My Army Complaints.
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| Donald Lebo |
I’m an RA (RA13400239) but not the Regular Army that I have found on the inside. Yes, it’s a fact that I enlisted for three years, however I came into the army feeling I was going to serve my country and do my share of the burden. I went through the training given to most men upon entering the army, and I worked hard to be ready in the defense of my country and my families. I am quite willing to die for my country as my friends and relatives did in World War I & II and Korea Wars. But at the same time I expected fairness of my families and myself. I want to pull my tour duty like others before me and expect to be called in the time of emergency. Nevertheless as I see it, my country has forgotten my family and my sacred religious duties toward my family which I have given in a marriage vowel and the communion table. I’ve prayed to keep my family whole, happy, and healthy. My family, it consists of my wonderful loving wife who is now pregnant and is expecting in November, 1952.
Being separated, with a child, from my wife makes the army unbearable most of the times. If it weren’t that I thought my child, may it be a son, needed a father’s love and helping hand along the life he will have to face. My wife lost her father at the age of 14 with a terrifying disease known as cancer. She didn’t have the father’s blessing of getting a husband nor does she actually think about it. All these things I want to be able to do. For being away troubles the heart and soul and mind to the degree to which he does nothing except for that family. I hate all that has been on my mind ever since I have known my wife to be pregnant. It’s now I need her most and she needs me in turn.
If I had her with me to be able to watch her and live with her I would be relieved of the feeling of nothingness the army offers. Then, I could serve my time and country with more than enough in return. I have also thought about an emergency in or out of the army, it is then I would be willing to defend these rights I have spoke of and [illegible] even go as far as to die. Because it is the most sacred and blessed life for the living.
Since my entrance in to the army in July 51 I have met married men who are draftees and will be home after two years of service. I also have met other men who say they are married or were married one time or another. These men I have found to be RA’s and even hope to make the army a career by staying in for 20 years. Why, because of lack of love, in other words, cheating or drinking or both. It’s these men that think the world has nothing to offer and then by all means resort to the army way of living.
I myself have very much to live for. A family which to me is the most wonderful in the world is life itself. My wife is occupying my absence by working with the social departments of the Harrisburg Evening News and Patriot. When the time has come for her to bear the child she will have nothing to occupy her time in recovering except the motherly will to live for the child. Upon recovery she will have her hands full to the extent of taking care of him. In return what will I be doing to do my share with my family? My country first in the acting of occupying my time for her benefit, but after this time as others have done I hope to do my family’s part also. For that is truly honest why I’m serving my country in the first place. So please consider these facts!
I have said nothing of my past before entrance into the army. So I believe it should be related, for it to has a bearing upon my life and the conditions and problems I am now facing.
I lived and graduated from a high school successfully which is normal where I live (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania). During World War II my brother Kenneth continued the idea to enter the Navy for six years. It was at this time my mother had a nervous breakdown and was committed to the State Hospital. After almost a year of rest she was released and then picked up her family living which she was so much a part.
Upon graduating from high school I decided and wished to enter college. So in the fall of 1948 I went to Pennsylvania State College. My first year was above satisfactory standings. It was that summer of 1949 I met my future wife Dorothy Ann Smith, while working beside her in a drugstore. I saw her every night practically and gradually fell in love.
As I enter my sophomore year at State College I had her on my mind constantly and so my work in school gradually tapered off. However I came through not too beaten and the summer following she and I went steady.
It was the fall of 1950 that I decided I wanted to go to a smaller college and major in physics and mathematics. The college I chose was Gettysburg and upon entering so as to be on their schedule was sent to York Junior College. This was almost unbearable as Dotty would come to see me and I to see her at Hood College where she was attending a year behind me.
It was then this summer of 1951 that we both were confessing our love and talked of marriage.
From here I wish to relate my experiences concerning the armed forces.
1. In June 1951 I was revoked from being able to become an Air Cadet after asking for it in Dec. 1950 having a little over 2 years of college behind me.
