped me in my tracks the other day when I glanced upward, just outside 21st TSC headquarters, and noticed the chiseled stone head of a Nazi soldier just below the roofline. There was also the name Panzer Kaserne, or Tank Compound, in German, printed on signs throughout the base. Until then, I’d taken this slice of Americana for granted. I ate at the Burger King, watched American TV shows like “Friends” on Armed Forces Network, shared lasagna with Theresa from Arkansas and Brenda from Boston. The antiwar condemnations of German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder and French President Jacques Chirac scarcely registered.
Soon I began to notice other details of K-Town’s forgotten past: carved stone faces of German soldiers in World War I uniforms, stern-faced Prussians in spiked helmets, even one of those Nazi eagles, wings spread wide, above an empty circle. (The swastika chiseled away?) Near the soccer field, a weather-beaten stone slab surrounded by iron crosses stands forgotten beneath the overgrown branches of a shade tree. In tiny letters, it bears the names of soldiers lost by the Reich in World War II.
None of the U.S. soldiers I encountered seemed to know the history of this place. They are caught up in their own unfolding story. But locals remember. Six decades ago, another army readied for battle here. In 1942, boys between the ages of 14 and 18 arrived to become “fitness certified” for war. They trained for three weeks, then went off to the eastern front, most never to return. Units of Rommel’s famed Panzer Corps were here as well. Late in 1944, when Germany seemed lost, Allied bombers noted unusual numbers of floodlights here at night. Kaiserslautern was a main staging area for the Battle of the Bulge, Hitler’s last major offensive.
The ironies are rich. There were protests around K-Town last weekend. Yet inside, the logistics for war proceed uninterrupted. Despite its opposition to U.S. action in Iraq, Germany’s government has so far done nothing to limit U.S. activities here. Truth be told, the din of controversy hasn’t come close to matching the transatlantic fracas of 1981, when President Ronald Reagan pushed NATO to place medium-range nuclear missiles in what was then West Germany. A “terrifying president,” Germans called him, who treated Germany “like a colony.” Somebody detonated a powerful bomb on the nearby Ramstein Air Base and burned several cars in the base parking lot.
A more distant history, however, helps explain Germans’ skepticism about Iraq. “My father was wounded in the second world war, his brother was killed,” a protester told me outside the gates of Ramstein airfield the other day. “War is irreversible, you cannot bring people back to life.” Kaiserslautern itself bears the scars of war. Allied bombers flattened the town as a strategic rail and transport hub, destroying more than 60 percent of it. When American troops occupied Germany, they took over the Panzer Kaserne and Ramstein airfield. By 1950 it had become the largest American military community outside the United States. For many Germans, that presence also brought prosperity.
Even today, Germany knows that good relations with Washington are critical. And so the soldiers in K-Town go about their business. Like those young 14-year-olds did in World War II, they will go wherever their leaders send them.
