Talking to Amtrak Conductor About Late-Life Enlistment, Loving the Cold War Army

 

Many Amtrak conductors and other rail workers are veterans. Over the past quarter century of commuting to Philadelphia on Amtrak, I got to know many veterans. The most recent is a conductor named Darrell I have only got to know in the past year. I still go to Philadelphia every week. 

Darrell is a conductor on the 9:33am train. That train always runs to Philadelphia with the engine in the back of the train and the cab car up front. Until recently, Darrell’s crew did not let passengers use the cab car, leaving it for crew with nearly empty trains. But Darrell let me ride in the cab car knowing I was a long-time rider. A couple of weeks ago, Darrell and I talked about being in the Army. 

He asked me about my backpack, surprised I would have gear from a recent war. I told him I deployed to Iraq in 2009-10. We got into a long conversation about how I got back in and deployed at 56 years old. Darrell served four years from 1988-92. He served in Germany for right at the end of the Cold War and during the Gulf War sending supplies to Kuwait and Iraq. He said it was the best four years of his life. Then we talked about friends from Cold War service. 

I told him I was going to Europe to visit my roommate from the late 70s in Cold War Germany. Darrell is meeting some of his friends from the Army later this summer. Darrell said he got out, had kids and didn’t think he could ever go back in. He is more than a decade younger than I am and was thinking if I could do it, he could have.

The Army returned the enlistment age to the traditional 35 years in 2009, so the window has closed on older soldiers returning to service.  

Now Darrell and I are two old soldiers riding the train who can say with the crew of "Fury" that being a soldiers was "The best job I ever had."

Who Fights Our War? Veteran of the Tet Offensive in 1968 Working Security at Kennedy Airport

The Tet Offensive in 1968 was the beginning 

of the end of the War in Vietnam

This afternoon I checked in for a flight to Paris on IcelandAir.  Checking in for boarding took a while because of COVID documents, but once I had a boarding pass, there was almost no line for security.

When I approached the screening area, I told the guy at the metal detector that I would need the alternative screening.  I said,"I have metal here, here and here" pointing to my neck, left knee and left elbow.  James, the TSA screener, said "Go ahead and try anyway." I did. The alarm sounded and I waited for the technician to check me. After I put my arms over my head in the plexiglass booth, James came over to do the pat down. The technician was a woman and could not do the hands-on check. 

When James walked over I held my arms out straight to my sides.  He said, "You don't need to do that, you're not an airplane."

'And you are a native New Yorker,' I thought.  

Then he said, "You got metal all over the place, was it shrapnel from a war?" 

"As a matter of fact, in 1973......"

"No way," he said. "You were in 'Nam? I was there during the Tet Offensive. '68. Radio man." 

"I managed to get blinded by shrapnel in a missile explosion in America," I said.  "Live fire test."

"That sucks," he said. "No Purple Heart, right?"

"Right?" I said.  Then I told him about my fingers hanging off and getting re-attached.  With professional curiosity and gloved hands, he checked the first fingers on my right hand.

He then told me about his communications site being surrounded, then the North Vietnamese went around his bunker and moved on. "I was sure I was dead," James said.  

We fist bumped then waved as he went back to the check-in line.  

I have talked to many TSA agents who were Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. I don't remember a lot of Vietnam War veterans.  Certainly not recently.  But it was fun to talk with him.  

My Summer Vacation: More Concentration Camps

Arbeit macht frei the ironic and terrible sign at the gate 

of Auschwitz and other Nazi Concentration Camps

Next week I am flying to Germany to join my best friend Cliff on a thousand-mile tour of Nazi Concentration Camps.  We have visited other concentration camps together in 2017, 2019 and 2020:  Buchenwald, Dachau, and the first concentration camp opened in the state of Hesse in February1933.

We also visited Nuremberg in 2020, the site of the rallies that were central to Hitler's power. 

In July we will visit Flossenburg, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Theresienstadt.   We chose these because Cliff had never been Auschwitz, I had never been to Flossenberg and neither of us have been to Theresienstadt. 

Auschwitz is the largest and worst of  the camps. A million Jews died Auschwitz, but by the time the camp was in operation, three million Jews had already been murdered. They were shot by tens of thousands of German soldiers, German police, and by police and volunteers in conquered countries.   

Flossenburg is where Dietrich Bonhoeffer was martyred by the Nazis just before the war ended. One of the worst Trump toadies wrote a biography of Bonhoeffer in 2011.  Eric Metaxas could write about a martyr and then praise Trump.  

Thereseienstadt in the Czech Republic was the "show camp" for the Nazis early in the war. It was a place they took the Red Cross to show them the camps were not as bad as the rumors. It was also the camp where Jews who were confessing Christians were sent.  Churches in Germany stood aside and let their members who had any Jewish heritage be murdered.  

Bruder Timotheus and Kanaan 

Cliff was Sergeant Cliff Almes in the1970s in Cold War Germany where we were roommates.  After leaving the U.S. military he became Bruder Timotheus at the Land of Kanaan in Darmstadt. Kanaan was founded in 1947 by two women who believed Germany must repent for the Holocaust.

Before 2017, I had never been to a Holocaust museum or memorial or a concentration camp.  But when a racist President put the head breitbart.com in the White House, I knew I had to get connected to my genetic heritage.  Steve Bannon gave white supremacists and neo-Nazis a place to promote hate on breitbart.com  

In August 2017, Nazis were "fine people" according to the President and I needed to learn more about the hateful people who are his base of support.  

Germany was a civilized, if impoverished, country in 1932. By 1945, the country was bombed, invaded and defeated. The Nazis killed millions of innocent people and left their own country a smoldering ruin.  America was the leading democracy in the world in 2016, we are now slowly sinking into tyranny while Republicans cheer. 

I am going to concentration camps to see just how bad it can get if a tyrant rips away American democracy.