Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
Q:
Let's turn a minute to talk about what it was like to be stationed in Germany during this time.
A:
From '57 to '59.
Q:
You were at Hanau.
A:
Yes.
Q:
What were the facilities like in the late '50s? For the BOQs?
A:
The 23d Engineer Battalion was in Hessen Homburg Kaserne. Just two years ago [1988], we
started fixing up Hessen Homburg for the first time since then. It was an old German kaserne.
It still had the rifle racks in the hall in an alcove. It was adequate for our need then, barely.
We had a motor pool that was down at the far end of Hutier Kaserne. You had to climb over
a bridge over a street between Hessen Homburg and Hutier, and then walk to the motor pool
for the tracked vehicles at the far end of Hutier.
We had a cinder courtyard in the middle of all our kasernes where we could have company
formations. Typically physical training in the morning was out there, and we could fall out
formations for morning work call and that sort of thing. The battalion commander ran the
kaserne, where we had our own company messes and luckily our own theater where we could
get large numbers of people together.
Years later they put a headquarters and a medical battalion in that same kaserne. They parked
tracked vehicles on the middle quadrangle, which really made it awfully tight. I would have
thought it would be very difficult to have lived under those conditions.
As a lieutenant living in Germany at that time, my BOQ was near Campo Pond. I had a
single room, shared a bath. I ate all of my meals at the officers mess located in old Argonner
Kaserne just two blocks from the BOQ. The facilities that are Hanau's today, basic kasernes,
were there then. The family housing areas were nearby, so when you were invited to another
lieutenant's home in the evening for dinner, as you were from time to time, they were usually
within walking distance.
A bachelor's life was spent, when not in the field, out looking for girls, like any other place.
You met them in the American community or at the movie, or you could go out and meet
German girls. We had one lieutenant in the battalion who was engaged to a German girl, so
dates could be arranged through her and her friends for others. There were also the special
service girls who operated the rec centers, and the teachers in the Hanau schools lived in a
women's quarters nearby. Thus, much of the social interaction was around that.
Garmisch existed as a recreation center, so you could go there to ski in the winter. Then you
could book your own travel, either tours or on your own, driving to various places. That was
the era of not many German cars on the road and the era of 4.2 marks to the dollar. You
know, you could go down the street and get a rump steak for
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.50 or .00. A lot of the
German cars on the road were the little Messerschmidt three-wheelers, more like the cockpit
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