The Summer of Love, part two

Trafalgar Square, July 1967 (Don Dale photo)

Breakfast the next morning bowled me over. I described it in the letter about my London trip to my parents.

"Breakfast was served family style at the Victoria Hotel by the proprietor's wife, who looked like Fanny Brice. I had mush (oatmeal), biscuits with fresh apricot preserves, fried eggs, bacon, sausages, toast, coffee, fruit juice and sliced tomatoes. It was quite a meal."

I had spent the night in a few small hotels in Germany on weekend trips. Breakfast was much simpler: cold cuts, coffee, hard rolls and perhaps a boiled egg. But the English really knew how to serve breakfast right.

Thus fortified, I was off to see more of London. I took the Tube to Russell Square, where I caught a bus for a half-day tour of the city. It cost a pound ($2.80 in US dollars). It was mostly a drive-by tour, but that's okay. I have made sure ever since to first take the drive-by tour in a strange city. It gives you a look at places you might want to come back to. We saw Trafalgar Square, the Houses of Parliament (where we stopped for a guided tour), Big Ben, the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey and Buckingham Palace (where we stopped to see the changing of the guard).

The bus dropped us back at Russell Square, and I immediately took the Tube to Westminster Abbey for a closer look. The exterior was, in 1967, badly in need of cleaning -- stained with city grime and pigeon droppings. But inside -- awesome! I stopped to look at the elaborate sculptures, tombs and memorials honoring some of the great names in English history -- Darwin, Burns, Gladstone, Churchill, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Dickens, Keats, Kipling, Milton, Shelley and Wordsworth.

I learned that the abbey itself has roots going back more than 1,000 years. Monks worshipped at the site in the 10th century. It has been the coronation church since 1066. Seventeen English monarchs are buried there. I wrote to my parents that it was "chock full of English history inside, and you could sort of feel it, really."

After shooting a couple of rolls of film, I walked to Trafalgar Square. It's huge, with each of its four sides the length of a football field. It's named for the 1805 Battle of Trafalgar, and at the center on a 185-foot column is a statue of Horatio Nelson, the admiral who commanded the British Fleet at Trafalgar. I was told that the square is the fourth most visited tourist attraction on earth.

I was blown away. "There must have been 500 people there," I wrote to my parents. "Most were young, and they were sitting on the lions, the base of the column, the sides of the pools, the railings, the benches, the pavement . . . everywhere.

"I would sit somewhere for 10 minutes, and at least three people would stop to chat. I talked to people from Austria, Germany, the States, England, Ireland, Wales, New Zealand, Australia and Hong Kong. We talked about where we came from, why we were in London, and what life is all about. We argued politely about Vietnam, the draft, and the virtues and drawbacks of carrying a camera on vacation."

It was dark by the time I made my way to dinner, where I encountered another difference in customs at a restaurant near Leicester Square. I was alone. The place was crowded. So I was seated at a table with two young Australian women. After about five minutes of ignoring each other, Celia and Kimmie and I started to chat. After dinner, they were going to Regent's Park to see a play. We had gotten on so well that they invited me to tag along. I saw "Cyrano de Bergerac," memorable for its outdoor setting and spectacular lighting.

I was two days into my first trip to London, and I was bubbling over with excitement. On the way back to my hotel, I stopped by Trafalgar Square one more time. It was still crowded, even at midnight.

The Summer of Love, part one

The Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace, July 1967 (Don Dale photo)

The longest letter I ever wrote home from Bitburg was eight single-spaced typewritten pages. It was dated 25 July 1967 -- the military style was creeping into my personal correspondence -- and I have it in front of me as I write this. My mother kept very few of my letters from Bitburg (and I kept none of hers to me), but she saved this one. I found it among her papers after she died.

I wrote the extraordinarily long letter just after I returned from a five-day leave in London. I had always wanted to see London. It was impossible to grow up in Richmond and not be somewhat influenced by England. So much of Richmond's architecture, taste, and history is tangled up with and still influenced by England, from Jamestown to today. Plus, I had studied English literature at the University of Richmond.

London was my first European venture outside the Eifel. It didn't start well. I had planned to take the free military bus from Bitburg to Rhein-Main AFB in Frankfurt. There I planned to snag a free space-available seat on a military hop to a U.S. air base in England. From there, I'd change out of my uniform and into civilian clothes and buy a train ticket to London. I had no idea where I'd stay in London, but I had a copy of "Europe on $5 a Day" -- yes, that was possible in 1967.

But the bus to Rhein-Main was full of people with military orders, and all I had was leave papers, so I couldn't get on. I was still determined to go to London, so I went back to the barracks and woke up my friend Glenn Thomas, who had been at Bitburg for about two years. He called his friend Helga, a civilian who worked in the base ops office, and she gave him directions on taking the train from Bitburg to Trier, then from Trier to Frankfurt. She also checked to see what military flights were scheduled from Rhein-Main to England. She thought I might be able to get a hop to RAF Alconbury, a British base about 60 miles from London.

I made it to Rhein-Main AB that evening after spending most of the day on trains. I checked in at the base transient billets, hoping to spend the night. My plane was to leave at 8 the next morning. The transient billets were full for the night. I tried the passenger hotel (where I'd have had to pay to spend the night), but it was full, too. So I spent the night trying to sleep in a chair in the transient lounge.

At 6 the next morning I checked in with base ops, signed the manifest for the flight to Alconbury, and by 8 a.m. we were airborne. "We . . . ha!," I wrote to my parents later. "There was me, a tech sergeant, an airman 1st class and a colonel, on board a C-118 with seats for at least 30. We rattled around quite comfortably."

From Alconbury I took a train to King's Cross Station in London, where I had my first experience with London's Tube. (Don't call it a subway, my guidebook said, because Londoners use subway as the word for an underground passageway to the other side of the street.) I thought then -- and still do today -- that London's Tube is a marvel of sensible, convenient transportation.

