In Remembrance Of

Tuesday was my father's birthday.  I have not been back to Denver since his death, so I planned on going to his grave on his birthday.  See if there is a stone yet, leave a flower, wish him a happy birthday.

Yeah, I know.

So, I went, spent about 10 minutes trying to remember where his grave was.  Took some pictures.  Lost control.

I could not wish him a happy birthday.  Yeah, he is not there.  It is my belief that he is not only separated from this life but from God as well, for all eternity, by his own informed choice.  There is no one to wish happy birthday to.  And I lost it.

All of those years of frustration and anger at the injustices he subjected me to, all of the pain he inflicted upon me, all came roaring back.  For the first time in my life - I felt something towards  him, and it was not worthy of me to have felt so of anyone.  Such is the new nature now that I do have emotions.

I reread what I wrote upon his death.  Yeah, it is still true and yet it was written by the old me, someone whom had never had a feeling in his entire life.  Today, that short memory would have been far different.....

I felt so sorry for my friend whom was with me, for I was truly a basket case.

As for the poppy, his mother's favorite name for him was Poppi, her wild flower.  More true than she ever knew.

Response

The little blog has been my way of putting some of father's story down, admittedly as a way for me to work through my own angst over his death and our complete lack of relationship.

And, the responses have run in the hundreds of emails to me!  The majority are from historical revisionists claiming that the Holocaust never occurred.  The one I would like to have gotten would have been from Martha, outside of Hamburg, my unknown half sister.  Yes, I hope in vain to at least ease lack of memory should she have thought others knew her father and perhaps connect her with father's family in Switzerland.

I find the entire historical revisionist movement disturbing.  First, there is some truth to what they claim.  Yes, 6.5 million Jews did die, however the evidence of their systematic execution is weak.  Much of the photograph material we have of executions were actually Ukrainian peasants - whom had the Germans treated decently would have joined forced against the Russians!  Rather shortsighted there Hitler.  Much of the evidence concerning the Holocaust comes from the Russians and it has been scientifically proven they manufactured evidences for the Nuremberg Trials.  Building were modified at Auschwitz to fit their story line, again proven.  However, there is the question of the 55,000 Hungarian Jews, whose end were documented ad nauseum by the Germans: from their capture through to their execution in Poland a week later.  Every step, every detail, all photographed step by step.

So, a revisionist may argue against all systematic arguments against the Holocaust, but you are stuck with the 55,000 Hungarians.  And if you want to argue that it was an anomaly, fine, but it is still genocide.  You lose.

Okay, so the next series - when I have time - I will be posting is the Holocaust from Germany's own documentation made at the time by the Nazi's.  None of this is from Russian sources, it is all Western German captured paperwork.  Then I will publish the Hungarian photos.

I have also deleted this blog at least four times, this is a memory I do not cherish.  However, again response has been overwhelming to have it restored each time, over 900 this last time!  So what you have read to this point is restoration 4!  For some reason there is a strong interest in stories of the war, from a first person perspective.  Admittedly, I find enjoyment that my father was at the Dresden Firebombing and lived to tell the tale of the US fighters strafing the fleeing civilians.  Why?  Because that story was told at the time and no one believed it then, the pilots all denied it.  And yet, even the Russians filed the same complaint - whose forward observers had been strafed as well!  So, the Russians testified to this, the Germans testified to this, my own father could back it up with the damage down to the family estate outside of Dresden where he had run across a balcony and the terracotta shot up by the fighters as they wheeled around to fly across Dresden again.  And western history says this did not happen.  So whom are you going to believe?  Witnesses?  Victims? Or the pilots whom would have faced charges were it found to be true at the time?  And that is what makes eyewitness accounts so inconvenient - it contradicts the testimony of the victors.

Like the Holocaust, the further we move from that time period, the harder some facts become to be believed, while others completely become reasonable.

In Memory Of

He saw the rise of National Socialism and the fall of the Reich.  He worked on the first atomic bomb and luckily never saw its completion.  He witnessed the evolution of rocketry, from hobby to weapon.  The birth of the jet age fascinated him no end.