2. After this time I was pressurized by the draft board calling to see if I was going to enlist in a service or not. They said either enlist in the regular Air Force for 4 years, or the Navy for 4 years, or the Army for 3 years, if not they were going to draft me. At that time I have but 3 days to do so and have to do it before 15 July 1951.
3. I talked it over with the Enlisting Office and they told me that if I should join the Army before the draft got me I would be able to get into whatever I wanted or qualified by their ratings. When asked about getting into OCS the answer was it depended upon the army test scores (over 115) and physical fitness. It so turned out that I had scores of 133 and 137 or somewhere near vicinity and physically fit to at least pass the qualifications. Also told to me was that you would get out of the army and not need to worry about the reserves. With these expectations in mind I enlisted for 3 years with all intentions of putting the army in the past and need to worry of its interference in planning a future. (Note:) During basic training, (End of 4th week, 1 September 50) at Indiantown Gap Military Reservation, Pa. I got married.
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A New Years' celebration at Indiantown Gap Military Reservation in 1953,
posted by Fort Indiantown Gap on Facebook in 2017. |
4. After basic training, the army automatically sent me to Leadership School at I.G.M.R. as it was then a requisite for OCS [Officer Cadet School] so therefore had no complaints. I graduated (Class 25) through the Leadership School successfully after the required 8 weeks of infantry leadership ability. First 5 weeks was the actual training and the last 3 cadre work in basic training Co-M 10th Regt.
5. Effective 10 April 52; my application was considered but because my competitive standing in relation to all other applicants was not high enough to justify my selection; however if I desire I may reapply 6 months hither if I still be eligible. (Similar reading of letter from HQ 2nd Army, Office of the Commanding General, Fort George G. Meade, Md.)
6. The 6 May 52 till 19 May 52 had leave en route on orders to EUCom via Camp Kilmer, N.J.
7. In Replacement Center 208 at Zweibucken, Germany. APO 872, N.Y., N.Y. Saturday 7 June 52 in the classification office I had my interview. It was then told to me because of Leadership school, MOS47454 is primary and cannot be changed by any means. So therefore it remains as such.
I returned recently from keeping house for a year behind the iron curtain, in a unique kind of outpost and island of democracy, that dramatic city of Berlin.
From the day my plane touched the very tip of the runway at Idlewild Airport in New York City and quick tears sprang to my eyes at the joy of being home in America, my days have been filled with lesser by meaningful joys.
There is the joy of taking long walks aimlessly though the streets without stumbling upon barbed wire barricades, armed guards, the warning signs, “You Are Now Leaving the American Sector.”
Then there is the thrill of taking ice cubes out of the refrigerator, warm baths when I choose, and warm water in which to wash the baby’s clothes.
And best of all is the joy of smiling at strangers on the street because we share a common happiness in a sunny day or a child’s antics. The complete absence of mistrust. Fear is gone.
When my husband was assigned to the Sixth Infantry Regiment in June 1952, I knew perhaps as little about Berlin or West Germany itself as the average American does, but I delved into all the books and newspapers I could find and frankly, what I found scared me.
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| Post-WWII Berlin |
Berlin lies 175 miles behind the Russian zone of Germany and is divided into four sectors, the three Western powers and the East Zone. The implications of living in such a situation became even clearer as I received my husband’s letter, telling of the all-night ride from Frankfurt to Berlin in coaches where blinds were pulled tightly to the sill until West Berlin was reached.
As soon as our baby was born six months later, we began the endless correspondence which resulted in my coming to Berlin. He still had eighteen months left to serve and we decided I would follow him. “No matter if I have to wash diapers in a tea cup or live in a tent,” were the words I used in my letters but little did I dream how close I would come to that!
Berlin, being the political hotseat it has been through a year’s blockade and following, the Army was no longer sending dependents there to be with their husbands, not even officers.
We decided to chance it as tourists after German controls on visas were lifted in February 1953. In April, David, the four months old, and I, left the shores of Long Island behind for an adventure that forever will make our lives different.