By 3 p.m. I had checked in to the Victoria Hotel near Victoria Station. I'd found it using "Europe on $5 a Day." I paid for three nights at 30 shillings a night (a shilling was equivalent then to about 14 cents). I had a clean, neat room very near a Tube station. The room had a sink, a mirror, a bed, a wardrobe and a dresser. The bathroom was down the hall, and you had to feed coins into a meter to get hot water for the bathtub. More important, the room rate included a full English breakfast.

I had left Bitburg the morning before and hadn't really slept overnight in the Frankfurt lounge, so the first thing I did was take a nap. By 7 p.m. I was up again and eager to explore. I took the Tube to Piccadilly Circus, where I strolled the brightly lit streets and enjoyed the sights, while appreciating the experience of being with real civilians.

Back in the States, the summer of 1967 was known as the Summer of Love, and much of that same culture permeated London that summer. Keep in mind that I'd had little contact with civilian life for a full year. Remember too that in those days, as the standard joke went, stewardesses told incoming passengers, "We are now arriving at Byrd Airport in Richmond, so please set your watches back 100 years." In short, I grew up in a city that still reveled in the 19th century. And I was naïve and untravelled.

Piccadilly Circus was almost overwhelming. I dodged traffic to the circle in the center where the statue of "Winged Christian Charity" stands. Sitting on the steps at the base were the first real hippies I ever saw. Later I described them in my letter home as young, wearing sandals, jeans and T-shirts, with long hair. The ones I met had a thirst for conversation and a longing for new experiences. "They don't do anything," I wrote my parents. "They just sit and watch people and observe life."

I stayed until about midnight, with a break only for dinner at a nearby Italian restaurant (recommended in my guidebook). "The hippies were the neatest thing I was to see during the whole trip," I wrote.

Actually they weren't. But the whole idea of them made a powerful impression on a callow youth from Richmond who'd been around almost nobody but GIs for a year.

A window on the Eifel

Neither of my two roommates in the hospital barracks knew anything about farming. But we had an ever-changing view of one little plot of Eifel agriculture right outside the window of our barracks. Across the street in front of the barracks was the Bitburg Air Base hospital and the front gate to the base. Right behind the barracks was a working German farm.

I sent this picture home to my mom, who spent her early years on a Virginia farm. I was hoping that she would be able to identify the crop that was just emerging in the spring of 1967. She said it was too early, but she suspected it could be either soybeans or some sort of grain. If I'm remembering correctly, it turned out to be soybeans.

Living in Bitburg was my first experience with living in a truly rural area. The Eifel Mountains are much like the Blue Ridge Mountains -- old, worn and gentle for the most part. There was no autobahn nearby. The roads were narrow and winding and took advantage of the slopes and valleys rather than trying to conquer them.

Unlike here in the States, farmers didn't live on their farms. In the Eifel and other rural parts of Germany, they lived in small villages and farmed on the outskirts . Mötsch, not more than a mile from the front gate of the base, was about as small as a village could be. There was one restaurant, a gas station and a cluster of small homes. Beside each simple home, inevitably, an aged farm tractor was parked next to a compost pit. It was not at all uncommon to see an entire family piled on board a tractor headed off for church on a Sunday morning. The kids would be perched on the fenders.

The GIs called those tractors "Eifel Cadillacs."

Giving thanks

There are so many things to be thankful for on this Thanksgiving Day 2009. High at the top of the list for me is family.

There are four generations in the picture above. Second from the left in the back, wearing glasses, is Louise Massie. Her great granddaughter, Rowan Miller, is the barefoot little girl on the far right. Louise's daughter Becky, wearing black in the left center, is married to my nephew, Mike, in the white shirt and glasses. Mike and Becky's daughter, Jenny, is on the left, with her arm around Carlos, the little guy who is my niece Terry Cavet's son.

That's Terry, the third from the left, and that's her husband, James, holding Milagros, the little girl in blue who has her head turned away from the camera. And I'm the one in the green sweater, standing next to Nate Miller, who is holding Rowan. Rowan is my great great niece.

Four generations of us gathered today at Terry and James's house for Thanksgiving dinner. After a sumptuous meal, I can say without reservation that there's still no shortage of excellent cooks in the family.

Also joining us were Leslie Calambro and her husband, Al, who live across the street from Terry and James. Leslie, Terry and Mike have known each other since they started school. Al took this picture, while Leslie stood behind the camera trying to get the little ones to pay attention.

Terry and James and Mike and Becky have taken good care of me since my mom died by making sure that I know I have family to be with, not just for holiday dinners, but all year long. And for that and many other things, I am truly grateful this holiday season.

Under the clock

I'm going to digress a bit this fine Thanksgiving morning to say . . .
I miss Miller & Rhoads.

Like so many Richmonders of a certain age, I miss the style that Miller & Rhoads represented. I miss the carriage-trade elegance and the level of service. Most of all I miss the chocolate silk pies.

But there was another Miller & Rhoads for my family. That was the department store where my mom worked, and where I (briefly) worked. That was the Miller & Rhoads that gave me a scholarship to help pay my first semester's tuition at the University of Richmond.

I must have been about 11 when my mother decided to look for a job. It was the 1950s. We were about to move into a new and larger house, and she wanted money to furnish it. Her first thought was to learn how to type. My father bought her a second-hand Underwood typewriter and a typing stand. They cleared a corner of the dining room. My mom bought an instruction manual and set to work.

As she progressed slowly with her lessons, she heard about a sales opening at Miller & Rhoads. One morning while my sister and I were at school, she dressed up, rode the bus downtown, and applied. She got the job -- and stayed there until she retired at the age of 67.

She worked for many years selling linens in the basement. Then she moved to women's sportswear. She became a fixture over the years and developed a strong customer list. She knew what her customers wanted, and she would often call them in the morning to describe something special or something on sale. The customers would place orders, and Miller & Rhoads would deliver it to their doorsteps that afternoon.

