Major Conflict Read online

  Pulling off the autobahn at our ausfahrt (exit), we came upon a charming little town called Butzbach. Butzbach is picturesque and has a wonderfully warm feel to it. Off-white stucco buildings with exposed timber beams rise along cobblestone streets, housing quaint little shops and restaurants. In the center of town is the Marktplatz, where a large circular fountain serves as a kind of rendezvous point. It’s a great place to spend a warm summer afternoon. Butzbach has the simple and wholesome feel of a place that’s been doing things precisely the same way for a very long time, which is no surprise since the history of Butzbach goes back as far as the Roman Empire.

  When I was there Schloss Kaserne housed administrative and support units. If you had pay problems, housing questions, promotion points to add to your records, you went to the kaserne (barracks) in Butzbach. If you were new in country, as I was, you’d spend a week or so there attending an orientation course. You learned how to converse, how to convert money, what the driving laws were—all the basics. If you were an officer, you checked into your BOQ (bachelor officer quarters) at your home post and went during the day for the courses. This was changed later on so that everyone, regardless of rank, had to stay at the Twenty-first Replacement Battalion. Apparently, too many officers were blowing off the courses, setting a bad example for the troops.

  After checking into the replacement battalion at Butzbach, we drove to the Ayers Kaserne at Kirch-Göns, where our unit was located. It was a postage stamp compared to the massive installations you find in the United States. And it was completely fenced in and heavily guarded. Armed guards manned the gate on a rotating basis twenty-four/seven. At that time, most posts in America were completely open. Here it was different because the troops had been the target of terrorist attacks in the 1970s by radical Marxist groups like the Red Brigades in Italy and the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany. Security was also a major focus because the Soviet Union had a robust espionage operation in the West that was designed to monitor our deployments and equipment.

  The entire post was maybe three miles in circumference, and the BOQs were located on the backside of the kaserne next to the officers’ club. Ron made sure I got settled into my BOQ and left me for the evening.

  My BOQ was dingy and small and dirty, like some lonely furnished room straight out of a T. S. Eliot poem. You couldn’t help but wonder if they deliberately neglected the BOQs as an inducement to marriage—this is what awaits you in the land of bachelorhood! And surely the rooms for “confirmed bachelorhood” would be much, much worse. Spartan would be an overstatement. There was a single bed with a lumpy mattress. There was one chair, a sofa, a TV set. The furniture was covered in some kind of thick brown industrial fabric that reminded me of the protective liner of a flak jacket. Despite being dotted with cigarette burns and covered in stains, some of which looked as if they’d been created before the Berlin Wall even went up, the stuff seemed absolutely indestructible, as if it would outlast the heartiest of cockroaches after a nuclear war. Putting my bags down on top of the old mattress, I reminded myself that I wouldn’t have to stay here for long. After the orientation I’d be able to get an apartment of my own off post. In the meantime I was too tired to care all that much. Even the lumpy mattress didn’t bother me that first night.

  The orientation was pretty uneventful. By the end of the week I was beginning to understand why some officers skipped the classes. The kicker came unexpectedly at the end of the week. As a means of putting the skills we’d learned into practice, we would take a day trip in order to interact in German society.

  “Tomorrow,” our instructor began, picking up a piece of chalk and turning toward the blackboard. “You all are going to make sure you can get your sorry asses around this lovely host country of ours. But you have a choice.” He started making a crude sketch of a castle. “First, you got history,” he went on, pointing to his childlike drawing of two turrets. “Marienburg Castle. Leine River Valley. Nineteenth century. George V. Scenic. Educational. Postcard material for Mom. Or . . . ,” he continued, a slight smile edging up on the sides of his mouth, “you got big city,” and he started drawing the outline of a woman’s body, a very big woman, with enormous breasts and huge hips. “Frankfurt. Red-light district. Pussy,” he said, circling the area around the crotch several times. “So what’ll it be? Castle?” circling the castle. “Or pussy?” circling the crotch area of the sketch again. “Castle or pussy? Castle or pussy?” he kept going back and forth while he repeated this, circling the castle and the crotch area over and over again.

