Last week I wrote about my successful hitchhiking trip from California to Boston. When you do a brilliant thing, put it on the shelf and dust it off from time to time. Don't try to replicate it as I did when I finished my course in Vietnamese at the Army's language school in Monterey.
My classmates and I had orders to Goodfellow Air Force Base in San Angelo, Texas. We would spend three months there basically learning how to tune a radio. Our Top Secret clearances would be finalized and we'd be sworn to secrecy, so I'll say no more about that, other than that we were very low level spies. Saigon Sally never attempted to wheedle secrets out of me.
Some of my classmates planned to go home before reporting to San Angelo. I had friends in Austin so I decided to visit them and would go home to Boston after my three months in Texas. I also decided to hitchhike to San Angelo. Bad move. My route would take me through Berlin during the last days of WWII.
They say your dreams can be affected by what you've been doing before you go to bed. During my last days in Monterey. I had been reading The Last Battle by Cornelius Ryan. The book paints a horrific picture of Berlin before the Russians arrived. The Germans put up a good fight, but food and supplies were running short. It was a total disaster for the losing side.
And then there was Sawicki's ghost. Sawicki was this guy from Chicago who was always laughing and joking. Everyone knew Sawicki even though he finished his Vietnamese course a few months before us. He showed up one day in the barracks looking haggard and drawn. "Enjoy your time in Monterey," he said, "because San Angelo is horrible, horrible." Then he melted away.
We finished at Monterey in October, 1969. I was able to catch a ride south with a classmate. Once we left the San Joaquin Valley, I noticed how parched the land was. I saw signs to Death Valley and the Mojave Desert. At about 10 p.m., my classmate and his wife dropped me at Needles, California on the Arizona border. They were headed to a motel.
Ten p.m. is not a good time to be looking for a ride, but soon a beat up looking Jaguar XKE stopped. The driver (I'll call him Jeff) was heading to Springfield, Missouri. "The crossroads of America," he called it. Springfield was his home. He had been living in LA for a while and was sick of it. He said he was sleepy and asked if I would drive.
I was not too good on a stick shift at the time having mostly traveled on Boston's excellent transit system, but I did manage to get us up to speed and Jeff fell asleep. I saw nothing of Arizona, but fell in love with New Mexico when the sun came up over the desert. I saw little Navaho kids running for the school bus in Gallup. I found that highly exotic.
Jeff was fairly taciturn, but he did tell me an XKE was not a good venue for love making. We were in the Texas panhandle by mid afternoon. Jeff suggested I get off in Amarillo and angle down to Austin. That sounded like good advice, but the first guy who stopped was headed east to Oklahoma. It would be a little out of my way, but if I got out in Lawton, Oklahoma I could head down to Ft. Worth and on to Austin. With night approaching, it's always good to be on the move.
It was night when I got dropped at an interchange outside Lawton. Traffic was light and soon it was non-existent. I forgot to mention I was travelling with a heavy duffle bag which contained all my belongings, except for my books which I had mailed home. There was no point in walking anywhere. There were no businesses or homes in sight. just rolling plains, though I could see Lawton's glow in the distance.
I found a soft spot in the ditch and cuddled up with my duffle bag. I was making up for lost sleep when I was suddenly awake. A feeling of oppression overcame me. I thought I was a German soldier somehow cut off from my unit. There were lights in the distance and I started walking towards them. I truly believed I was on the outskirts of war-torn Berlin in 1945.
After a few or many minutes my trance lifted. I was greatly relived to find myself on the outskirts of...where was I? Oh yeah, Lawton, Oklahoma. But where was my duffel bag? I retraced my steps, and now began to see what a tangle of curving interchanges I had gone to sleep in. I walked and walked trying to find where I had gone to sleep. A car passed now and then. Had someone picked up my abandoned bag? It had my orders in it along with all my records. I wasn't supposed to lose those documents.
I spent hours wandering those interchanges. When it got light I looked some more, then caught a ride into Lawton. I found the bus station and bought some breakfast and a ticket to San Angelo. My hitchhiking days were over. I also called the police department and reported my missing bag. "How did you lose it again?" The truth was my only option, though I left out the Berlin part. I postponed my trip to Austin. I needed to get to the base and set my affairs in order.
It was a sunny day but a dreary ride to San Angelo. I walked the two miles out to the base. I did not attempt to hitch a ride. I still had my military ID card and was able to get onto the base and start telling my sad story. Maybe they'd kick me out of the service. I'd be ok with that. Maybe they'd send me right into battle in Viet Nam. I'd dreamed of that.
They did give me a bunk and some old uniforms that fit fairly well. I'm sure there was a discussion among the officer class whether to grant me the Top Secret clearance. But they had invested a year in my training and so decided to take a chance on me. My classmates started drifting in and it was good to have an audience for my yarn.
One of my classmates found a 1957 Ford sedan for $75 and asked if I'd like to share the cost with him. This was a good chance to retire my thumb. When our three months training was over my classmate said I could have the car if I wanted it. I thought about driving it to Boston, but I had no mechanical skills at the time and kept picturing the thing breaking down in the middle of nowhere. Or on the outskirts of Berlin. So we sold the car to a member of an incoming class.
I've often wondered what became of my bag. There are some people who on finding a duffel bag in a ditch would make an effort to find the owner. My bag did not fall into the hands of such a person. There wasn't much of value in it. Just some clothes and the paper records of a 22 year old wayfarer. Anything can be replaced. Anything but lost memories, so I'm lucky that way.
| Berlin, Oklahoma |
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