Everybody shopped at Miller & Rhoads, and family and friends would always make it a point to spend a few minutes chatting with my mother before heading off to more shopping or to lunch in the Coffee Shop or the Tea Room. My niece Terry remembers well that she and her mother or grandmother would always make it a point to see my mom when they shopped downtown. As a result of her job at a store where everybody shopped sooner or later my mom became the most "connected" member of the family.

One of my first jobs was as a Miller & Rhoads stock clerk for the July White Sale in the better linens department up on the third floor (or maybe it was the fourth). My summer was spent keeping the shelves stocked just so. The woman who ran the department was meticulous and demanding. This was, after all, Miller & Rhoads.

My second job at Miller & Rhoads was as a part-time salesman in the men's furnishings department during my freshman year in college. On Friday nights and Saturdays, I sold ties, underwear, handkerchiefs, cuff links, sweaters and other accessories. The head saleswoman, a Mrs. Jackson, was also meticulous and demanding. Men's furnishing was on the first floor, and Mrs. Jackson was determined that it would remain a Miller & Rhoads showcase.

Because of our family's close ties to Miller & Rhoads, I thought of the store and the people my mother and I worked with almost as family. It was that kind of place.

Sadly, like so many inner-city department stores, Miller & Rhoads went out of business in 1990 after more than a century as a Richmond institution.

So many of these memories came flooding back this week when I happened across "Under the Clock: The Story of Miller & Rhoads" at the library. It's not a long book -- only 126 pages, many of which are taken up by marvelous photographs -- but it's a great story if you remember Miller & Rhoads in its heyday. It's available through History Press.

It was a kick for me to see the names of the co-authors on the cover of this gem of a book: Earle Dunford and George Bryson. Earle Dunford, the retired city editor at the Times-Dispatch, and George Bryson, who went to work at Miller & Rhoads in 1950 and made it to vice-president for public relations at the store before he "retired" in 1989.

I knew both of them. I took a class from Earle Dunford when I was at UR, where he was an adjunct instructor in journalism for 20 years. And for 16 years, I worked with George Bryson at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, where he landed after the store closed. Earle Dunford taught me real-world journalism. He was a critical but excellent teacher. George Bryson was a valuable colleague at VMFA. He had known my mother for many years at Miller & Rhoads, and at least once a week he'd ask me how she was doing. When I would tell her George had asked after her, she was always so pleased that he remembered.

By the way, the recipes for two of my Miller & Rhoads favorites are in the book: for the chocolate silk pie that was sold in the bakery and for the Missouri club sandwich that was so popular in the Tea Room.

Springtime in the Eifel

(Don Dale photo, 1967)

Earlier I showed you the view out of my barracks room window in the dark of winter. Here's what it looked like in the spring of 1967. The farmer's field has been plowed, and after the short days of winter the longer daylight hours of spring seemed to cheer us all up. (In the winter, the sun didn't rise until about 8 a.m. and dusk was at 4:30. By the height of summer, daylight would last until past 9 p.m.)

I didn't grow up on a farm, but my mother did. I was curious about what the farmer would be planting, so I asked her in one of my letters home what kinds of crops she might expect in Bitburg's climate. My mother wrote back and told me that I could always take a picture of the crop as it emerged and send it to her: she'd be able to identify it.

I began by taking this picture to show her what the field looked like just after it had been plowed. The rainbow was a serendipitous element.

Antiwar lyricism

(Photo by Don Dale, 1967)

I passed this school and its playground every time I drove to Luxembourg, only about 30 minutes from Bitburg. We were usually on our way to an outdoor café in the small town of Echternacherbrück, just across the border on the other side of the Sauer River. The menu -- in French, German, English and the incomprehensible local language, Lëtzebuergesch -- included the usual regional wursts (sausages), kraut and black bread - but most important, Russiche Eire (Russian eggs) and draft beer.

Russiche Eire are sort of like deviled eggs, but not really. The filling in the version served at the Echternacherbrück café included finely chopped carrots, celery and tiny green peas. The eggs were served on a lettuce leaf and with caviar on top. The beer was Luxembourg's own Henri Funck (pronounced Ahn-REE FOONK). Once or twice a month, on a summer's evening, we'd while away an hour or two stuffing ourselves with eggs and enjoying the beer with the funny name.

The antiwar movement that was raging back in the States in the late 1960s had its sympathizers in Europe, although I never personally experienced any anti-American attitudes -- whether I was in or out of uniform. But every time I drove by the school you see above, with its hand-painted political statement in big white letters, I was struck by how much more lyrical it sounded in French.

The siren's call

Oberwesel is a town on the most scenic stretch of the Rhine River in Germany. (Don Dale photo, 1967)

The Rhine River -- which flows north from Switzerland to the Netherlands -- has been a major cultural, political and economic force in Europe throughout history. The most scenic part of the Rhine is the stretch in Germany between Bingen and Koblenz. One of the ancient myths of this part of the river is that of Lorelei, a beautiful young maiden who committed suicide because of an unfaithful lover. She jumped from a steep rock into the Rhine and drowned. Legend holds that she was transformed into a siren, luring men on ships to their death with her call.

Lorelei's name is from an German word for "murmuring" and a Celtic word for "rock." The water itself creates a whispering sound around the rock that combines with a natural echo, and if you want to hear Lorelei's siren call, you can almost make yourself believe you can.

One Sunday afternoon, four of us medics took a cruise along this beautiful stretch of the Rhine. (This is known, in German, as a Rheinfahrt, combining the words for the river and "journey." Yes, we young airmen had great fun with this word.)

One of our stops was the small town of Oberwesel, which has both a Celtic and a Roman past. Oberwesel's castle (on the hill in the distance in the photo above) dates back at least to the 12th century. They've been growing grapes on the hillsides here for centuries.

It's difficult for Americans, who can drive for thousands of miles and still be in America, to realize how small European countries are by comparison. From Bitburg, we could hop in my VW and be cruising the Rhine in an hour. And the journey was cheap. We paid 14 cents a gallon for gasoline at the Air Force service station just a block from the hospital. The cost of the afternoon's cruise on the Rhine might have been 20 deutsche marks (about $5). And the beer we enjoyed while the scenery rolled by was about 25 cents a glass.