He survived the bombing of Dresden and told the politically incorrect truth, that is not a part of our "history".  He saw the mass murder of the scientific laborers by the tens of thousands.  He survived the Russian onslaught against his chosen homeland, at one point, only by playing dead.

He knew starvation as he fled with three others on his team from the Russians and American forces to surrender to the British.  He knew what it was to be a prisoner of war and to be prison labor.  He learned the hard truth of what freedom really meant and at what cost.

Although, as a mathematician he only understood facts and data, and I an artist, we agreed on virtually nothing across our lifetimes, except food.  So different from me, that by second grade I was sure I was adopted!

As I stood at Fort Logan National Cemetery this week, and looked upon that tiny plot of ground, I could not help but think of both the good and bad he had represented.  The beginning and end to so much of history.  And all of the what ifs......

But, he was my father.

Legacy

I was raised in European schools.  They will forever be best remembered for their blatant violence against a young man whom really did not understand what the heck was going on.....  One of the lessons I remember well, because it gave me cause to stop and think, was on the topic of: "what is going to be your LEGACY?".

A legacy?  Why on earth would I even care what people thought of me when I was long dead and gone?  As the years have passed, I have sort of figured out that I might like to be remembered by those I have successfully fathered, those I have discipled, those I have mentored.  Hmmmm.....

By the same token I can remember my father speaking on the topic a legacy, probably as I was trying to figure this whole idea out.  He seemed to think this was important at the time.

Of course, I have been rereading father's enormous highly fictionalized autobiography and the thought keeps coming to my mind, "Why did he write certain stories the way he did?  Why did he ignore certain stories or split others into separate events or even worse, why did he combine stories?"  Yeah, he created quite a work of fiction and I just do not understand.  Some of his stories I had forgotten and others I remembered extremely well - so I know they were wrong.

By the time the tales are over, one is left with the question of LEGACY.

Apparently, he did want to leave one.  But his complete ignoring of any of this children, other than one step-son, makes you wonder.  Even, Sommer, the golden girl - did not get as many mentions as bathroom humor.

A man whom was at the creation of 20th century history, blew off that history so as to be politically correct in the end, and those of his descendants, he left with nothing.

I am not suggesting that you must worry about leaving your descendants anything but you might want to think about it - in terms of history and truth.....

That should be the basis of any of our legacies.

Split

Following that weekend in Munich, father applied for and received a rotation back to the United States.  He never asked any of us our opinions, we would have all voted to stay in Germany!  So, knowing my father this meant there was another agenda running and that weekend in Munich was probably all it took for him to decide to run as far as possible away from Germany permanently.

Mother continued to be her weird self, father was away as much as possible, us kids just went to school and tried to avoid them both.

It was my birthday, 1972, when father had divorce papers served on mother.  His explanation as to why - was to wake her up that she was destroying her marriage.  You see mother had become a Southern Baptist.  She and father fought like cats and dogs over everything!  Food, religion, all aspects of marriage!  And us kids got to hear it all.

It was on my birthday, 1973, when the divorce became final in court.  So two birthdays utterly destroyed and neither of them cared - they just wanted their war to continue at all costs.

Of course, father then started dating the older sister of my girl friend and that made things very awkward!

Shortly after this, I became a Christian, having fallen in with a group of Hutterites.  Father was outraged that any son of his could be so stupid and did not talk to me for the next 32 years!

And so my tale of father now closes.  I know less about his other six marriages or him during this time.

November 1967

November was a hard month on me.  I was in seventh grade at the Canadian School and had a music class from hell.  Mr. Elliot, I have no doubt was a wonderful teacher and a gifted musician but he was unable to understand that there are people in this world whom have no sense of rhythm and can not play a musical instrument!  He literally drove me to a nervous breakdown.

At the same time, father found out that Heisenberg was living in Munich and was very agitated to have learned this.  When the doctor wrote my school a request for a few days off for me to just get away and recover, father threw me in the car and took me to Munich for a long holiday.

It was fun and I naturally assumed that father had gone to see his old professor, when he disappeared for so many hours one day.  Coincidentally, Mr. Elliot did have a nervous breakdown and we ran into each other at the same hotel!