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Little did I dream what the adventure would claim of my old feeling when our four-engined DC6 gently dipped wing tips toward what seemed to me, vast rows of red-roofed houses, cemeteries and tall fir trees. I noticed aimlessly, while I jiggled the baby in one arm, how clean the forest floors looked. Later that winter when the temperature sank to three below zero and we clung to our featherbeds, I remembered that day. Even parks and gutters were cleared of twigs and dried leaves.
My first taste of the new life came when blue uniformed “polizei” politely retained my passport for entry stamps while the baby whimpered and my husband paced behind the visitor’s rope. Even as we left the airport, the impact of our “outpost” existence hit me square in the eyes. There in a double line were several hundred East Zone refugees, waiting for transportation to Frankfurt. The women, in their brown cotton stockings and sturdy shoes gently rocked their babies, and the men placidly smoked their pipes and stared—into the past—or the future—I never could find out.
Refugee was the word that filled every mouth those days as we trod the streets until footsore and weary. One after another real estate agent shrugged his shoulders and explained in simple English, “No places, many come from East Zone, no work, no houses.” Already Berlin was crowded with unemployed and refugees were flowing in at the astounding rate of two to three thousand a day! We began looking for a three-room apartment and ended up almost begging for a room, any room!
Government billeting was impossible to get. We had realized this even before my decision to come. I was permitted a visitor’s PX ration card for three months. Ironically we were classified as “tourist dependents” although we had neither the luxuries of tourists nor the facilities of dependents. Usually after a three months’ period, the husband was transferred to a station in the Western Zone where wives could legally accompany them.
However three days after my arrival, we found our new home with a German family of three in an immaculate bungalow with a red tiled roof and fish pond. I sighed in relief, “We’ll take it!”
Life was back to normal; or so I thought!
My first awakening to the days ahead came the next morning when I hung the baby’s wash out on the line. At least I felt wonderful, smelling the fresh clean wash, humming a little song. I noticed vapor trails overhead and watched until I could see them no more, that evening I told my husband. I shall never forget his answer.
“Yes, honey, they are Russian jets.”
Some strange shell of fright covered my heart and never left. It was then he explained we lived only two blocks from the Russian sector of the city, and I was never to wander too far but always walk to the West. “And never,” he cautioned, “take the underground railway. It goes into the Russian sector with no warning.”
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Berlin as it was occupied directly after WWII. In 1949,
the three western sector of Germany were unified
and became the Federal Republic of Germany, or
West Germany. Although it held democratic
elections, it was largely controlled by Allied forces. |
I was ready to pack and leave for America the first day I heard heavy Russian guns resounding until the house vibrated. Dashing out of the house in bare feet and hair in mad disarray, I sent my new family into fits of laughter.
There came that day though when I too delighted in the stupefied look that crossed the face of an American newcomer, when with studied nonchalance, I would point out a plane crossing overhead. “That’s a Russky transport. See how the nose is shaped differently, and notice the Red star markings.”
Berlin is large and lovely, with parks and lakes in every district, but nevertheless, I have yet to meet the American who did not long for that old custom of a Sunday afternoon drive in the country. The feeling of being shut in a closet, if 362 square miles can be called a closet, grows and grows until it comes close to stifling.
One Sunday afternoon I begged if we could not go anywhere, just anywhere to see rolling hills and valleys, even a wheat field! That evening we did find a wheat field. The only thing was the lovely sheaves of grain were snarled in a roll of barbed wire, one side East, one side West.
Housekeeping is housekeeping the world over, or so you might think!
As though not knowing one word of the German language was not handicap enough, I discovered to my horror that first evening in the kitchen, a coal stove, one cold water faucet and two blank faces that could not understand a syllable of English. I was to boil the baby’s formula twenty-five minutes but gave up after the first few times of using innumerable baskets of wood while Frau Schultze fumed. Spaghetti was a two-hour process with my knowledge of coal stoves. Fortunately a month later and electric stove was bought.
I washed our clothing in the kitchen, heating huge pots of water on the stove, wringing until blisters began to bleed. The round little woman who was to become “Oomie” to us, “Gramma” for a year to our baby, gestured wildly and spoke vociferously in German. My sole answer to everything could only be at that time, “Nicht verstedt.” (Don’t understand.)