What impressed us most, I think, is the important role the river plays in European transportation. We passed barge after barge carrying everything from consumer goods to industrial supplies. In the Middle Ages, the feudal lords of the Rhine's castles controlled passage on the river, sometimes employing great chain barriers at strategic points. Every vessel that passed had to pay a toll. Today, the vessels pay taxes but they enjoy free passage.

Around every bend of the river, there's another castle high on a hilltop. Along this narrow gorge between Bingen and Koblenz, there are more castles than in any other river valley in the world.

All in all, I'd have to say it was a gute Fahrt.

Life in the OR

Life in the OR at Bitburg saw routine days, with appendectomies, D&Cs and hernia repairs, as well as the unexpected emergencies. I took the picture you see above on my day off, when our ophthalmologist allowed me to scrub and mask and bring my Pentax Spotmatic camera into the OR. He's performing strabismus surgery to correct a little girl's crossed eyes. It was an elective procedure, and it was an operation I'd never seen before. The delicacy with which he worked was impressive.

The emergency surgeries were often far less delicate. Young GIs and dependent children can get themselves into a lot of serious trouble.

We spent an afternoon sewing up a couple of dependent teenagers who had been exploring an old German bunker from World War II. Inside, they found unexploded shells, and they picked up one of them and tossed it to see what would happen. Their toss wasn't far enough, and they were badly injured when it exploded.

On another occasion, a flight-line mechanic somehow over-inflated a tire for an F-4 Phantom fighter jet. When the tire exploded and the rim blew off, it sliced off much of his left butt cheek. We spent most of a night in the OR stabilizing him so that he could be medevaced to the States the next day.

Americans weren't the only troops we worked on. There was a small French casserne less than a mile away, and British forces were also in our vicinity. During a British forces exercise one fine spring evening, a helicopter with a half-dozen troops on board hit a power line and crashed. Two of the survivors came to us, one with a subdural hematoma. We had no neurosurgeon on staff, so the emergency fell to one of our general surgeons. It was the first and only time I ever scrubbed for cranial surgery.

I suppose what gave me the most to think about was when we were prepping the patient. "Shave his head, and save his hair in a paper bag," the OR's chief nurse told me. "Why are we saving the hair?" I asked. "Because if he dies, the undertaker will need it," she said.

The surgeon, after consulting with a neurosurgeon at Wiesbaden Air Base (a large American base about 90 miles away), used a hand-drill to make a hole in the patient's head to relieve the pressure. Blood poured out. The surgeon put the plug back in his skull and the patient survived -- at least long enough to be airlifted back to home. I don't know what the ultimate outcome was.

One of the oddest -- and somehow saddest -- cases I ever scrubbed on involved three airmen who had been part of a detail using a front-loader to clean brush from the base perimeter near the flight line. At the end of the day, three of them decided to ride back to the storage shed in the front-loader's bucket, their legs dangling over the cutting edge. The front-loader hit a rut, tipped forward, and crushed their legs. One suffered major bruising. Another broke both of his legs. The third came into the OR with one leg dangling by its tendons below the knee. The other leg was badly crushed. We amputated the first leg and spent hours trying to stabilize and pin the other leg. He was only 19 years old.

I learned something important about myself from these unusual cases: I was in no danger of freaking out in the OR. We were focused completely on doing the job we had to do. There was no time for introspection or philosophical thoughts. It was all about saving lives.

My fellow medics and I could get into some crazy stuff in our off-duty lives. But in the OR, it was all business. I never worked for a surgeon who lost his temper or threw instruments. I saw OR medics who did more than I ever imagined they could do -- and perhaps more than they ever imagined they could do.

Mostly, what I did was suck up new knowledge and experiences like a sponge. I gave some serious thought to using the GI Bill to go to medical school after my tour of duty was up. If it hadn't been for my commitment to journalism, I might have done just that. It was a close call.

Gladiators and tigers and bears

A friend and I explored the Roman Amphitheater in Trier one afternoon. That's him in the picture above. I can't recall his name, but he was a cook in the hospital chow hall.

The amphitheater dates back to the 1st century A.D. Until the end of the Roman Empire in the 5th century, it was home to man-vs.-man, man-vs.-animal, and animal-vs.-animal combat -- to the death.

It wasn't easy to find information about this or any of Trier's other Roman ruins. The tourist office, such as it was, had visibility issues. If you wanted to visit a site then, you were pretty much on your own -- none of today's maps or brochures, information panels or signs, or tour-guides waving furled umbrellas. But we found out what we could, picked up some take-out lunch at the local Schnellimbiss (sort of a snack bar), and spent three or four hours at the amphitheater.

We explored the entire structure, from the uppermost level down to the arena and into the vast basement beneath, where gladiators, criminals, and exotic animals were stashed before combat. Seated above would have been as many as 25,000 bloodthirsty spectators.

After examining everything there was to see, we sat and thought about where we were. Right there, at that spot, had been real-life barbarity we could hardly imagine. And it was viewed as entertainment.

Germany's oldest city

It was near dusk when I took this shot of a portion of the city of Trier from atop the Porta Nigra, the Black Gate. The Porta Nigra was the oldest structure I had ever seen. (Don Dale photo, 1967) Click here for a picture of the Porta Nigra itself.

When I looked up my European destination back at the Gunter AFB library, I found little more than the bare essentials -- a map with a dot marked "Bitburg" and a few facts, such as the population (about 8,000) and its location near the borders of Luxembourg, Belgium and France.

If I'd looked about 30 miles south of Bitburg, I'd have seen Trier. (It's pronounced as one syllable, "Treer"). On the other hand, the name wouldn't have meant anything to me at the time.

But once I bought my Beetle, I began to explore the countryside. A fellow medic who had been in Germany longer than I had told me that the oldest city in Germany was about a half-hour away. Trier became one of my favorite destinations.

Nestled alongside the Mosel River, where some of the finest German wines are produced as they have been for centuries, Trier traces its history from pre-Christian times. It was founded 16 years before the birth of Christ and is the oldest seat of a Christian bishop north of the Alps.

