Patton and me

I had been a medic at Bitburg Air Base for about two weeks when one of my roommates suggested a trip to Bonn to celebrate the coming new year, 1967.

Bonn, a city on the Rhine River, was the capital of what was then West Germany. It was about as long a trip as it is from Richmond to Washington, D.C.

We all piled into a couple of Volkswagens, drove to Bonn, found a small hotel, and enjoyed the city -- which, since we were GIs, entailed the drinking of mass quantities of the excellent local beer.

In other words, we got drunk every night.

On New Year's Eve, after spending the evening drinking too many liters of Bonn's best, somebody suggested, "Let's go piss in the Rhine. Everybody does it!"

It became a raucous venture that started with us trying to find our way on foot to a bridge across the Rhine. I was more than enthusiastic about going along, but I kept asking why it was a big deal to piss in the Rhine. Nobody seemed to know exactly, but I was assured that it was "tradition."

So there we were, as the city's cathedral bells tolled midnight, lined up along the railing in the middle of a bridge, pissing into the Rhine far below. We weren't the only ones, and it was quite a sight.

It wasn't until a few years later that I discovered why pissing into the Rhine was considered de rigueur.

It was all General George S. Patton's doing. He had promised himself during World War II that he would one day urinate into Germany's most important river.

And Patton kept his promise, in full view of his troops. "I drove to the Rhine River," he said, "and went across on the pontoon bridge. I stopped in the middle to take a piss and then picked up some dirt on the far side in emulation of William the Conqueror."

Patton was nothing if not a colorful character, beloved by the vast majority of his men.

Although I didn't know exactly what we were memorializing on that bridge on December 31, 1967, it was an extraordinary experience. And now that I do know what we were commemorating, I'm doubly glad we paid tribute to Patton, even in our own small and incoherent way.

(Although he was a California native, Patton's family connections to Virginia were strong and went back to before the Civil War. Patton attended Virginia Military Institute for a year before enrolling at West Point, from which he graduated in 1909. He died December 9, 1945, after injuries suffered in an auto accident near Mannheim, Germany. He is buried at the American Military Cemetery in Luxembourg, a place I have visited many times.)