Visiting the Base Where I was a Tank Commander from 1976-79 in Wiesbaden, Germany

When I visited Wiesbaden Air Base this summer, the tank in the photo above was the only tank on the base.  When I arrived the first time in October 1976, the 54 tanks of 1st Battalion, 70th Armor were combat loaded with 63 rounds of cannon ammo. We were on the East-West border within 48 hours after we landed at Rhein-Main Air Base.  

The building above was post headquarters for 4th Brigade, 4th Infantry Division as soon as we took over the base.  It still serves as headquarters, now for the reserve forces in Europe, commanded by Major General John Gronski, my division commander in Pennsylvania before he took over this new command in Europe.  

This building was my barracks in 1976-77, before I moved off post.  It is offices now. Bravo Company was mostly on the second floor.  The barracks were carpeted and had relatively luxurious living spaces.  I shared a room with three other sergeants.  Enlisted men were eight to a room.  Sergeant Daniel Rosera was the first one to buy 300 Watts of stereo to play Peter Frampton Comes Alive out his barracks window.  Her also bought a mic so he could belch at 300 Watts.  He could belch short sentences.  A man of considerable talents.

Across this fences is a few dozen trucks and a dozen more Blackhawk helicopters.  The tanks are gone and aircraft sit where M109 howitzers and their support vehicles were parked 40 years ago.

I rode up to Wiesbaden Air Base from Darmstadt and visited John and Berti Gronski. They live in the housing area. Gronski and his wife still ride. I didn't find out until this visit that they were really serious riders.  When Gronski left active duty as a lieutenant in 1981, he and Berti rode home from Washington state to Mossic, Pa. on bicycles! John towed a trailer carrying their 15-month-old son.  

The unit motto of the 28th Division, Pa. National Guard, is "Roll On!"  Gronski would say that at formations and public ceremonies. I had no idea in 2012 - 14 when he was division commander that he took "Roll On" so literally. He and Berti rolled on for 3,000 miles across the country.  

The Flag of Israel, A White Falcon, Beeping Horns and Real Pride

On Sunday, June 11, 1967, in mid-afternoon, a small parade of cars drove north on Oak Street in Stoneham, Massachusetts, past my house.  I happened to be in the yard. I went to the street to see what was going on. The first car of the six or seven in line was a white 1962 Ford Falcon convertible with a tattered Israeli flag tied to its antenna.  It seemed like a dozen men and women in their 20s or so were sitting on the doors and the trunk and standing on the seats, waving and yelling.

"Israel won! Israel beat the Arabs! Israel!" They also yelled in Hebrew.  Most of them were wearing something blue or white or both.  The lead car was the only convertible. The rest of the cars were sedans with people sitting on the doors or hanging out the windows also waving and yelling.

Israel won!

Stoneham is a suburb nine miles north of Boston. When I was 14 years old in 1967, the population was 12,000 and growing.  But the Jewish population was in the hundreds. Most of the town was divided between old families that went back to the Revolution or further. Stoneham was incorporated in 1636. The other half was Irish and Italian Catholic families.  It seemed like the entire Jewish population of Stoneham was in those cars, at least those between 18 and 25 years old.  I am technically not Jewish, my father is Jewish, not my mother so I am not Jewish by Israel's official definition.

But on this day, for the first time I can remember, I was really proud to be Jewish.  Israel beat Egypt, Jordan and Syria in just six days.  The victory was crushing. Israel was outnumbered 100 to 1 and sent all three armies fleeing. Until that day, when I thought about being Jewish, I thought about being a victim. I did not know much about my heritage or the Holocaust, but I know that millions were killed by the Nazis.

The Six-Day War changed that for me. Israel could fight and win against impossible odds.  Israelis were not victims, they were warriors.  I just finished reading Six Days of War by Michael Oren. This book brought together all of the details of a war I knew from news reports at the time. Oren makes clear the cascade of errors and arrogance by the Arab leaders that led to such a quick and crushing defeat.  He also details how many of the victories were last-minute decisions in the moment that could have gone another way. Taking Jerusalem, for example, was not a plan. There was an opportunity. Israel took it.

Reading this book was also a counterbalance for me to my visits to Holocaust sites and memorials this summer.  I spent the summer being reminded of how dangerous Nazi and white supremacist ideology really is.  Oren's book reminded me that Israel is ready to fight any enemy of the Jewish people.

Eight Years Ago Matt Jones Was My Mentor, and the Same Age as My Kids

From Left: Me, Matt Jones, Dale Shade and Andy Mehler

Ten years ago this month I moved from Echo Company to Task Force Diablo HQ. My new mission was to write about as many soldiers as I could and take hundreds of pictures.  