The Romans played a big part in Trier's story from the beginning, and the city claimed it was the northernmost outpost of the empire. Remnants visible today include an amphitheater complete with underground rooms for athletes and animals and a large, stone city gate known as the Porta Nigra (or Black Gate). You can still see the ruins of three Roman baths and the basilica, originally a 220-foot-long throne hall for the Roman Emperor Constantine. (Now it's a Protestant church.)

The first church on the site of Trier's cathedral was built by the Romans, and it is home to what some believe is the Holy Tunic, the robe Jesus was wearing when he died. To get into the city from the direction of Bitburg, one can still drive across the Roman Bridge, built in the 2nd century.

The Romans abandoned the city in 395. In 459, the Franks took control. In 870 it became part of what developed into the Holy Roman Empire. In the 1600s and 1700s, Trier was repeatedly invaded by France, which finally took control in 1794. Twenty years later, after the Napoleonic Wars, control passed to the Kingdom of Prussia. Karl Marx was born in Trier in 1818. The city became part of the German Empire in 1871. During World War II, it was heavily bombed by the Allies.

Twenty-two years after the war, I crossed the Roman Bridge for the first time.

With six or seven times the population of Bitburg, Trier was a sightseers delight. On many a weekend, I'd grab a friend and head for the city. We could get by with English near the base, but in Trier, my new skills in German were necessary. I made a lot of mistakes, but the secret seemed to be just giving it a shot. I'm sure I must have sounded like an idiot, but when I used my pitiful German, people tried to help, smiled a lot, and were encouraging. The more I used it, the more my German improved.

I remember the first time I climbed to the top of the Porta Nigra, which stood four stories tall, and realized that I was walking on stone that had been laid 1,700 years before. I was standing in a place that had existed 1,200 years before Columbus set sail. I was quite literally filled with awe.

In 1967, anybody could climb the Porta Nigra, walk through the amphitheater and stroll through the ruins of the baths at any time of the day or night. Today they're all tourist attractions, and you have to pay to gain access. Tour guides are available, and hours are restricted. There's even a tourist center at the Porta Nigra. None of that had been developed when I was first there. We could tour what we wanted to, whenever we wanted to, but we were on our own.

Unlike Bitburg, which had rebuilt its post-war economy around the base, Trier had not been "Americanized" in the least. But the bars, the restaurants and the shopping were much more sophisticated. One of my early visits was to the Kaufhof, a large department store, where I purchased perfume (Jalique) to send home to my sister and after-shave (Tabac) for me. (I still wear Tabac. I used to have to stock up on return trips to Germany, but now I can order it online.)

Today, Trier has completely capitalized on its value as a tourist attraction, in the process losing some of its authenticity to my way of thinking. Traffic has been banned in the center city, which is a good thing. But kitsch, alas, is plentiful, and in the summertime, tourists crowd the streets. Nevertheless, it's still a great city to visit.

My first visit to a beer-hall was in Trier. I'm talking about a huge, crowded basement room, with plank tables, a raucous oom-pah band, waitresses in dirndls and waiters in lederhosen -- all wearing Bavarian-style green felt hats with feathers in them. The crowd was tipsy and happy, singing along loudly and enthusiastically with the band. We ordered "what they're having," pointing to the plates of the people seated next to us. We ate sauerkraut, boiled potatoes, roasted chicken, pommes frites with honey, and meaty joints of ham -- and beer, stein after stein of Pilsner on draft.

As we made our way back to my VW, I remember thinking, "Now I've seen the real Germany." I hadn't seen much of it yet, of course. But I had three more years to explore and enjoy before I came back home to Richmond.

Freedom to roam

That's my roommate Doug, who worked in the emergency room, standing next to my first major purchase at Bitburg. The VW still has temporary USA plates on it. The car, which I drove for the next three years, didn't look all that great, but it ran perfectly. It never let me down during my rambles throughout Europe. I bought it for $150 from a staff sergeant who was rotating back to the states after his tour in Bitburg. I sold it to another GI for $150 dollars when I left Germany. On nights and weekends, my VW represented freedom.

The Crock

(1967 photo by Don Dale)

I had many an adventure in the building above, the 36th Tactical Hospital as seen from the top floor of the medic barracks across the street.

The operating suite at the rear of the building comprised a scrub room, two ORs, a lounge and locker room, a sterile-supply room, a workroom for assembling instrument and linen sets, a holding room for patients about to have surgery, a small office where surgeons dictated case notes, and offices for the chief OR nurse and the anesthesia team. The walls in both ORs were tiled in hospital green. The floors were conductive black linoleum. We all wore conductive shoes so we'd be grounded. Sparks can be dangerous in an environment rich with oxygen and anesthetic gases.

The first really unusual case I scrubbed on was a belly-wound explosion. I was on call but sound asleep when the CQ woke me up in the night. (There's always a Charge of Quarters on duty. During overnight downtime, the CQ waxed and buffed the barracks hallways and common rooms. We rotated the duty, and we hated it.)

I asked the CQ why he was waking me up. "The Crock has exploded," he told me.

I knew what he meant.

I forget the boy's name, and I wouldn't mention it if I did remember. "Crock" was Bitburg ward-medic jargon for a chronic complainer. This patient had managed to get on everybody's nerves starting two days earlier when he was checked in with belly pain.

It wasn't that we were heartless. We were used to dealing with people in pain. But this guy, a young enlisted man, was over the top. He whined. Nothing suited him. He wanted this, and he wanted that. And he wanted it now. The ward medics thought he was behaving like a child, and he had been the prime topic of conversation in the chow hall.

I first saw him when I went to the ward to shave him from nipple-line to mid-thigh in preparation for an appendectomy. He was alert when I met him, despite his pre-op cocktail. He complained about how extensively I had to shave him, and he bitched about my using cool water. (We had a good reason for that. Think about it.) He tried my patience, but I kept my mouth shut, did my job well, and told him I'd see him shortly in the OR.