Fast forward to 1984 and I received a letter from my grandmother, it had been written in 1968!  Unfortunately, I already knew she had died in 1974 - I had seen a letter in German laying on the table at my father's house announcing her death.  So, I now knew for sure that father had lied to me for the length of his life about his family.  So, I decided to run his family down and solve the mystery of my father.

At the end of three years, I now knew that father was not whom he claimed to be; I had his real birth certificate and a good piece of his real life's history.

I also discovered that the real man, whose name father had taken back in Wöbbelin - had work on the Italian train system following his release from Wöbbelin and retired to Munich in July of 1967.  He had been murdered the very weekend I was in Munich with my father recovering.

Yet another coincidence in father's life?  Or did father permanently silence the one man whom could unravel father's real identity ... ?

When you hide behind a wall of lies, well, there is no way you can be thought innocent.  Luckily for father, there was nothing ever to tie him and that man together - only in this day and age, with the abundance of information can such a coincidence be ferreted out.

Narcissus

The first time I read father's autobiography, I was struck at how father was a complete and total narcissus!  The entire 1,100 pages completely revolved around him.  I scored about three lines, my sister - the golden girl - managed half a page, but one of his step sons about three pages, any of his eight wives - almost not even a mention.  The rest a highly fictional story.

Since my last post, I have now reread father's tome a second time and I have been struck, yet again, at what a complete narcissus father was!  Not like it should now be a surprise, only it is, due to the level of narcissism we are discussing here!  We are discussing mental illness levels. So, if father was a narcissus, then I thought I would read up on this subject on the internet.....

I did not know that narcissism is a variant of being a sociopath.  Sociopath I understand very well, I was diagnosed as such at 17 by the US military - whom then wanted me rather badly.  But, my father?  I also learned that psychopathy is a genetic disorder.  Great.

Now I am seeing his family in a new light.  Either of his parents passed this trait on to him.

Now I can understand the man whom could walk away from his family in Switzerland to support Hitler, the man whom could be married eight times thinking he was in love and often with more than one bride at a time.  Social convention meant nothing to him.  I could understand how he could have worked on atomic and hydrogen weapons with no flick of regret or doubt.  How his work on the V-3 (A-9) rocket and its purposed mass destruction was completely without understanding.  The Reich was his god, Hitler its prophet, my father its worshiper.

And yet this man had seen the slaughter of the tens of thousands at Dora, as the SS cleaned up all of the scientific workers - leaving very few for the Russians to capture.  It touched him enough that he converted to Judaism at the end of war.  It touched him enough that even to the end, he was seeking if there was a God or not - but he could never equate his life with the existence of the kind of god he sought.

I still have to wonder at some of what I know about my father.  Not the least of which is why did he write an autobiography that would be largely a work of fiction ..... ?

Another Broken Arrow

Over the weekend I was thinking about the fun Broken Arrows brought to this young man.  Lots of trucks, cranes, missiles, military types all over and I was always a sucker for anything destructive!

And I remembered of a little incident outside of Portland, Oregon.  I can not even begin to remember the year or even where in Portland we were - so I had to be mighty young!

Now one of the ways to go to the Portland zoo, back before they build a superhighway straight into there was to drive southwest through Portland and then take this little road that went through a small tunnel.  As we reached the tunnel, an Air Force jeep came through and blocked off the roadway.  No big deal - that meant the day was about to get more exciting.

My father got out, identified himself and asked what was up.  Before the poor MP could even answer - there came this horrendous crash and shriek of metal from the tunnel.  Yeah, something big had just made a mess.  Dad and the MP took off running - and hey, no one to stop me - I went to!  And, what a sight I saw!

Seems a tractor trailer was hauling a missile back towards Portland and had impacted the warhead with the top of the tunnel.  The missile was now ejected out of its cradle and lay half on, half off the cradle.  The nose cone was mashed horribly.  Father let lose a series of oaths you would not have believed!

Dad grabbed the radio, ran for the Portland side of the tunnel and radioed into the Base for a decontamination team, full geared inspectors, a suit for him and two cranes to be brought in from the south.  What an exciting day!

Of course, I got to go through decontamination and you know I really do not like stripping in public.  Just a modesty issue I have never overcome.