The last time I took photos professionally was in the 70s. Cameras had film. I needed help.  At Brigade Headquarters there were two Public Affairs sergeants, but only one had been to the Defense Information School. The sergeant who handed me a digital camera and showed me how to use it was Matt Jones.  Of course he was less than half my age, everybody was. But this young, quiet sergeant who was about the same age as my oldest daughter was also my mentor. He showed me how to use the new camera, how to frame shots, how to care for the camera in sandstorms and prop wash from helicopters, and how the Army does public relations.  

I had more than 20 years experience in public relations, but the Army is a much more controlled environment than the civilian world. Matt guided me through the virtual land mines of Army approvals. He is also an excellent line editor and made several of my stories better and more focused. 

Although we occasionally worked in the same office and we were both in the same Brigade, Matt's work environment was sadly different than mine. The people I worked for in Task Force headquarters gave me everything I needed within their power to help me do my job. Matt worked for a headquarters with a troubled commander and the infighting that always happens in that kind of situation. While I got praise and encouragement, Matt got criticism and disdain.  

Matt is now just another old guy, over 30!, with kids and a career. Ten years ago, he helped me to succeed while he handled his own set of difficulties.  

Thanks again Matt. 

The Army is Progressive When the Country is Divided

When I enlisted in 1972, racial integration was a fact in the American Army, but was an on-going mess outside the gates of every base. At that time, the very few women in the military were very separate and no one could be openly Gay, but the Army was ahead of the civilian world in racial integration.

Part of the success of integration in the Army was shared suffering.  Everyone in Basic Training of whatever background had a common enemy in the Drill Sergeant. After Basic, soldiers of every color had a real enemy in Vietnam. Rifle squads live by trusting each other.

During my first enlistment between 1972 and 1984, I lived in an Army that changed from a draft to a volunteer Army.  By 1977, one of the Volunteer Army infantry battalions in the armored brigade I served in was majority minority--Blacks and Hispanics were almost 70 percent of the soldiers in the unit.

By the way, in the 70s the ranks of Black Drill Sergeants grew rapidly. It was still difficult for minority soldiers to achieve officer ranks, but Drill Sergeant was open to every career sergeant who mastered all the essential soldier skills. And that meant soldiers of every background were taking orders from a Black man from the first day of their service.

When the Army became "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" in the 90s, it was far ahead of a culture in which old people (voters) were against Gay Rights and young people (non-voters) were mostly in favor of Gay Rights.

The Iraq War saw the integration of women in the Army in a way they never had been before and later Gay soldiers were allowed to serve openly.  Last year Transgender soldiers joined the ranks. The President is issuing orders to ban Transgender soldiers, but he is fighting a trend that toward inclusion that is more than a half century old and will continue.

The military squeezes people into tanks, destroyers, Humvees, submarines, aircraft and holes in the ground. In those confined spaces, they learn to survive and thrive.

I wish there was a civilian equivalent of a bunker or a Stryker vehicle. We would have better world.

GRUNT by Mary Roach--Funny, Brilliant Book on Military Technology

I reviewed this delightful book for Distillations magazine. Here is the text:

Mary Roach. Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War. W. W. Norton, 2016. 288 pp. $27.

Mary Roach had me in the palm of her hand from the opening sentences of Grunt, her latest look at science’s stranger endeavors:

The chicken gun has a sixty-foot barrel, putting it solidly in the class of an artillery piece. While a four-pound chicken hurtling in excess of 400 miles per hour is a lethal projectile, the intent is not to kill. On the contrary, the chicken gun is designed to keep people alive.

Roach loves detail and understands technology. These chickens are fired at military aircraft as “stunt doubles” for all the birds—ducks, pigeons, geese, gulls—that collide with jets. But chickens are denser than ducks and geese, so their carcasses slam into engines and canopies with different effect. “Nonetheless,” writes Roach, “the chicken was the standard ‘material’ approved by the U.S. Department of Defense for testing jet canopy windows. Not only are chickens easier to obtain and standardize, but they serve as a sort of worst-case scenario.”

Despite the almost cartoonish vision of a gun designed to shoot chickens, Roach’s opening—and the rest of Grunt—is about the work of researchers who find ways to keep soldiers alive and healthy through the many hazards of war and military life in general.

Almost 20 years of the past 44 years of my life have been spent in the U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force, and Army National Guard. In the 1970s I served in the United States and West Germany, then switched to the reserves. I left the military in 1984 only to re-enlist in 2007. I had one tour in Iraq and finally retired in 2015. After reading Roach’s rollicking review of sweat, diarrhea, hearing loss, penis repair and potential replacement, maggot medicine, and much more, I felt almost glad about my retirement. But her book did lead me to recall my time in Iraq and to think about what my fellow soldiers and I really worried about.