I scrubbed on the appendectomy. It's a routine operation, and it went smoothly -- no problems. Within 30 minutes the patient was awake and on the way to the recovery room.

Two days later, in the middle of the night, he exploded.

He developed a deep infection at the surgical site, the pus built up, and, well . . . he burst. Pus had splattered the bed, the bedclothes, the bedside table, and the wall at the head of his bed. He had complained loudly about pain in the hours before this grenade of infection had gone off in his belly. The on-call doctor saw him and found nothing wrong. His surgeon had been called in and found nothing out of the ordinary. His temperature was on target. The wound didn't show any signs of an angry redness. All his vital signs were normal.

Clearly he had been in pain. But equally clearly, throughout his hospital stay, the level of his complaining had been so high that his new complaints seemed routine.

All that aside, the surgeon was upset, the ward nurses and medics were upset, and the OR staff was upset. Patients were not supposed to explode after appendectomies, and we were all questioning what we could have done better.

After the on-call team was scrubbed and just before the patient was wheeled back into the OR, the anesthesiologist came around to dab a drop or two of oil of wintergreen on our masks. "He smells to high heaven," the anesthesiologist told us. "He's still full of pus."

As we positioned the boy on the OR table, we were grateful for the masks and the oil of wintergreen.

The anesthesiologist gave the boy a shot of Demerol to knock him out, intubated him, and adjusted the machine that fed the right combination of Halothane and oxygen to keep the boy deep enough for surgery. The surgeon enlarged the wound, cleaned it, redid the sutures where the appendix had been excised earlier and washed inside the patient's belly with an antibiotic solution. I threaded needles and clipped them into suture-holders while he began to sew the wound back up. The surgeon left a drain in place, in case infection developed again, and gave orders that the patient was to be checked every 15 minutes until further notice -- by a nurse. "I don't want him going sour again."

The patient was discharged from the hospital a week later. He was still complaining about everything, but he had recovered quickly.

What did we learn? HAI's (hospital-acquired infections) were more uncommon in the 1960s than they are today. Was this an HAI? Had the infection come instead from the original inflamed appendix? Had a deep suture not been tight enough to prevent leakage from his bowel? Had one of us inadvertently broken the sterile field or, perhaps, not scrubbed well enough? We would never know.

But it was a cautionary message that surgery was more than just a job. Patient by patient, it was a matter of life and death.

And there was another lesson: It pays to listen carefully. Even if the patient is a little boy who cries wolf.

The Bitburg routine

The Bitburg Air Base perimeter was behind the medic barracks, and the view from my room was of a field, a barn and a copse of woods. It was barren in the winter, but we watched it green up in the spring, flourish in the summer and grow desolate again in late fall. The major crop was soybeans. (Don Dale photo)

I settled in quickly at Bitburg. And every day brought something interesting: My work in the OR, the town itself, the history of the place, the people, the language and the food were all new to me.

The air base was a sprawling place, stretching from the town of Bitburg to the tiny hamlet of Mötsch. The hospital was right across the street from the barracks, right next to the main gate on the road to Mötsch. Behind the hospital were dozens of housing units -- all painted in pastel colors -- with apartments for NCOs and officers who had brought their families with them. In the middle of the housing complex were the schools for dependent children. The high school football team, the Bitburg Barons, drew big crowds for home games.

The flight line and base administrative offices were a 15-minute shuttle-bus ride into the middle of the base. Bitburg AB was home to the 36th Tactical Fighter Wing, and the primary fighter jets were McDonnell F-4 Phantoms. The sound of their takeoffs and landings was muted by our distance from the flight line, but the F-4s were a constant presence: They were why we were there. Those were the Cold War days, when the biggest fear was that Soviet troops would someday come roaring through the Fulda Gap. The 36th Tactical Hospital was prepared, ready on short notice to set up field units to provide almost every medical service -- including functioning ORs -- in the event of combat.

Aside from the occasional practice alert, the days were fairly routine. There wasn't much need for us medics to visit the main part of the base. The hospital had a chow hall, a PX branch and a movie theater. In the barracks we had a dayroom where we could play fussball, watch American Forces Television or just hang out.

In the OR, we worked from 6 a.m. until the day's last case was finished and we had returned the ORs to spotless condition, usually by about 2 or 3 p.m. Off-duty time was ours to do with as we wished. We rotated on-call duty: A three-person team -- a nurse and two corpsmen -- had to be no more than 15 minutes away. I was on call about once a week. Being woken up for surgery was rare -- maybe once a month.

I had to learn to do every job in the OR except actual surgery. One day I might do nothing but wash and autoclave bloody instruments. Another day I might fold, pack and sterilize sheets and towels. The fun days -- most days -- were spent in the OR itself. I learned how to be an integral part of the team around the table, whether we were repairing a compound-complex fracture, doing a tonsillectomy on a dependent kid, performing hysterectomies on dependent wives, or operating on troops with routine wounds, bad gall bladders, appendicitis, broken noses, or tumors.

This is not to say there was no drama. There were at least a few dramatic procedures each month. I'll write about some of them later, and the stories will probably make your toes curl. But working in our two-OR suite was a job like any other. We showed up, did our work, and went home.

We had two general surgeons, two orthopedic surgeons, an ENT surgeon, two OB-GYN surgeons, an eye surgeon, an anesthesiologist, a nurse-anesthetist, two OR nurses and eight or nine enlisted medics who ranged from Airmen 3rd Class (me, when I started) to Tech Sergeant.

OR work at Bitburg differed from work at a stateside military hospital. There were no surgical interns or residents in our 65-bed hospital. That meant the medics around the table had far more opportunity to get their hands bloody and far more opportunity to learn. It was not at all unusual for us to first-assist on most procedures -- cutting, sewing, suturing, excising, retracting, clamping and suctioning, all under the watchful eye of a surgeon.