In due course of the day, they found the warhead (which was supposed to have been removed prior to transport!) was intact; very little radiation was evident in the area - other than the roof of the tunnel and ground below; and it took close to a week to extract that puppy from the tunnel and reload onto another carrier - this time with the warhead safely removed!

I never got to see if I glowed in the dark or not.  Oh yeah, good times!

Broken Arrow

The night after our being detained by Catalonian Separatists, we headed off again in the cooler night air, continuing on towards Madrid.

Again in a mountainous area, at a bend in the road, you guessed it - another roadblock!  Just as the night before, an uniformed officer asked for our papers.  Only this guy was really nervous - so nervous that father was actual getting concerned for our safety!  Father tried to get a  conversation going but the guy just got on his radio and talked so rapidly no one knew what he was saying.

Several minutes later,  a military jeep drives up with some - what I am guessing were Spanish MPs.  One of them was quite fluent in English and from the car I caught the gist of the conversations - they had managed to drive too close to the shoulder of the road with a tractor trailer hauling a nuke and rolled it.

Father then identified himself, more talking on the radio and they were off - father to inspect said nuke and to supervise the correct reloading to the carrier on the trailer.

Once completed, father returned and we drove on with lots of smiles and hand waving by those still working on the mess they had made.

It was the first time I had ever seen one of the newer missiles and I was impressed.  No idea as to which one it was but it was cool to see something you heard about but no one had any pictures of.....

Held In Catalonia

In 1966 father decided we needed to spend the summer camping our way through Spain, Portugal and of course - Gibraltar.  Summer was perhaps a poor choice since the heat was unbelievable - hitting 121 on several occasions!  I can remember watching the tar on the roads bubbling when we would stop for a lunch or stretching.

So, we drove and camped our way south through France, through Andorra and then down into Spain.

It was late at night when we entered Spain.  As we wound down the narrow gravel road from Andorra and the heights of the Pyrenees Mountains, we were forced to stop at a roadblock.  A uniformed officer approached, asked for our papers, was delighted to practice his English and then spent some time on a walkie-talkie.  Returning the papers, he explained that the road would be closed for a few hours due to highway construction.  So, we were stuck.

About thirty minutes later a group of women approached, walking up the road, set up a table and motioned us to come join them.  A large pot was set out, along with plates and bowls.  They were providing a meal!  We marveled at Spanish hospitality!  The soup was good but the bread was first class!  Dad and the officer talked quite a bit - father in Spanish, the officer in English.  Though we could not know it, father was about to use a whole lot more Spanish in an official capacity!

Once done, the ladies packed up all of their stuff and trotted back down the road and around a bend we could not see beyond.  A short time later the officer returned again and told us that we could now pass the construction zone but to be very careful as workers were still on the roadway and to stay far right.  So we started down and around the bend.

What we were to pass by was miles of what looked like concrete water pipe.  Workers, hundreds of them, were busy drilling holes in the pipe.  It made no sense, but having no real knowledge of construction, who knows what they were doing!  We continued on through the night, eventually reaching a campground by early morning, where we set up and went to bed.

About mid-day we were awaken by the local police whom told us they were interviewing all travelers and wanted to know if we had come from the north the night before.  We said we had and then father told them all about the road construction the night before, the great soup and bread, and then being allowed to continue on after a while.

We then learned that Catalonian Separatists had bee sabotaging the new water pipe construction project.  Ah, that explains all of the holes in the pipe - they were making it unusable!  Then across many questions we were to learn about Franco's problems in Catalonia, the guerrilla movement and the policeman's concerns over Communist activities in the area.  Of course, as we were to find, Franco's freedom was so heavily socialist and the people so preyed upon by the government - no wonder people were involved in what father called Monkey Warfare.....

James Bond For Real?

My father made a point of taking me to all of the opening nights for James Bond films.  Dr. No - stupid, Goldfinger - mostly stupid by I liked the girl with the rifle, Thunderball - pure gold.

I was not really impressed with the beginning of Thunderball and I felt real sorry for that snake if it was real and thrown from one vehicle to another.  The take over of the Vulcan bomber, priceless.  I always loved Delta wing aircraft and the Vulcan was probably the largest and longest living of all of these 1950's relics.