When I deployed in 2009, the army issued me four full duffel bags of gear. Some of it was important: the uniforms, boots, socks, and underwear that were my daily companions. Some of it was crazy. We all got cold-weather gear good to −60°F. I left that gear in my locker in Pennsylvania, where it stayed until I was discharged.

Of all the things I carried, what did I have with me on every flight and every mission? Joining my helmet, rifle, ammo, Kevlar body armor, and other requirements was an empty Gatorade bottle stashed in the right cargo pocket of my uniform. Many of my fellow soldiers carried a Gatorade bottle so they would have someplace to spit tobacco. I carried that bottle because a 56-year-old man in a Black Hawk helicopter might not make it to the next landing zone before needing to recycle his last cup of coffee. In the army a single mistake can follow a soldier through an entire career, and I did not want to be known as the old sergeant who pissed himself.

Roach devotes a whole chapter, “Leaky SEALS,” to the body’s exit ramps, though she focuses on diarrhea. She turns to Mark Riddle, who runs an army clinic devoted to the study of the subject, and in her delightful, snarky way quotes Riddle on his work as saying, “I live and breathe this stuff.”

In past centuries the statistics on diarrhea among soldiers were grim. Roach tells us that 95,000 soldiers died from diarrhea or dysentery during the American Civil War and quotes William “Father of Modern Medicine” Osler as saying, “Dysentery ‘has been more fatal to soldiers than powder and shot.’ ” Modern medicine has made diarrhea far less fatal, but a soldier with a failed digestive system is out of the fight and in the latrine. According to Roach, 54% of American combatants in Afghanistan and 77% in Iraq came down with diarrhea, with 40% of the cases serious enough to require medical help. Soldiers may not die from it these days, but I have heard them mutter “just shoot me” while curled into a fetal position in between sprints to the latrine.

While fear of intestinal disease varies among soldiers, a different type of fear trumps all others. But first a word about war movies and videos: if you want to give a soldier a reason to laugh, just give him or her a war movie. The great exception to that rule is the HBO series Band of Brothers, which I never heard a soldier criticize. Why’s that? In episode three there is a moment that perfectly illustrates the greatest fear every male soldier brings to war.

In the scene, First Sergeant Carwood Lipton is in a street directing his men. An explosion blows him back against a wall. He collapses. Another sergeant, Talbert, runs to Lipton and binds his injured arm. Then Talbert’s eyes follow Lipton’s down to the injured man’s crotch, which is bloody and getting worse. Talbert rips open Lipton’s pants and looks inside. “You’re OK, Lip. Everything’s right where it should be.” Lipton nods, relieved and grateful. The shrapnel that cut through his thigh and caused the bleeding is insignificant in comparison.

I remember many scenes from Band of Brothers, but few of them are clearer in my mind than the look on Lipton’s face before and after Talbert finds everything in place.

Roach followed a real soldier who was not so lucky and required several reconstructive surgeries; the book describes in detail how skin is removed from inside the cheek to rebuild the urethra. Skin tissue in the mouth has no hair and is tolerant of pee, she tells us. But the relatively small number of soldiers with this type of injury meant the military pushed such surgeries down the priority list: there were 18,000 amputations of limbs during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq versus 300 soldiers in need of reconstructive surgery “for their junk.” Despite the small number of affected soldiers, the psychological impact was huge: men who could adapt to the loss of both legs or both arms were devastated at the prospect of living their lives without their “short arm.” Army doctors had to be convinced that this surgery was vital to the well-being of soldiers, even if the numbers needing it were low.

For those soldiers too mutilated for reconstructive surgery, Roach introduces the prospect of transplants. Such transplants do not yet exist, but even the possibility of this radical surgery may brighten the future for the affected soldiers. As of 2015 Roach had found a French surgeon with one partial success and several failures. (As for women, given the way female anatomy is arranged, any significant damage to reproductive organs likely involves a fatal injury.)

In addition to pee, poop, and penises Roach introduces the reader to the latest research on, among other things, the use of horrible smells as weapons (a failed experiment Roach has fun reporting on) and sweat and heat injuries. In the desert it’s common for soldiers to wear more than 60 pounds of gear in 120°F heat; without frequent hydration soldiers can develop heat stroke, which the military now goes to great lengths to avoid. (In the past this problem wasn’t taken seriously.) While I was in Iraq, there were pallets of water bottles all around my air base, and sergeants constantly asked their soldiers when they last drank.

DM rev Grunt vr.jpg

U.S. Army soldiers training with a virtual-reality simulator in Grafenwöhr, Germany, December 2013. 