(Circumcisions were the exception. Friday was circ day, and no surgeon wants to spend the morning cutting off GI foreskins, so they left circs to the medics. When we'd finish, a surgeon would leave his coffee and Stars and Stripes newspaper behind in the lounge and inspect our work. I got to be quite good at it, although it's a skill that's been pretty much useless to me since.)

In those first weeks, I started taking German classes at the base library, exploring the town of Bitburg itself, and hiking the countryside. World War II had been over for only 20 years. West Germany was still recovering. The Deutsche Mark was worth a quarter. (When it was replaced by the Euro in the 1990s, the DM was worth more than a dollar). One Deutsche Mark would buy a beer. Four would buy a light meal at a gasthaus. Fifteen would buy an excellent dinner at a restaurant.

In the woods and fields around the base, World War II German bunkers could still be found, some with live ammunition buried in the rubble. Farmers still plowed up bombs that had been dropped by American planes.

And no German I ever met would talk about the war. If a GI raised the subject, the inevitable response would be "Nein, nein, I was too young" or "Nein, nein, I don't remember." We knew, however, that if they were much older than we were, they must have had clear memories of Hitler's Germany.

The town of Bitburg depended heavily then on the air base for its economy. Had it not been for our presence, the town might have had three or four thousand inhabitants. As it was, the town's population was about 10,000. (The base population was far higher.) There were eight Italian restaurants in town, and they all delivered pizza to the barracks.

The only German national who ever spoke about the war to me was a pizza-delivery man. My mom had given me a subscription to the Richmond Times-Dispatch Sunday edition. When the pizza guy brought us our food one night, he saw my copy of the paper on my desk. "I was there!" he exclaimed. He bubbled over as he explained that he had been captured by the Americans during the war and shipped to the States. He had been imprisoned for the duration just outside Richmond. He knew my home town and said he had fond memories of eating well and being treated well.

There were reminders of earlier wars in the countryside near Bitburg. During my hikes in that first winter, I stumbled across towers and fortresses from the days when feudalism prevailed. Most had long since crumbled into ruin.

I knew that there were many more adventures ahead, but Christmas arrived nine days after I reached Bitburg. The hospital chow hall -- the best I ever saw in the service -- had a steamship round of beef, turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, green beans, cranberry sauce and all the expected trimmings. But I was an ocean away from home, didn't know many people yet, and had never been away for the holidays before. In some ways, the day was as bleak for me as the picture above.

But I was settling in fast, learning to speak German, exploring my new environment and enjoying surgery even more than I had expected. Christmas 1966 was my first of three in Germany. I missed Richmond and my family and friends, but not too much. After stuffing myself in the chow hall, I went for a Christmas Day hike.

You can see live images of downtown Bitburg today at http://www.webcam.bitburg.net/.

A night to remember

I have revisited Bitburg many times since I was stationed there in the 1960s. This picture was taken when I went back to the first German gasthaus I had ever been to, Zum Edelweiss, which was just outside the main gate, across the ambulance parking lot from the medics' barracks. In the 1960s, the troops called the place Mom's. The man I found behind the bar on my last visit was Mom's son. Mom retired after making a fortune and was living on the shore of a lake in the Alps. (Photo by Walter Foery)

The journey from Richmond to Bitburg was lengthy -- metaphorically and physically. After two weeks of leave at home, my father drove me to McGuire AFB in New Jersey, which took most of a day. That night I boarded a plane for my first trip across the ocean. Our destination: Rhein-Main Air Base in Frankfurt. From there, I boarded an Air Force bus -- about as Spartan as they come -- for the bumpy four-hour ride through the mountains to Bitburg.

By the time I was assigned to a room in the medic barracks, I was dead on my feet.

It was December 16, 1966, about 4 o'clock in the afternoon, and it was already dusk. During the winter, night falls early in those latitudes -- Bitburg is due east from lower Canada -- and dawn comes late. As the winter solstice approaches, the days are short, cold and dreary. I slept from about 5 p.m. to 7 the next morning and woke up with my first case of jet lag.

The next day was filled with paperwork, a tour of the 36th Tactical Hospital and introductions to the staff in the operating room suite. As dark fell, I ate dinner in the hospital chow hall and headed for my room.

"Let's go get a beer at Mom's," one of my new roommates said with an evil grin. I might have been able to handle one beer, maybe even two or three. But no ....

That's not what my fellow medics had in mind. Zum Edelweiss -- named for a tiny white flower found in the German mountains -- was crowded, but we found seats at a table, and soon they were more medics pulling up chairs and buying rounds. My new friends were intent on initiating me by getting me commode-hugging drunk. I lost count of the beers I drank -- Bitburger Pilsner draft, Dortmunder Hansa Pilsner in bottles, Simonbräu Export on tap.

Then came the schnapps. To loud encouragement, I downed shots of apple, pear, plum and cherry schnapps. Then came the true killer shots -- of slivovitz, a distilled beverage made from plums. By midnight, I could no longer feel my lips. Or focus. I hadn't paid the dienstmädchen for anything. My new friends paid it all, and I was as drunk as I ever want to be.

Mind you, I grew to love and appreciate the beer, schnapps and wines of Germany over the years. The Bitburger Pilsner was brewed no more than 2 miles from the base, and it's still the best beer I have ever tasted. But I wasn't appreciating it that night.

A lot of little things can remind you of how far you are from home when you're in a foreign country. Two such things stick out from that night. In the men's room in the basement of Zum Edelweiss there was a commode, one tiled wall and a large stone fixture in the center of the room that looked like a dentist's spit-basin on steroids. A stream of water circled the lip of the thing and drained at the bottom. The troops called it a vomitorium. It was designed specifically for throwing up in. At the top of the tiled wall was a pipe with holes running its length, like a soaker hose. At the bottom of the wall there was a shallow trough. The wall was meant to be urinated on.

I used the vomitorium and the wall in equal measure that night. To this day, I don't have a clue as to how I got back to the barracks. I might have stumbled, crawled or been carried. I do remember another stop to pray to the White Porcelain God in the barracks before I made it to bed.

I had been initiated. I hadn't reported to work in the OR yet, but I was now "officially" a medic.

