40.

On Wednesday, October 15th, our German teachers took all four or five classes of their students on a field trip to San Francisco. We went to the German Consulate, where we watched an earnest black-and-white movie about a plot to assassinate Hitler, a movie to prove to us that there were “good” Germans as well as these stock SS villains gleefully exterminating Jews.

What did I care about the difference between “good” and “bad” Germans? The Hitler era was a long time ago. Besides, I had my Harris Tweed sport coat on. I thought I looked pretty elegant. God, I was excited. I just wanted to inhale the wonderful possibility of learning a new language in the company of my bright new friends. I wanted to walk narrow cobblestone streets in Europe in my new green jacket.

After the movie, our teachers took all twenty or thirty of us over to Schroeder’s German restaurant on Front Street in our civilian clothes. It was a delicious feeling, being in the army and leaving my uniform behind. Our group included two Green Berets. They were hillbillies, one from Tennessee and the other from West Virginia. They didn’t look so good out of uniform, though. They looked diminished in their short-sleeved shirts and out-of-style brogans. One of them had a faded tattoo on his forearm. Shabby, shabby. The rest of us, dressed mostly in tweed coats of some kind, look as though we’re on our way to teach a university class. Those tweed clothes are our real uniform, and we look jaunty.

While the dark paneling, the beer steins, the murals, and the buck heads on the wall of the restaurant were Germanic clichés, I didn’t care. The place seemed European to me, far more European than anything I’d ever seen. I was so excited about the possibility of going to Europe that I could hardly contain myself.

The streets around the restaurant were crowded that day. It was a national day of protest against the war in Vietnam. Since many of the protesters wore black armbands, it was also a day of mourning.

Most of us PFCs were against the war, but we didn’t say or do anything as we walked through the throngs of demonstrators. We didn’t want to jinx our chances for assignments in Germany.

Even my euphoria couldn’t cover up what a strange day it was. Here we were in the army walking among thousands and thousands of antiwar protesters. In the restaurant, we sat under stuffed boar heads and sang “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,” which is still the anthem of Germany.

“What’s a little compromise among friends,” Goldberg said. “We’re the good Americans, right?”

Out of our group, only Neil Renner, a charming blond kid who wore John Lennon glasses and punctuated his speech with little whistling sounds, had the courage to make his opinions known and showed up at the lunch with a black arm-band around the sleeve of his tweed sport coat. The rest of us looked away, embarrassed. When Neil tried to make a joke, we studied our plates filled with sauerbraten and spaetzle as if he weren’t there.

I still have one of the Zap Comix Neil gave me. He bought it in San Francisco. Mr. Natural Visits the City.

WATCH OUT a street sign says in the comic. WATCH OUT.

Nisei Hall was a two-story cinder-block building named after the Japanese Americans US officials quarantined in what looked a lot like concentration camps after the start of World War II. Some of the Nisei taught American soldiers the Japanese language to help the United States occupy Japan at the end of the war.

Room 250 wasn’t very big. It was actually half a room, divided off from the next classroom by a folding accordion door made by, oddly enough, a firm in Janesville. The classroom probably wouldn’t have held more than eight students and a teacher. Even our little class of six felt crowded.

Each classroom door had a window so that the supervisor could check on us and our teachers. That supervisor was generally Frau Schneider, who would sneak up on the classes, her head suddenly appearing in the window like a portrait. The language programs had stringent testing standards imposed by the army, and there simply wasn’t time for idle chit chat. We had to memorize, memorize, memorize. It was Frau Schneider’s job to keep us on schedule.

She occasionally made a surprise visit inside a classroom and threw her arms up and down for emphasis as she went through a dialogue.

Week after week went by at DLI, and we sat in Room 250 of Nisei Hall repeating aloud the dialogues we memorized every night as we listened to our Wollensak tape recorders. We didn’t study Beethoven or Goethe or Nietzsche. No, our guides were military people: our dialogues had characters with names like Captain Quick who guided us around. In German his name was more elegant: Hauptmann Schnell.

So what if all the characters had military ranks? They were teaching us German, weren’t they? Did it matter how that happened? We had castles ahead of us, river cruises on the Danube, cobblestone avenues, and tall glasses of beer. Did it matter how we got there? We would get to culture later on, wouldn’t we?

Night after night, I sat in the corner of the living room, headphones on, snapping the keys of the controls. PLAY, STOP, REWIND, PLAY. The American voice introduced the German.

Listen carefully,

he said. But eventually the voices were German. A little tired, sometimes thick with cigarette smoke or hangovers, they slowly enunciate basic German sentences. While many people my age are getting stoned and listening to Pink Floyd through their earphones, I’m sitting in a chilly two-room apartment in Monterey repeating German.

Was machen Sie in Monterey?

Ich lerne hier Deutsch.

Wirklich? I lerne auch Deutsch.

Through the heavy green Koss headphones with the big plug attached to the Wollensak came the crisp German syllables.

What are you doing in Monterey?

I am here learning German.

Really? I am also learning German.

Every evening I sat in the corner of that apartment going over and over the dialogues. I occasionally looked up and saw Jenny sitting there reading or staring off into space.

I went back to the Defense Language Institute last fall. The Basic German course is still being taught, though with new materials.

“But Hauptmann Schnell continues to be a man of these new times,” Ben de la Silva, president of the DLI alumni group, tells me. “I understand that there are photographs taken in East German bathrooms after the Wall came down. ‘Hauptmann Schnell Was Here’ was written on the toilet walls, as if good old Captain Quick, famous DLI alumni, had beaten everyone there.”

I still have the tapes and the books from my class, but I no longer have Jenny, no. Not Jenny sitting there, her legs folded up beneath her. Jenny sitting there, rocking back and forth, holding on to her legs. I should apologize for what I did to her.

I am so sorry, Jenny. Will you forgive me?

But then, back then I have drills to learn. Idioms to master. I don’t have time to apologize.

New pattern,

the flat voice says.

New pattern.
Model.

Jung.

Ich bin jung.

Now you do it.

Yes, I say to myself along with him.

Now you do it, Rick.

You do it.

You’re young.

Now you do it.