U.S. Army photo by Markus Rauchenberger

Many of the topics Roach covers, including roadside bombs, hearing loss, digestive failure, and the fear of being shot below the belt, are part of my lived and shared experiences in the army. Her discussions of the sea (and sharks) resonate less with me, though the chapter on submarines and sleep deprivation captures the corrosive culture of pride that both fuels much of the military and is one of its greatest threats. I have former “Nuke Boat” sailor friends who wore their sleep deprivation as a badge of honor. Yet, as Roach points out, sleep deprivation correlates with a decrease in mental ability. These confident, sleep-deprived sailors get progressively more error prone as the hours tick on. On a positive note I was surprised to find that the navy took sleep research seriously enough to make changes that address the problem. I can’t imagine the army doing the same thing.

Grunt is both entertaining and informative in the best tradition of science writing, and its author is well versed in the fine art of footnotes. Throughout the text she races from erudite explanations of how bacteria explode intestinal cells to what she learned by attending a bowling party for amputees. These relevant but parenthetical facts are kept on the page rather than hidden away in endnotes. In a chapter on foul smells Roach footnotes the difficulties of creating an odor that is universally sensed as vomit. International Flavors and Fragrances was asked to design such a smell and eventually gave up. The initial request came from a diet company that wanted to make certain foods repellent to dieters. The military investigated vomit and other smells as weapons to keep enemy soldiers away from certain areas. But, as Roach explains, few smells are universally repellent: some small percentage of people like what most people sense as the smell of vomit. Go figure.

In her introduction Roach writes, “Heroism doesn’t always happen in a burst of glory. Sometimes small triumphs and large hearts change the course of history. Sometimes a chicken can save a man’s life.” This sentence is not a bad summary of the book. Roach tells us about the strange work of those who try to keep soldiers alive in a profession that routinely puts them in the way of death. In telling that story she offers many smiles and, in my case, some real laughs.

Ten Years Ago I Re-Enlisted at 54

Ten years ago this week I raised my right hand in front of the flag in the lobby of the Aviation Armory at Fort Indiantown Gap, Pa. and re-enlisted. I left the Army Reserve in June of 1984 and spent the intervening 23 years as a bearded civilian.

On the day, if I remember correctly, the officer administering the oath was Frank Tedeschi, an Apache Longbow pilot. Other witnesses were Chad Hummel, who was the Training NCO for the unit I was joining, and Miguel Ramirez, an admin NCO who was one of my roommates during pre-deployment training.

My wife, Annalisa, and my son, Nigel, were also there.  I had put off the enlistment day until two weeks after I got the neck brace off from the crash in May that left me with a smashed C7 and nine other broken bones.  Everything healed up and I was ready to be a soldier again.

As soon as I could, I called my friend from the 70s Army, Abel Lopez, and told him I actually did it. I re-enlisted. I was back in starting again as an enlisted man, a Specialist.  I also pointed out that General David Petraeus and I started our Army careers the same year and both of us were still serving. He said, "You and him are a lot alike Gussman, except he's a Four Star General and you're a Spec 4." Once an old friend made funny of me, I knew I was really back in. As it turned out, Petraeus did not stay in as long as I did.

From Trying to Convert Each Other to Wedding Invitation

In 1979 I lived in the military housing area in the Wiesbaden Military Community. One day, a Jehovah's Witness came to my door. Back then, military housing was open and Germans came into the housing area for many reasons. The top reason was dumpster diving. The Germans thought (they were right) Americans threw away perfectly good stuff!

And then there was Martin. He was an earnest, committed Jehovah's Witness. He spoke four languages and wanted to convert Americans to his faith.  Martin was in his late 20s, tall, thin and very serious. He had thinning hair which he wore short, but not military buzz cut short. He looked straight into your eyes with his ice blue eyes and radiated sincerity.

When Martin came to my door, he started with his practiced presentation then went off script when he found I had actually read the Bible through in two translations. He was even more delighted when he found out I was taking a correspondence course in New Testament Greek. Martin was studying Greek. After 90 minutes of talking about how best to parse irregular Greek verbs Martin said he had to go, but said he would be back the next week. We set a time to meet and he was off to tell the rest of the housing area about his faith.

Martin came back the next week and every week I was in town for several months until I went home at the end of my enlistment. Martin was getting married the month after my discharge. He invited me to the wedding. I was sad that I could not attend. We continued to disagree about matters of doctrine until the last time we met, but at the same time thought that there was no way to be serious about reading the Bible and read it in translation.

At the same time I was studying Greek with Martin, I was visiting my friend Cliff every week in Darmstadt where he was a novice in the Franciscan Brotherhood at Canaan. Cliff left the American military on May 2 of 1979 and started on the road to becoming Bruder Timotheus, which he is now at Canaan.

While I was in the Cold War Army, I met many people who were serious about their faith. When I re-enlisted in 2007, I expected to find the same kind of people, but the world and the Army had changed a lot between the 70s and the Iraq War.  The "Whatever" culture affects everything. In the 1970s, there was a guy in our unit who could have been "Bible" from the movie "Fury." I never met that guy in Iraq.