Our language barrier was soon eased with a dictionary and the drawing of simple pictures. I began to understand international difficulties all the better when I would misinterpret a simple explanation how to shut the gate and promptly turn loose a huge dog and six scared chickens.
The problems my husband met with the first sergeant were nothing compared to the diplomacy he required each evening to soothe over my mistakes.
My first few days of doing the simple tasks such as shopping three times a day, washing with a paddle and cold water, and ironing on a table, left both my husband and “Oomie” and “Oopie” in gales of laughter.
When I asked where the refrigerator was, a vague look settled on their faces and then it occurred to me why all the hausfraus seemed to be continually shopping. Naturally refrigerators are plentiful on the retail market, but are considered luxuries in most middle class homes. We compromised on a cake of ice every other day, and soon I began shopping before each meal too.
My first trip to a super market with signs I could read, endless selections, and frozen foods, was a thrilling experience upon reaching home.
Our large American breakfasts astonished our German friends, also the custom of drinking coffee and water with our meals. I am certain our breakfasts were the subject of neighborhood gossip for fully a week. Germans are accustomed to five meals a day; coffee and black bread upon rising, a mid-morning coffee break, a large meal of potatoes, vegetables in season, and meat or fish three or four times a week. Three o’clock is coffee time again with pastry, and then seven, snack time.
Frau Schultze peeled huge quantities of potatoes every week. I have heard it said somewhere that most of the German population is overweight from potatoes and pastry.
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| Sauerbraten. |
I found it difficult to adapt recipes to my way of cooking because “Oomie” would measure by the pound and I by the cup. She did teach me how to make sauerbraten and cheese coffee cake, and I, in turn, showed her how to make cheeseburgers and peanut butter cookies. Herr Schultze, a massive silent man, would stand and chuckle while I worked on supper. “All comes from can and box in American, nicht?” he would say. I put on weekly demonstrations of making cake out of a box with just milk. Such magic! For mixing we used a bowl about eighteen inches deep with a heavy wooden mallet.
No longer did I blithely slide pudding in the oven to brown the meringue. Electricity is precious stuff and not to be wasted. I usually planned one oven meal a week.
After ten o’clock coffee time I would take the baby carriage, which always drew crowds of curious children, and go first to the “Fleischerei” for meat where I would draw a picture of the animal from which I wanted meat. Then the ruddy-faced butcher with many flourishes would produce what seemed to me like half a cow or pig from which I chose my cut. The majority of butcher shops keep their meet in cold cellars. All the shops close in the warm hours of the afternoon and remain open into early evening.
From the “Fleischerei” we shopped for fruits and vegetables, those in season and those shipped in from southern Italy. Then we would go to the dim cool “Milch” shop where milk is dipped into pails from a porcelain well and there is a vague cool odor of cheese and cream. American salt butter was a treat to all our German friends. Little four-year-old Freddie preferred his black bread spread with lard and onions however.
We usually ended our shopping expedition at the “Backerei and Conditorei” where rows of rich cakes, cookies and fancy creams and candies looked like something out a Bavarian fairy tale. Our favorite was a sponge cake split and filled with layers of fresh cherries and whipped cream. If we waited to shop until afternoon, we stopped at the corner café for coffee and whipped cream. By the time we trailed home our string shopping bag was bursting as the stores provide no paper bags. Everyone carries some kind of briefcase, satchel, or knapsack.
Trying to explain the American housewife’s life to the German hausfrau is like trying to explain jet engines to the village blacksmith.
One late summer evening Oomie’s sister from the East Zone was drying dishes while I washed them in two tin basins. Inga asked if this was the first time I had ever done dishes.
“Oh no,” I demonstrated in mostly sign language. “I’ve been doing dishes since I was old enough to hold a tea towel.”
This surprised her and pleased he in an odd fashion as she explained that the East Zone women were told capitalist women are lazy and do none of their own housework.