  The whole class, myself included, erupted into laughter and whistles and cheers. I was one of only two officers in the class. The other, a second lieutenant by the name of Zach Forbes, an infantry officer who’d been assigned to Fifth Battalion, Fifth Cavalry Regiment, was sitting next to me. I was smiling and laughing as I turned my head toward Zach, but the truth was I felt a little uneasy. I think even if I’d been 100 percent straight, I’d have felt uneasy. Personally, I really wanted to see the castle. It functioned as a museum of the Hannover Royals, and I’d read a lot about them. And besides, I’d grown up in a big city, so big city was no big deal for me. In addition, I couldn’t imagine that spending the day with a bunch of enlisted guys could lead to anything good, especially in the red-light district. I looked at Zach, but he said nothing and simply rolled his eyes.

  “So what’s it gonna be, fellas, old castle or red-light pussy?” the instructor shouted over the commotion.

  “Do we have to go as part of a tour?” a sergeant in the back yelled, “or can we do our own shit?”

  “Once you’re off the bus you’re on your own. It’s just you and your cock.”

  The sergeant in the back then shouted, “Pussy!” setting off the whole class. Shouts of “Pussy!” came from every part of the room, along with more whistles and clapping and cheers.

  “Well, there you have it. Can’t say I’m surprised,” the instructor said, turning to the blackboard and slashing a big X across the castle and then circling the crotch of the freakishly large woman he’d sketched one last time. “Pussy, it is! I’ll let the driver know.”

  The next morning was bright and sunny. The fountain in the Marktplatz seemed cleaner and brighter than usual. The sun weaved its way through the narrow cobblestone streets of old Butzbach, past the old shoe store and the Italian restaurant where we often ate. Though I’d wanted to see Marienburg, I was excited about going to Frankfurt. I knew it wasn’t quite Paris or Rome, but it was still an important financial center full of history and culture, and I was still pretty much the wide-eyed American, eager to soak everything in.

  I knew that Frankfurt had been virtually leveled by the Allied bombing raids in the war, but that fact didn’t really register until we pulled into the city center. Coming from Butzbach to Frankfurt was like traveling quickly a thousand years through time. Considered the skyscraper capital of Europe, parts of Frankfurt seemed more like New York to me than old Germany. Frankfurt was not the only German city left so devastated by the war, of course. As I traveled around the country over the next four years, I recognized scars from the war nearly everywhere. I’d be looking at some significant church or palace and suddenly notice a seam and realize that only half the building was authentic and that the rest had had to be rebuilt after the war. Seeing these healing scars so prevalent throughout Germany, I soon began to appreciate why the German people were now so ardently devoted to peace, often much to the chagrin of the Reagan administration. I remember the struggle to deploy the Pershing II missiles and the visceral reaction that decision sparked. Literally hundreds of thousands of Germans took to the streets to oppose the decision. At the time, being a casual observer who had yet to travel to Europe, I didn’t really understand their outrage. I thought they were being ungrateful since, after all, we were putting the missiles there at our own expense in order to protect them and the rest of Europe. Once I was there, though, and able to see the scars from the devastation of World War II up close, I understood that
it was much more complicated, that there’s an enormous difference between the way readers experience history through books and the way the citizens of a particular nation experience history they lived through and remember.

  They dropped us off at the Hauptbahnhof, the main terminus of the railways in the city, which was located on the south side of the Stadtmitte, the city center. On the bus ride down, Zach and I had agreed that it was probably bad form for officers to mix with troops in the red-light district, so we split up from the group and for the next three hours walked around the city together, checking out museums and historical sites and the shopping district. It was a nice morning, and we had no trouble navigating “our sorry asses” through the “lovely host country.” Around noon we had lunch in a small café.

  During lunch Zach asked me if I wanted to check out the red-light district. I hesitated but then, seeing his smiling, expectant face beaming at me, said, “Why the hell not?” I figured he’d probably think it was weird if I said no. And besides, I was genuinely curious, though a little fearful.

