55.

Ah, yes, the good life, all courtesy of the US Army. And, oh, Angelika. I musn’t forget my Angelika, my little German revolutionary.

She was the administrator at a University of Maryland office in Turley Barracks. Her office was right across the hall from mine. It was a place where the soldiers from the tank corps, who made up most of Turley’s population, could sign up for classes. Perhaps because the office was in a military police station, she didn’t get much business, so she spent most of her time reading or hanging out in a nearby army snack bar drinking Cokes. When Lance B. Edwards was gone, she took to visiting me.

Slightly buck-toothed, Angelika exuded a simple sexuality. She wore very short skirts and would occasionally bend over in front me, showing me the crotch of her pink panties. She wore translucent blouses, and you could see the dark outlines of her puffy nipples. When we talked, she would sometimes run her index finger down my arm, and I would often be in a state of half tumescence when I spoke with her, unsure of what we said.

Even though she was German, we had oddly similar backgrounds—both of us were the children of unhappy government workers. We’d both majored in English literature and believed we were intellectuals. We were both working for the US Army and thought of ourselves as subversives, though Angelika, if her pictures were to be believed, was a little more serious than I was.

She showed me a snapshot of her standing before a Che Guevara poster holding some kind of automatic weapon. She also loved the Baader-Meinhof Gang and had a scrapbook filled with newspaper articles about them. She told me she knew many of the gang members.

Since what mostly interested me about Angelika was her sexuality, I didn’t pay much attention to the political stuff. I didn’t care about politics.

One morning, she came into my office, gave me a lingering French kiss, and sat down on the top of my desk. Her legs straddled my chest; her crotch was right there in front of me. Without thinking, I began caressing it. She closed her eyes and began humming a tune.

“Oh, my little soldier boy, such fingers du hast. My. Yes. My. My.”

The next thing she was sitting on my lap rocking back and forth, trying to unzip me.

Even now, decades later, I have to close my eyes when I think of the waves of longing that came over me.

“Your place,” I said, breathing hard. “I’ll take you home from work. Three thirty. I’ll leave early. We can’t do this here.”

She got up, pulled her tiny skirt down over her exposed panties, blew me a kiss, and left.

I looked down at my crotch. It had blotches of her wetness there.

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I ached looking at the slow passage of time on my watch but then we were out the door and into the Volvo and she was unzipping my pants and sucking on my cock and I was driving to her little apartment in Neckargmünd. It was really just a large room with a sink and a hot plate and a bathroom to one side and then we were out of our clothes and making love on her squeaky bed.

I get dizzy thinking about the months we were together. I usually stayed until six or seven. I told Angelika I had to leave because I had to check in at my barrack because of my security clearance. When I got home to Jenny, I told her we’d been having special military exercises and that I’d be coming home late for the foreseeable future.

I led this delicious double life. I was having it all. Saint Moritz and Paris and London. A cool apartment. New Dansk dishes. Two women to fuck. All brought to me courtesy of the United States Army. Wonderful.

Sometimes Angelika and I would sneak away from work in the middle of the day and lie around her apartment making love and drinking Riesling. Other times we would have sex standing up in the storage closet at the back of her University of Maryland office.

Angelika wanted me to be her boyfriend, and I didn’t have the courage to tell her I was already married. I just kept making up stories about my security clearance when she asked me to go out in public with her.

“We’ve got to keep this a secret,” I said. “I’m not allowed to be seen with a German national. It would compromise my job.”

She wanted my picture, and I let her photocopy the one in my customs police identification wallet. She had the photo framed and put it on her dresser.

“I’ve got my own soldier who will take me to live in America,” she kept saying and French kissing me afterward.

I’m not sure why Angelika liked me so much. She probably could have had any soldier she wanted. Maybe she was in love with me.

Her apartment was filled with anti-American political tracts and posters promoting—along with Che and Mao and Ho Chi Minh—the Baader-Meinhof Gruppe. She told me she was just a pal of the gang’s, though not really a member. I suppose this confession should have triggered an alarm, but I was so interested in the next blow job that I didn’t pay it any mind.

As Sergeant Dooley once explained, “You don’t want the truth to interfere with your fucking.”

Angelika just kept telling me that she and I would go to America together and be revolutionaries together when I got out of the army.

She told me she loved me. She gave me a key to her apartment. How delicious it was when I would get there before she did, undress, crawl under the cool sheets, and wait to surprise her.

Ach, ja,” she would say, stepping out of her skirt as she came toward me. “Here is my American soldier defending his little bit of Deutschland.”

Jean-Claude Killy, Paris. Dansk. And, now, add Angelika to that. My lovely Angelika.