The next morning at 6 a.m., with a hangover uniquely awful in all my experience, I reported for duty in the operating room. The chief OR nurse knew all about the welcome-to-Bitburg ritual. She assigned me an easy task for the day. I folded OR sheets and towels for 7 hours, then went back to bed and slept straight through until the next morning.

Welcome to Bitburg, Airman Dale.

Gowning and gloving

I bought a camera at the PX at Gunter as soon as I learned I'd be going to Europe. This is an image of one of my Gunter OR school classmates in our mock operating room. Neither the blood nor the patient were real, but the experience was valuable nonetheless. (Don Dale photo)

At Gunter AFB in Montgomery, Alabama, I discovered exactly how fascinating work in an operating room would be. Concomitantly I discovered how exacting and demanding our training would be.

No longer would we be giving shots to oranges. We gave shots of sterile D5W solution to each other. We learned about surgical instruments -- mosquito, crile, Kelly, Ochsner and Halstead hemostats, to name but a few types of clamps; rongeurs; cannulae; retractors and elevators; gouges and probes; scalpels and blades; bell clamps; needles and needle holders; sutures; and orthopedic instruments that looked like stainless-steel versions of what was in my dad's toolbox. We learned how to sterilize them and pack them so they'd be ready for instant use. We learned how to scrub our hands and forearms with hard brushes for the prescribed length of time. We learned the process of donning gowns and gloves while preserving their sterility in a process that seemed ritualistic and balletic but is actually quite practical.

We learned the names of surgical procedures -- from circumcisions to hysterectomies to cholecystectomies -- and what instruments would be needed for each. We learned how to pass those instruments to the surgeon so that when they hit his hand they would be in exactly the right position for immediate use. We learned how to pass a scalpel and avoid having our hand sliced open when the surgeon grabbed the handle. We learned about anesthetics, how to hit a vein to start an IV drip, how to tie a suture in a wound so full of blood that you couldn't see the knot, and how to anticipate what a surgeon would need next. We learned how to keep track of sponges so that none would be left behind. And we learned to estimate blood loss by looking at those bloody sponges.

There were essentially two major jobs we'd be performing in the OR: we'd either be scrubbing or circulating. Scrubbing involved working directly at the OR table, gowned, masked, hatted and gloved, performing tasks ranging from holding retractors to passing instruments and assisting the surgeon in cutting and suturing. Circulating meant working the perimeter of the OR in scrubs and mask -- assisting with gowning and gloving, fetching supplies, noting the exact start and end time of a procedure (and sometimes the exact time of a birth or death), re-sterilizing dropped instruments, and handing off excised tumors or amputated body parts to lab techs waiting just outside the OR.

Naturally, there was an Air Force manual for Operating Room Specialists -- a very thick manual -- and we were expected to know it from cover to cover. Mediocre grades were not an option. We had to know it all. Average wasn't good enough.

The OR school's instructors were demanding, and rightly so. There was no room for error. After a day of difficult classes, we'd go back to our rooms to study the manual.

For me, the whole learning experience was exhilarating.

We were, however, young men and women in our late teens and early 20s. We found time to have fun. Montgomery was a lot like Richmond. We toured the State Capitol and the White House of the Confederacy (which had preceded Richmond's). We sampled the bars. The city's pace was more Southern than Richmond's, but the local menu specialties were similar and just as good, and the accent didn't sound so strange to me as it did to my classmates from the Midwest. The politics of the place was even entertaining: George Wallace was governor, and he was about to be succeeded by his wife, Lurleen. The Alabama State Fair was in town, and the rides, food and displays kept us busy for a weekend. Back on base, we drank our share of beer and liquor at the club.

But mostly we studied in our off-duty time. The stakes were high: Finish No. 1 in the class and you'd have first pick of assignments and get to choose where you'd spend the next three years. I wanted to go to Europe. I knew there would be few, if any, European assignments on the list.

I knew there was one other person in our class who might get better grades than I. The instructors would calculate our rankings weekly, and sometimes he'd beat me out. Most of the time, I beat him. In the end, I edged past him by one grade point. When the assignment choices were posted, there was only one in Europe: Bitburg Air Base in Germany. I had never heard of Bitburg, so I went to the base library to look it up. It was a small town, about the size of Ashland, nestled in the Eifel Mountains not far from Luxembourg, Belgium, France and the Netherlands. That was all I could find out, but I picked Bitburg. My classmate who finished second picked Tripoli Air Base in Libya. There but for the grace of God ....

There's one anecdote about OR school that I can't leave out. There was no hospital at Gunter, but there was one at Maxwell Air Force Base on the other side of Montgomery. One of our last experiences before graduation was spending a day working in a Maxwell OR. On the appointed day I was assigned to an amputation. A dependent grandmother with diabetes had lost all circulation in her lower left leg, which had turned gangrenous and had to come off.

I scrubbed diligently, and the circulating nurse helped me with gowning and gloving. When the patient had been anesthetized and the surgeon was ready to begin, he told me to hold the patient's foot and elevate the leg. I had been predictably nervous about my first actual OR experience, but, when the surgeon and his assistant began, my nervousness disappeared. I was fascinated to see that everything I had learned about was happening now right in front of me. The procedure went quickly. The surgeon made an incision through the skin and sliced down to the bone. He clamped the bleeding vessels and sawed through the tibia and fibula. He folded the skin flaps over, sewed them together, and it was done.

But, remember now, I was holding the leg. It was no longer attached, and I didn't know what to do with it. Clearly, I hadn't thought this thing through. The enormity of what I had in my hands hit me. I was holding an amputated leg that just moments before had been part of a living human being. Dear God!

I turned to the scrub nurse beside me. She took the leg out of my hands, gave it to the circulating nurse, hooked a stool with her foot and sat me down on it. "Airman Dale," she said, "You're white as a ghost. Take a deep breath." I did, and the moment passed.

There would be many other tough moments in my time as an OR medic. But that was my first. And I will never, ever, forget it.