  I tried to act casual and relaxed as Zach and I made our way to Kaiserstrasse (also known as Kstrasse), talking about old girlfriends and bad dates and parties we’d been to. I was still a bit uncomfortable, but all my reluctance seemed to vanish as we entered Kstrasse, my worries overridden by sheer curiosity and the vague stirrings of desire. With block after block of apartment buildings devoted exclusively to the sex trade, Kstrasse is a wild, wild place, like nothing I’d ever seen, and certainly like nothing that exists in the States. It seemed as if every single window had a red light in it and the windows seemed to go on forever, like a stage set that suggests a kind of infinity. Could there actually be this many women working as prostitutes squeezed into such a relatively small area of town? It was like walking into a fantastic dream.

  Self-conscious and anxious to get off the street and out of view, we picked the nearest building and entered through the Gothic stone arch. The passageway was poorly lit and, ever the native New Yorker, I worried that we were going to get mugged. A short distance ahead of us was a doorway covered with a set of thick, clear plastic curtains that you might see on the back-alley entrance to a restaurant kitchen. Through the curtains we could make out a dim light that seemed to be illuminating the fuzzy outline of several doorways at a greater distance. Classical music and then some jazz, I thought, too distant to identify, drifted softly from the doorway. We pushed through the plastic. As I listened to the curtains clap against each other and against the sides of the doorway, my grandmother’s voice suddenly popped into my head telling me to wash my hands. I smiled to myself and walked forward.

  We’d entered a large lobby with a smooth marble floor. Though still quite dark, it was clear we’d come into a pretty fine old building. The air was filled with the sickly-sweet detergent smell of a freshly mopped floor. I was a little surprised by this since I’d expected something far worse—a lobby crowded with whores and derelicts and drug addicts sprawling in the filth that comes from years of indifference and neglect and dissipation, kind of like the waiting room (now Vanderbilt Hall) in Grand Central Station in the mid-1980s. Instead, this fine old building looked as if it was as meticulously maintained as I imagined the Marienburg Castle was—very clean and ordered, in typically Teutonic fashion.

  At the far end of the lobby I noticed a woman standing in the doorway of what looked like a single room. She wore red satin panties and a feathery red bra. She had shoulder-length, blond hair and perfect skin and not an ounce of fat on her perfectly shaped body. I was kind of stunned by just how beautiful she was and how healthy and normal she looked. Far from the strung-out, crazed hooker I’d imagined, she stood there calmly and entirely self-possessed, patiently observing us as we looked around. As we moved closer, she shifted slightly on her stilettos. I noticed a small sign with a picture of a woman on it hung up rather conspicuously just to the right of her door. Later, I would find out that this was her government license, certifying her status as disease-free, as determined by her last round of STD (sexually transmitted disease) tests, the date of which was stamped on the license. It reminded me of a cabbie’s license in New York. Or the USDA stamp on a package of ground meat. Zach and I nodded to her and she nodded back with a slight, knowing smile. She smelled of what I think was Chanel No. 5. I tried not to stare but was curious about her room. I walked slowly past and looked inside. It was painted a garish color of pink, and the sheets on the bed were deep purple and lavender. There was a decent-looking chair and what looked like a suit holder in the corner. An array of sex toys were hung across one of the walls. A small radio sitting on the night table next to the bed played Mozart softly.

  Despite the apparent civility and cleanliness of the place, I couldn’t help feeling anxious, thinking that at any moment some armed German guy was going to jump out from the shadows and mug us. As Zach moved on and I followed him, I kept looking back over my shoulder to make sure no one was behind us. The last time I looked back, the red-pantied hooker had lit a cigarette and was turning and moving, high atop her red stilettos, into the room with a good-looking middle-aged man, a wisp of cigarette smoke trailing behind her. I’d not even seen the guy coming. The door clicked shut quietly and the Mozart vanished, leaving just the faint sound of a saxophone coming from somewhere and then just silence, which felt like an accusation, like Grandmother’s wagging finger.

