Among the Germans -- (Zie Deuchen?)

    After sixty days among the Germans, this time of my life in the surreal and slightly disturbing or fearful experience; the reality and normalcy of it gradually settled in. For two months and on, working every day, long hours and perspicacious as the fellow cohorts from the Hinterland,  I was doing my thing all right. Immersed within this foreign yet familiar environment and culture: these fellow workers and uniformed troops were like me but not like me. German, Deutsch, Deutschen, not Deutschlanders as I thought they were called years before. 

    

    I was hearing it, a language some call guttural-- in person in my office in conversation and music, walking up and down the halls, in neighboring buildings like ours, across the whole military compound, edging into the cafeteria and the bars and shops to the east outside our secure fences. I was influenced by the language in other corridors, and in the barracks where I slept, or going the other direction to the outer gate of the base, past the German radio station and the memorial wall and flags dedicated in tribute and memory of those that had fallen. Germans, Norwegians, and perhaps Swedes and Finns. Their names and lives etched in printed epigraphs. Over ten years into that more distant war.

    Surrounded in this day and age by the Bundeswehr, not the Wehrmacht, as I mistakenly called it once, conversing with a younger American soldier more than ten years later, closer to now. The American young man was alarmed by my naming mistake. He knew historical terms.

    Time changes and flows.

    Now and then. Growing up in the 1970s alone, I was watching and playing World War II movies, television programs, analyzing books and photos of the ravages of the awful times that transpired in Europe and beyond from the 1930s in the 1940s. Death, destruction--a German monstrosity caused the ignominious fated and dreadful end to so many Jewish Europeans, and other Europeans of all types, along later with our American G.I.s. The graves are still solemnly spaced and remembered across the nations. Markers and memorials dot the country sides where the fighters were slain. Many of their bodies were possibly retrieved and sent back home, but their gravesites stand in stark witness of the carnage and sadness.

    As small kids we would go into our nearby woods and fight the krauts, with our sticks converted machine guns, as we were prone to do. My friend's father perhaps fought in Vietnam. If we were not fighting the Japanese, it was normally against the Germans. "The krauts!" we would exclaim; not the jerries as I learned, later, through books by Stephen Ambrose and Jeff Shaara and others. Comic books printed in the 1970s, perhaps like Sergeant Rock, the grizzled non-commissioned officer with his cigar hanging from his mouth, the helmet askance; and later Indiana Jones films and his related comics and books that I would hastily scoop up also depicted those of the Third Reich, the dreams and nightmares of the Deutschland of the generations before. Harrison Ford fought them as a G.I. Colonel right after Star Wars in Force Ten from Navarone. That was cool. That was life in the 1940s. Our mortal enemies were severe and stout. But we were the good ones, the good guys. Like Han Solo. Indiana Jones. We fight the Nazis. We beat them.

    Decades for me and the world pass. And there was I was: surrounded by zie Deuchen. In a different time and war from yesteryear. And here they were my friends and allies. To be trusted and trusted by.

    Yes, I came to be accustomed to them, to it. The Germanness. Each culture or society, mind and soul,  with its own power and flare, its underlying thoroughness or flow, an essence unto itself. I understood more and I could say more things. I learned more of German geography, culture, personalities. There was the German officer who delighted in hunkering down and focusing intently to beat me in chess-- that in our off hours at a wooden bar area outside the secure compound, where beer, assuredly German, was served and good times were shared. Even when they ran out of the cold brews in the hot season.

    Months and more months passed, the seasons changed, but things became a routine. My German friends and co-workers ate and dined together with me, in the German cafeteria surround by peoples of all nations.

    We were among them, and they among us.

    And so, times change, and images and thoughts and German patriotism and nationalism evolves and adapts. The dead leave behind their legacies; the living heritages also continue.

    Here we are in 2024, past the age of Merkel and Obama and Bush in those former days of Afghanistan, longer since the era of the Berlin Wall when Kohl and Reagan were afoot, and longer still since Kennedy and the newer generations of German leadership in the 1960s, and then back to the tragic times of the 1940s themselves. Death camps and tank battles and bomber runs crushing and burning cities and bodies. So much ordnance, so much sturm and drang, after blitzkriegs and panzer movements, all the sig heils and goose steps and lifted hands and arms, the movements and uniforms and the random Tarantino film pursuing the past demons of the continent. Not to forget Africa, either. And the seas. 

    So many waters under the bridge, as it were. Blood and names and bodies made bones and dust, and the left-over wealth and genealogies, families who came and went: some who fortunately survived.

    And here we are. Reflecting peacefully, now done with what I call the insipid tome, translated into English from the original German, translated unto the other world languages, into our English as I have finally read it one hundred years after publishing.

    One hundred years, a century since publishing. His struggle, my struggle, our struggle. 1924. 2024.

    And we continue living, breathing, and dying, among the Germans. And the Afghans, too.

    I worked with the Bundeswehr, and things were legal and clean and we kept things sterile, fighting the insurgents and terrorists at arms' length. We did our parts, and gathered information, and used the U.S. forces to do most of the kinetic work, which could end up hurting (yes, killing) our guys.

    Our struggles continue in a world of a more peaceful, recalcitrant, but firm and strong Deutschland.

    Long live the Germans. And the rest of us.

    It disappeared from a few minutes ago, but I write, or wrote, of love over hate. Hate should not be the basis for our goals and missions. Our national and local hopes should be based in love and care, not the opposite.

    We love the Germans, and the Germans must love us. And a hundred years from now we should be brothers and sisters still. Could we ask for Russian and Chinese companionship and solidarity?

    We may. We should. We must. 

    Ich liebe dich, meine broter undt sister.