Suddenly, the movie was stopped, the lights came up and an officer standing at the front of the theater ordered all disaster preparedness personnel to report to the lobby immediately.  Father left, the movie restarted and about three hours later father returned to take me home.....  He was very angry over being called out of a movie and not being reimbursed the admissions price!  Plus the NATO theater was a 70 mile drive one way for us.

Seems someone in the audience was familiar enough with the breathing systems on the Vulcan and wondered if the same was in usage on the B-52 and Convair's Delta Dagger (F-102), both nuclear equipped.  If it was multi-passenger and could carry a nuke, its air systems were thoroughly investigated that evening.

I can't say whether or not any problem was actually found, but I am sure that after the release of Thunderball - there was no possibility any gassing of the crew, via the movie plot scenario, as being any longer a possibility.

OMG Off Spain

It was my birthday 1966.  The family all went to Basle for the winter carnival - my favorite!, to celebrate.  Okay it is really my and my mother's birthday, we were born on the same day and knowing my father this was really for her but I will claim it!  :^)

On January 17, we headed back for home, up in the little notch where Belgium, Luxembourg and France are all joined together.  But, something was wrong on the Swiss - French border, Father was requested to leave the car and go to the guard shack.  Very odd.

When he came back, he was really in a state of agitation.  Seems the US had lost a B-52 over Spain, equipped with four Hydrogen Bombs!  Three had been found, one was missing.  Nothing like one of your toys going missing on you.  (Not even getting into the whole discussion of how on Earth he and Edvard were able to justify what they had created!)

Father, faced turned from camera

So, we had a very quiet ride home, were dropped off and father headed for the nearest NATO base for an emergency flight to Spain - in winter - life is really tough.  The school was all a buzz over this.  News leaks out of Upper Hayford let us know that the bomb had been found almost immediately - but the idiots were going to leave it where it lay because the searchers had broken military search routine in finding it.  Wasn't finding it the whole point?  But it lay another 9 weeks until it was re-discovered, and then could be properly raised.  Father was so angry when he got home, you have no idea.....  I have no idea if any of his complaints against the wackos responsible had any effect.

I know from my secret readings in father's books, that things were not going to go well for those poor villagers whom had been contaminated by plutonium when the three bombs, which hit ground, had blown their conventional detonators.  I remember at the time reading in the newspaper of villagers kicking sand on the bombs to put the fires out; posing for pictures sitting on the bomb casings, and living life as usual - in a contaminated environment.  I never did see any reports come out on their life expectancies or deaths in public sources.  Just not news I guess when you have shots of President Johnson holding up his beagles by their ears or whatever.  And, I try not to even search on such subjects on the internet lest I draw undesired attention.

Prior to this I had always held the US military in high esteem.  But, if you were so anal as to "stick" to a scheduled search and then reprimand those whom broke protocol to find what you were looking for - doesn't this point to a significant problem within the power structure of the military?  Until January 1966, I had wanted a career in the US military, like my father, but now I started to watch, listen, remember and think on what I was hearing.....

All Those TDYs

Father was gone so much of the time from 1962 on, that one is forced to consider what it was the government had him up to!  You can look at world events, look backwards in history later on, as well as, note interesting occurrences. In this case, occurrences may have more of a clue than usual and we knew almost instantly what was up once the German State Police raided the village!

I was in training to be a long distance runner, so every morning I was out the door at 5 am for a cross-country training practice at mother's insistance.  Make no mistake, this was not my idea.  But, there was a little shoemaker about half way through my run and I would spend several minutes with him every morning to keep my time average high for mother's records.  He was a very nice man.  Lets call him Hans.

Hans was in this later sixties, sort of a broken man I would call him.  He knew almost nothing of the village history and carefully avoided all wartime discussions.  He made himself more interesting than he should have been.

One Saturday morning, even before the cows were up, I ran past Hans' and noticed the shop in disarray, with no Hans.  I ran for the Police.  Not the friendliest people in town but they were honest and reliable.   The Sargent was ash white when I told him Hans was missing.  Within minutes, before I could even get out the door - there were several calls concerning missing citizens.  The Sargent understood what I could not fathom.  I jogged back past the shop and now the State Police were there and I was instantly detained for being "of interest".