  We walked on and came to a short staircase, three small steps down, that took us to a long, dark hallway that led to a larger staircase up to the second floor. It was a little brighter here, on the stairs, and I could just make out the color of the walls, a kind of light brown, lined at the top with a burgundy border covered with flowers, the whole thing so faded it looked as if it had been dipped in bleach. We took a right at the top of the stairs and walked into a long corridor, lit dimly by simple globe light fixtures installed into the ceiling about every five feet. The corridor was lined on both sides with rooms, most with the door open, and a girl standing in the doorway or sitting on a chair or lying on the bed inside the room. I wondered what distinguished the girl down below from all these other girls and, when I couldn’t figure it out, decided that in our anxious haste we’d missed an entire wing of the whorehouse. That first girl was just the first in the first-floor line of girls. And maybe it was a matter of seniority, I thought, the girls down below having worked longer.

  Some of the second-floor girls wore relatively modest silk bathrobes; others had on skimpy lingerie; while the boldest, having dispensed with modesty almost completely, opted for only half an outfit, exposing either their breasts or bottoms, but never both. They appeared to be mostly European, and mostly German, and every single one of them was drop-dead gorgeous. All conversation stopped when we started moving down the corridor. They observed us intently as we walked by, the smokers stopping mid-drag, raising an eyebrow. And we looked them up and down, though each time one of them engaged her eyes with my own, I had to look away, move my eyes forward to the next girl, or down to Zach’s ass just a few feet in front of me, which was, I’d happened to notice, as we’d climbed the stairs, not bad at all. Toward the end of the line of girls Zach stopped and started chatting quietly with one of the girls. I passed him by and moved to the end of the hallway. I wondered what could possibly motivate such beautiful women, or even not-so-beautiful women, to do this kind of work.

  “How did you get into this line of work,” I would ask.

  And the girl would say, matter-of-factly, that it was just her thing. “Some people like to jump out of airplanes,” she would tell me, “or climb mountains or whatever and this just happens to be my adrenaline hit—taking on all you hot American soldiers and tourists and the dirty old German bankers from Deutsche Bank.”

  “And who does your outfits,” I would say.

  “Why, Patricia Field, of course, who else?”

  I laughed at myself, as Zach started walking toward me, having apparently failed to reach a deal with the girl he’d been t
alking to. It really was a different world, I thought. All my life I’d been taught that prostitution was degrading and violent and something to be hidden away from the public eye. But walking through these halls, I got the distinct impression that that just wasn’t the case anymore, at least not here in Germany. About a year later I was talking to a stripper we’d hired for a bachelor party, and she told me that prostitution in Germany is just another job, like being a secretary or a paralegal or a waitress. Women go to work to pay for college, save up for vacations, or simply for the adventure of it. The government monitors everything, so it all runs pretty smoothly and safely. Looking back, I now realize that that particular stripper was an exception, and that she either wasn’t telling me the whole story, or she wasn’t seeing it clearly herself. Truth be told, although the government monitored and controlled prostitution, it was technically still illegal, dangerous, and certainly not “just another job.” Two years ago, in 2002, thirteen years after my experience in the Frankfurt brothel, the German government actually legalized prostitution, and the life is still difficult and dangerous. Many of the prostitutes, some say at least half, are actually illegal immigrants, so the protections designed to protect them as sex workers don’t even apply.

  When Zach reached me, I pushed through the fire door to the stairwell and started climbing the steps to the next floor. Opening the door to the third floor, we found ourselves walking into a totally different world from the one down below. This was apparently the African floor. Occupied entirely by black women, the energy here was far less subdued, more celebratory, freer. The women danced with one another in the middle of the hallway to a Milli Vanilli song that blared from a boom box in one of the rooms. They barely noticed us as we negotiated our way through the crowd of bodies. Slowly, as it became clear they’d received visitors, they collected themselves and moved back to their respective rooms and stood waiting or sat down on the chairs just outside the rooms. Unlike the reserved German girls downstairs, these girls had no problem talking to us, even yelling at us.