59.

On May 24th, the Baader-Meinhof Gruppe set off bombs at Campbell Barracks, the US Army facility in Heidelberg, killing three people. It was the front-page story in the Stars and Stripes I picked up at the snack bar on my way into work the next morning.

The attack really frightened me. I wondered if Angelika had anything to do with it. I was nervous as I came into the main hall of the Turley Barracks MP Station, but the door to her office was closed and I didn’t have to deal with it. I was relieved.

“Ryan, did you see this?”

Lance B. Edwards was standing in the doorway to my office in our MP Customs suite a few minutes after I got to my desk. I thought he was talking about the bomb attack and went on studying the picture of the overturned Ford Capri in the parking lot at Campbell Barracks on the front page of Stars and Stripes. The car was blown up in the lot just outside of the main Twenty-Second MP Group Headquarters.

“Man, this is all a little close for me,” I said to Lance B. Edwards and held up the front page of the paper.

“Ryan, I knew you were talented, but I didn’t know that you were famous.”

“What do you mean?”

I put down the paper.

“Here.” He handed me a small poster with torn corners.

And there I was—or there’s my customs police ID photograph, the one Angelika wanted—on an anarchist wanted poster.

GESUCHT, the poster said right over the top of my face. WANTED. Wir suchen diesen Mann wegen krimineller Aktivitäten gegen das deutschen Volk. Verratsgesuch.

We’re searching for this man who’s guilty of criminal activities against the German people. Traitor Wanted.

“You must have quite the night life, Sergeant Ryan,” Lance B. Edwards said, for the first and only time using my actual army rank.

“Jesus,” I said. “Jesus H. Christ.”

What was it Angelika had said?

I fix you good. I will call my Baader-Meinhof friends.

“Where did you find this?” I asked Edwards.

“They’re all over Heidelberg,” Edwards said. “What’s your rotation date?”

“June 15th. Jenny’s leaving this Saturday. Most of our stuff has already been shipped.”

“Look: I got a call from headquarters about a raid in the morning. You and Goldberg go on that one. Then I vote you pack your stuff and get your ass out of the Federal Republic of Germany next Monday. I’ll get you some emergency orders, OK?”

I looked at the wanted poster of me, a little artifact that has me squarely on the wrong side of something. Is this, I wonder, what history looks like?