In the course of a year I brought more of America’s customs to Inga and gradually she began to come several times a week to help with the care of little David, who loved her.
She talked little but one night when a fuse blew and we sat by candlelight, she laid aside her round black-rimmed glasses and mending, and her tired eyes filled with tears. “Never is there enough money for my girls. Just enough for potatoes and bread and a little meat, but never enough for shoes.” A good pair of shoes would take a worker’s entire salary for a month in the East Zone.
She told me her husband and two sons were killed in the war and she and her two daughters lived on what she earned helping others with housework. “Inga,” I burst out, “Come home with me to America. Look at the refugees leaving everyday for a whole new life, women and men older than you.”
“Ach so,” she sighed, “but I am too old to start new and Germany is my home, East or West. Always is the hope for the very young and very old that better will come of it all.”
I can see her now, standing in the middle of our empty room on the day I left, clasping little Davie’s hand in her own work-creased one, and quick tears filled my eyes for all the Ingas form whom I could do little and tell nothing of the wonders of America.
The first question people ask me is “Are the Germans bitter?” Perhaps there is bitterness in the hearts of some, but all mistrust left Inga’s heart when we both sat by the radio listening tensely to every word in English and German on the day of June 17th when the East Zone workers rebelled and marched on the Russian embassy, then tore down the flag above famed Brandenburg Tor. We shared a common fear, hers for her two daughters in the East Zone, and I for my little one sound asleep in a house already scarred by one war, its shutters town by shrapnel, its furniture chipped by the boots of rude invaders.
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| Brandenburg Gate, June 17th, 1953 |
Americans were not permitted on the streets during that day and the next. We spent each minute by the radio listening, straining for every word. I knew the word “panzer” and I could count in German by then. The riots quelled, we were allowed on the streets, and then my heart quieted.
It was all too vivid because my husband and I had spent one afternoon in the East Zone, had been right in the spot where at the moment Russian tanks were rolling upon the rebellious workers. We had seen the impressive and ornate Russian embassy, surrounded by ominous loudspeakers shrouded in brown cloths. We had posed for family snapshots at the famed Brandenburg Gate which separates East from West.
For a solid hour we toured the elaborate Garden of Remembrance where Russian soldiers killed in the battle of Berlin are buried. We stared and were stared at. I found the Russian militia uniquely fascinated by my low-cut sandals. And I equally fascinated by their high black boots. All the uniforms which are dark blue trousers with khaki jackets, I am told, are cut in one size, hence the slim fellow looks rather bulky and the fat one strained. So many of the men seemed young, shy, just as curious as we were about them. I ached to be able to talk to them, to fill their curious eyes with visions of America. One Russian soldier who deserted to the West Zone told that men are stationed in Berlin only three months, else those curious eyes become defiant.
When we returned to the West Zone it was like coming back into sunlight. I recalled that upon first seeing West Berlin, all I noticed was the rubble and the grotesque skeletons of buildings not yet torn down. But that day I saw for the first the fresh new apartment buildings and the reassuring blue emblem of the Marshall plan.
Rubble lies in blocks in the East Zone, but sightseeing buses of course take the wide route down newly built and named Stalin-Allee with its tall white apartment buildings and bright HO, state owned stores. Formerly Frankfurt Allee, the street was practically completely demolished at the close of the war but now presents a new East face. At the end of the street was a statue of Stalin, hand inside coat, resembling the famed pose of Napoleon. Behind him were pictures of Marx and Engels.
Their pictures are as famous in the East Zone shops as Hopalong Cassidy and Marilyn Monroe are in our grocery and drug stores. Everything is rationed, but one can buy all he desires in state controlled stores, and of course if one can afford it. Butter was then 13 marks a pound, or about three dollars and fifty cents. [about $33 today]
One of my German friend’s family even feared to return to the East sector with its Eisenhower packets and instead took a bit of lard with them one week and a bit of flour the next week. When our friend Inga returned to her home with an Eisenhower packet, she told us how a loudspeaker cautioned all the women to turn over their food and many jeered. I can still see little Freddie going to visit his Aunt in the East Zone standing in the kitchen, so solemn in his leather short pants and little woolen sweater, with a bag of coffee in one pocket for Tanta and a bit of tobacco in the other pocket for Tanta’s husband.
