When I joined the Army, the JAG career management officer asked me where I would like to be assigned.  I told him Fort Carson, Colorado.  He said, “that’s in the Southwest, so put that down as your first choice.”  I put down Southwest and they gave me my first choice by sending me to Fort Hood, Texas.  Fort Hood was located right between Dallas and Houston (178 miles from each).

So, when it was time for my next assignment and I requested to go to the language school in Monterey, California to study German and then be assigned to Germany, you can imagine how surprised I was when it happened.  My next door neighbor at Monterey (Fort Ord) was also studying German.  They shipped him to Italy.  Now, that’s more like it.  He was an intelligence officer, and when we visited him in Italy, he was wearing Transportation Corps insignia.  But that’s another story.

I was assigned to the 4th Armored Division with its headquarters located in Goeppingen  (not too far from Stuttgart).  Cooke Barracks had been a German flugplatz (airfield) during WW II.  Goering was fond of the Goeppingen flugplatz and gave rousing speeches from the balcony of the officer’s club.  I must interject that I am not an historian, but I heard the same story from so many drunks at the O’Club bar that there must be some truth in it.

All buildings in Germany are built to last forever and the quarters we were assigned to live in were no different.  The building was substantial, consisting of three stories, with four apartments on each floor.  You entered the building through one of the two massive stairwells.  This is referred to as “stairwell living.”

Shortly after we moved in, one of our neighbors came down to explain to me that he was the senior officer of the building [SOB], and that he collected money each month to pay the putzfrau who cleaned the stairwells.  Nobody wanted to be the SOB.  He was also responsible for anything that went wrong in the building.  But, it didn’t occur to this captain to ask me for my date of rank.  So, for eight months, I dutifully paid him a small number of Deutchmarks for the putzfrau.  His six-year-old son explained to me one day in the parking lot, that his dad was in charge of all of us.  I just smiled.  One day the SOB showed up in my office and said, “Rice, what’s your date of rank?”  I told him and he said he would have the money box and the ledger to me within the hour.  Rank has its privileges, but also its responsibilities.  I became the SOB.

During a very bitter winter, the family right above us moved out.  The apartment was due to be painted, so the German painters arrived with their paint and their beer and proceeded to give the apartment a new coat.  When they finished, they left all of the windows open so the windows wouldn’t seal.  After two days, we could no longer keep our apartment warm.  I decided to go over to the post engineers, borrow the key to that apartment and close the windows.

Cooke Barracks was a very small installation and the post engineer was a second lieutenant.  I entered the office and there were three German civilians in the front office.  I explained that I was Captain Rice, the Senior Officer of the Building and that the painters had left the windows open and I needed a key to get in to the apartment and close the windows.  They explained that only the lieutenant could give out a key and that he was in Stuttgart.  I explained that my apartment was cold and I needed the key.  One of the ladies got up and went into another room to brief her supervisor.  She came back out and told me that the lieutenant would be back in two days and I should return at that time.

The friendly approach doesn’t always work with the Germans.  It isn’t fair to stereotype, but on a number of occasions, I felt that my pleasant, friendly approach was being viewed as a sign of weakness.  I then explained to them that as soon as they found a military officer senior to me to tell me that I couldn’t have the key, I would leave, but not before.  The same woman got up and went in the back.  Shortly, she and another German came out of the back.  He ask me to explain the problem.  After I explained, he said to all present, “Oh, he only wants to borrow the key.  That is no problem.”  The problem was the unnecessary elevation of my blood pressure.

On another occasion, a fellow officer flew me to Nuernberg and was supposed to pick me up at the end of the day.  But the weather turned bad and I had to take the train back to Goeppingen.  I took one train from Nuernberg to Stuttgart and then had to transfer.  I knew the track number and was heading toward it when a train conductor asked where I was going.  I told him Goeppingen and he directed me to a different track and told me to hurry.  When I got to the track, I asked about Goeppingen and another conductor told me to get on.

By now, you have figured out that the train wasn’t going to stop in Goeppingen.  Ordinarily, it would stop, but this day was a German holiday and it wasn’t even going to slow down or toot its horn.  We were on our way to Augsburg in Bavaria.  The good news was that I wasn’t the only one who had been misinformed.  A young 16 year-old German was coming back from a skiing trip and he also had been directed to this train.  We were told to get off in Augsburg and to find the conductor in the red hat.  He would send us back to Goeppingen at no cost.  I was pleased that the young lad was along, because he was fluent and could better explain our plight.

We got off in Augsburg and found the man in the red hat.  My young friend was explaining our situation.  The longer the conversation went on, the clearer it became that we had a superior/subordinate situation.  Mr. Red Hat was in a position of authority and my spokesperson was probably a high school student.  It was going down hill.  Finally, I understood Red Hat to say, “All the children in Deutchland know that the snell train doesn’t stop in Goeppingen on holidays.”  I immediately said, “Ich bin kein Kind aus Deutchland” (I am no child from Germany).    He was startled.  It was the first time that he realized that I understood what he had been saying.  He looked at me in my Army green uniform and new major’s hat (scrambled eggs outranks red) and, after a pause, he only said one word.  “Come.”

Well, we got our free trip back to Goeppingen and my young friend was probably thankful that I was along.

Some years later when I was at the Department of Transportation, I was invited over to the White House for a briefing on universal health care.  The speaker was addressing all the countries with universal health care and explaining the different problems with each system.  When he got to Germany, all he said was, “The German system works pretty well as long as all the participants are German.”   Jawohl!