One of the patrolmen sat and told me about how they were hunting Nazi war criminals and Hans had been one of those being sought.  I then repeated how I had reported Hans' absence to the local police and had over heard of missing people all over the Pfaltz....  The officer swore, ran for the door and quickly sped away.

I quietly re-entered Hans' little shop and remembered the humor and fun we had enjoyed.  I have always had the utmost respect for my elders, because they were interesting and I saw value in their knowledge.  I saw Hans had dropped a vest pocket wallet, which I picked up.  I burned the photos and papers inside, to his memory and perhaps protection.  I kept his SS Identification, dated August 1944, issued in Odessa.

Father moved us from the village to military housing following this.  There are no coincidences in life, one did not have to search far to find a similar SS Id Card carefully hidden amongst my father's papers.  This I followed up with also collecting my uncle Fritz's as well.  The three of them I imagine make quite a unique collection.  I have yet to see even one, even in photographs on the internet.  Hmmmmmm.....

However, this post is not about outlawed SS organizations, it is about the SS funding rocket research with the Egyptians in order to hasten the removal of the Jewish State in 1962 through 1967.  Egypt finally went with the Russian Scud missile as its offensive deterrent to the Jewish "aggression".  Nasser was nothing if not a scum bag himself.

As for father?  That is a pretty easy one: he and his fellow team from the V-3 (A-9) were all in on the project.  They all had the backgrounds, were all German and the three also had the nuclear background - because a missile has to deliver something!  Was the US Military Intelligence involved?  Was father and his friends all on contract to the Mossad?  Military to CIA to Mossad?  Certainly, enough of their co-workers met with horrible deaths back in Germany.  Makes you wonder about their absences and whom exactly was fingering German Nationals and European suppliers.....  Someone was feeding the Mossad and father was a Jewish convert after all.  To further add to the discussion, he received his second Bronze Star just after the missiles failed to launch in 1967 War.

Tales of Pork

The US used to have a base outside of Tripoli, obviously, if my father was involved - nasty stuff was present.  The base had been there since the end of World War II.  And it seems that there was a certain young officer in the Libyan Army whom was attempting to breech the base perimeter either for the sake of gaining arms or cause an international incident.

What is one to do?  The US Government under Lynden B. Johnson was committed to not offending host countries, but here was a situation where a loose cannon officer was trying to cause an incident and rightfully, even by treaty should be shot for his attempts to scale the wire..

Of course, he did get the incident he sought, just only not quite the way he thought it would go.

Father ordered the water trucks filled with the deep fry fat (hot pork grease) from the NCO club and then driven out to the fence the radicals were gathering near for their morning - "go ahead and blow me off this wire with a fire hose" routine.

The group rushed the fence, a translator warned them of what would happen and they dared the pumpers to make them unclean.

Yeah, a certain young Lieutenant Gaddafi was completely hosed down and left standing covered in pork fat.

Father had a very great laugh over that one.  Of course, officially he was reprimanded by the US State Department, as the Department of Defense promoted him at the same time.

As an aside to this tale, father expressed complete satisfaction at having taken a situation and defused it without the taking of human life.  Since the wire was now even unclean, no one attempted to scale it again.....

Germany

Germany was a bit different than France, in almost all regards.  For instance, our forced removal from France was in December - we arrived at Kaiserslautern on a Sunday I believe.  Monday morning my sister and I were arrested for not being in school!  Yeah.  Just playing on the swing set at the hotel and boom! off to police holding.  As Germany was to prove, it was not the friendliest of places to live, unless you appreciate complete control freaks.

It was also the place where father changed radically.  In Portland, following the Cuban Missile Crisis, father was rarely to be found.  In France he was around the home a great deal of the time.  But, in Germany, he was gone for most of the time on Temporary Duty Assignments.  Yes the world was a crazy place in 1967 and 1968.  We knew where he was to be, we usually knew what was going on from the news, but his absences to those places often ran weeks longer than the actual news event.  It was mystifying to this young man.

On the plus side, mother suffered no more almost fatal "accidents".  But she did become the family control freak - attempting to micro-manage a teen male and that did not go very well - especially since she was barely twice my age as it was!  Of course, when father was home I would catch hell and he became increasingly physically abusive.