Children bridged many a gap for me in those first precarious weeks of slight misunderstandings, caused by race and language barriers.
Babies are a bond the world over and I found the shyest German mother ready to show me how to smock a dress or eager to see Davie’s nylon snowsuit. School children in short pants and knee length socks, with knapsacks and milk pails would tail me for blocks, giggling and nudging one another.
Perhaps the best explanation we found to the absence of bitterness was in a conversation with a night watchman at the PX, a tall impressively handsome man who had served as a lieutenant in the tanker corps. Conversing in his oddly British accent, he stood at attention for an hour, jumping intelligently from religion to art to history, and making me humble inadequate—but able to understand.
Americans? “They think too much about money.”
Am I bitter? “No, I am a professional soldier, brought up in a military regime, and here I am a night watchman. But I have a job. There are 300,000 others jobless who would take my job tomorrow.”
Rearming Germany? “I hope they do. It is my profession. I have my application in now for two years.”
Religion? “To have thoughts inside, one must have time to relax and a full stomach. I have four children and we have food for today. Perhaps tomorrow there will be no work—but that is another day. I have seen men at the front always turn to God in the last moments.”
The future? “For my children? They know few fairy tales. They live on the streets most of the day and they learn what life is early. If only they could go out in the fields and woods to run and play.”
I found the children hugely interested in American customs and anything they could absorb about the country. All of them speak English and many can give you batting averages of big leaguers as well as the kid next door. G.I.’s spend many hours in German-American clubs running soap box derbies and baseball series. So incongruous and yet so wonderful to see a rosy cheeked youth of 15 in Alpine shorts and knee length socks sliding into home base to shouts of “Bravo!”
American jazz? Bebop may never survive Europe but when it came to discussing jazz with my young German friends I found myself feeling like a grandmother from the waltz age. They are thoroughly “hep”.
They talk little of the war now, little of nights spent in cellars, days hunting lost parents, begging for food, lost minds, lost souls.
My friend Ushi will not tell you how she had one dress for a year and washed that out each night after working in a hospital with no bandages while Berlin fell. She will tell you about the coach with the white horses that will drive her to her wedding and how they will dance to dawn.
My friend Gertrude will not tell you about digging her way out of a cellar after three days. She will tell you about her fifteen charges in an East Berlin orphanage all from one to two years in age—how they laugh and coo when she sings a lullaby.
[in hand, separately: At a huge concert by Ella Fitzgerald, thousands of them cheered, stomped, swayed or intently compared notes in the lobby during intermission. Nothing is more peculiar than seeing the familiar long haircut, belted raincoat of the typical young German man and hearing in the midst of his guttural German such phrases as, “Go, man, go.”]
And Hildegarde? She will not recall the 600 mile walk from Czechoslovakia to Berlin when the East regime began. She will tell you how she plans to work while her G.I. husband studies for his master’s degree.
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| Ernst Reuter on a postage stamp. |
Theirs are not the stories of tears or sympathy. “There is work to be done. Let us do it.” That is what they say. “And when there is sentiment, let it be honest.” Just as millions of candles burned in every window, flickering in the rain on cobblestone streets, when Ernst Reuter, beloved mayor of Berlin, died last year.
Our friends and the stories of their lives framed our year’s adventure. We never toured the continent, we never saw inside of an embassy. We did discover America for the first, the America of our hearts and we did a bit of campaigning for her, the humble kind, taking our German family to the PX for an honest-to-goodness sundae or hamburger.
Thus when we gathered our coats together on the plane prior to going through customs, I laughed and cried at once, because the girl next to me said, “Say, what are you laughing about, honey, the vacation’s over!”
And I remember saying, “No, it’s just begun, my vacation lifetime as just a plain American housewife.”
And so was launched a fifteen-year newspaper column on her vacation lifetime--at home, where the heart is. Happy Birthday, Grampa!