There had been times in Portland when I can remember he would come home and just beat the tar out of me, whip me until I bled, for some ill thought out prank.  But, there was once I could agree that I had that level of punishment coming.  That was the time I pulled a knife on him to protect myself from phase II of his abuse.  Bad idea, when you do not really know how to use a knife for defense.  In Germany, it became worse.  I swear if I opened my mouth, it was going to be filled with his fist.  That little arrest incident over playing on the hotel swings, brought on one of the most unjust of all beatings - especially since my sister received no punishment at all.  Somehow, I was to have known better than to play in a playground on a Monday morning.....  So I tried to stay away from him and the family as much as possible.  Oh yeah, I was beaten for that as well.

And honestly, I have no idea what our being in Germany had to do with his escalating violence towards me in particular.  But, even Germany itself was not exactly a great place back then either - as I will discuss later.

Deportation

In the world of politics, relations between America and France deteriorated tremendously - thanks to the US Ambassador, Sargent Shriver.  As read in the Stars and Stripes, as well as pieced together from adult conversations: Shriver had a son whom was 14 at the time.  Said kid in 1966 stole a car, went for a joyride and ended up killing an old woman walking along side the road.  DeGaulle confronted Shriver over this and the conversation turned ugly.  DeGaulle suggested that if the US could not control its children, then  maybe they needed to leave French soil by the end of 1967.  Shriver countered that if DeGaulle could not appreciate all the US was doing for France then perhaps the US needed to leave by May 1967.  DeGaulle then issued an order that all NATO facilities were to be closed as of April (26th as I remember) 1967.

Of course the French were outraged by this.  It was just more fuel for the French nationalist fires burning over America's entrance into the Vietnam conflict, a French territory.  Local villagers where I lived rose up in arms and slaughtered several of the NATO children living across the canal from us - amongst them my only English speaking friend.

Things had become so messy that by December 1966, we were escorted off French soil by machine gun toting policeman - all the way to the German border.  They were actually quite nice officers, had lunch with us, were very apologetic, etc.

Of course, change is evil and for those suffering with mental problems, change manifests evil.....  And father was not alone in getting a share of mother's difficulties.

France - Further Strain

Heeding his friends wisdom, father applied for  and got a posting to France.  His hope was to get mother to become less of a control freak and more dependent upon him.  Best laid plans as they say.

At the time, for some unknown reason, father utterly freaked out when we landed in France.  He went from normal to completely unable to speak for many weeks!  And he spoke French fluently, but with having lost his voice, we were dead in the water.  Something in father's past I assume caused this but I have no idea what stressed him to that level, just by landing in Paris.

Mother really did not do very well in France.  She refused to learn French, speak anything other than English and began rapidly becoming very 'odd' - like yelling at the French in English so they could hear her better.  Little things like leaving the house were only done when she was to drive to the nearest NATO base for shopping.  She formed no relations with any of the neighbors, except one old couple whom would watch my sister and I after school.  Yeah, odd.

My parents marriage must have begun deteriorating badly as father did some mighty odd things himself.  There were a series of 'accidents' which almost killed mother.  Were they accidents?  Or were they planned?  Mother was convinced that father was trying to kill her - the NATO police did not agree.  But, the grilling father got only made him more angry with her.

Within a short period of time, a kerosene heater failed and almost killed her due to carbon-monoxide poisoning.  Father was affected too but not near as bad as mother was.  Mistake, equipment failure or by design?

Father set a trip wire on the stairs which went up to the attic where mother hung the clothes in winter time.  She darn near broke her neck coming back down the stairs!  I know father did that because I saw him setting it but was too naive at the time to figure that one out!  The police never talked to me about that and I was ultimately blamed for it!  That was one was by design, which makes me wonder at the other incidents!.

A short time later, mother was driving to the local NATO base and one of the wheels came off of the car.  The only reason mother survived the crash was a tractor had pulled out onto the road and she slowed down from 60 to 20 before the parting of the wheel from the car.  Again, another accident?  NATO police blamed the local communist party.  But, where did they get a non-metric lug wrench for a car?  American bolts do not match up with metric tools well and the nut heads were in good shape.  No, that had to be father or another American in the area.

But why do this at all? I can not believe that he was planning on returning to Monika.....

My first indication that mother had lost it was when we were vacationing in Spain in 1966.  One morning she, out of the blue, started screaming and hollering about how we had to return home that day, immediately!  It was all very unpleasant and father drove us non-stop all the way from the Spanish coast to northern France in one horrible 27 hour drive!  Mother screaming, no words, just screaming the entire time!  Father so angry he bit the stem of his pipe in half, us kids cowering in the back seat.  Lord only knew what would happen next!  It was that bad.

Definitely, whatever it was that set her off, she remained 'odd' for the rest of her life.  One would at this point suppose that another change might help.  As it was world politics were about to provide a change of scenery for her and massive trauma for father.  Us kids were just plain screwed.....

Control Freak

I have mentioned in the past that I was a very aware young man, much to my parents dismay.  I could see, hear, reason and then understand a great deal far in advance of my years.  One of my many observations revolved around my parents marriage.  All was not well.

Father could tolerate no dust, no disturbance in his life!  So he would hide nickels around the house and then upon returning home, inspect the house to be sure all of the nickels had been accounted for as well the house work done to his satisfaction!  This went so far as to the proper tautness of the blankets on our beds and both my sister and I were inspected every afternoon for having achieved this.  Failure to do so ended with increasingly painful punishments.

I was not allowed to wear tennis shoes and so my shoes had to be inspected every evening as well.  Apparently this one task I excelled in and so by the time I was eight, he had me doing his shoes every evening.  Mandatory spit shine.  Okay I will admit that on occasion I would blow my nose on his shoes.  He never knew the difference and it gave me pleasure not to spit on his shoe but give him a snot shine....

Father was not an native English speaker, mother was, and she was constantly correcting him.  It became a power point for her to hold over him.  Also, she would choose the worse possible foods - things she knew he hated.  Think rutabagas, turnips and parsnips!  I am violently made ill by even the smell of them ... father was merely irritated by them.  It was just one more of many points of contest between them.

And someone amongst father's friends suggested that he should put the shoe on the other foot and completely remove her from her comfort zone.  Oh yeah, that one is going to teach her a lesson, right?

Sports

I have to admit that one thing I never did understand about father was his complete disregard for anything related to sports.  I am not sure he actually ever played a sport, even as a child!  He was a terrible runner and though he boasted of having been a skier - he actually couldn't even do the basics.  So, I think he must have watched skiers, not actually ever skied himself.

When I was 8 years old, I was growing at the rate of just over one inch a month!  My parents hauled me into the doctor's since I was getting really tall for my age - his advice: buy the kid a basketball.  Of course, had I any coordination that might have been really good advice but I was an utter klutz and more than once was beaten up by the ball.

Sports never did play an important role in my life, but I did play for all of the schools I attended.  Soccer teams in France and Germany, baseball in Germany, basketball and tennis here in America.  And for all of those games, across all of those years, want to guess whom never came to a single one?  Yeah, father.

I know in his mind it revolved around work being first, wife second, then friends, then children.  But you would think that in 8 years he could have made one game!  Especially true for the ones on Saturdays.

So, I think you are getting a picture of the man I really did not know very well.

Fishing

My grandfather, mother's strep-father, loved fishing.  If he was not working, then he was fishing.  I never caught anything but it was a fun activity.  Somewhere, father got the idea to take me fishing.

Now we lived on top of the bluff, on the northwest side of the Willamette River valley, overlooking Swan Island.  So, off we marched to the little road which wound its way down to the water.  Father of course was in shirt and tie, his most basic of all leisure dress.  His shoes were inappropriate for hiking on a muddy road with a steep incline.  Yes, you guessed it, he went a tumbling sliding down the length of that road!

Oh was he ever so angry over that mud bath!  I think I picked up swear words in five languages during that one!

So he ordered me back home and I had to wait at the top while he slipped and cursed his way back up to the top of the bluff.  That was to be the end of all fishing trips for him.

Luckily, two of my friends were old enough to walk with me and so we would go together.  No we never caught anything but then I am not sure that is the point of male adventures or bonding.....