I arrived at the Rhine Medical Depot (RMD) as a Private, E-2, in January 1955. I entered Germany at the port of Bremerhaven aboard a WW-II Liberty Ship, the USS General Hahn, after a stop at Southampton to off-load some of our Airman passengers. We left the Brooklyn Navy Yard with 2000-3000 Army troopers and Air Force Airmen 10 days or so earlier.

We had typical North Atlantic winter weather, which meant they stopped choosing people from our forward compartment two days out because the motion was so severe that seasickness kept everyone in their four-high bunks. The ship’s bow plowed under each wave and we weren’t allowed on deck because the decks were under water much of the time. Landlubbers like me worried at the entire ship shuddering when the propellers cleared the water as waves passed under the stern. Wave crests were higher than the ship’s bridge as we wallowed through the troughs. The ship’s newsletter advised us we were experiencing “moderate seas.” They could have fooled me.

We traveled by train from Bremerhaven—my first experience with European-styled rail compartments—to a replacement center in southwestern Germany (Zweibrücken?). There, they lectured that the tension with the Communist East was very real and that we should take the occasional alerts seriously because the Russian Army still made threatening moves at the borders.

We traveled to RMD by truck. There, we were told that we were in the process of expanding and absorbing the role of another medical depot that had been based in France. According to the explanation, the DeGaulle government had decided it would be better off with a diminished US military presence on their soil. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was still new and there was a lot of jockeying around among the members. West Germany, where the RMD was located, didn’t become a member of NATO until mid-1955.

I had been drafted a year earlier and inducted less than a week after I had completed the requirements for a BA degree. After Basic Training in Arkansas and a few weeks of Medic’s training in San Antonio, the Army sent me to St. Louis to become a Basic Hospital Equipment Repairman. The “Basic” meant that I was qualified to service the rudimentary equipment usually found in an Army MASH unit on the front lines. The real Repairman had at least a full year of training and could work on the big stuff in the base hospitals. There was no active fighting going on at the time so there were no MASH units. That meant they had too many of us “Basic” types and needed to find a use for us.

My entire class of “Basics” bounced individually from one post to the next over several months in the States before being sent overseas. The RMD had 10 or 15 of us at any given time and they were authorized for none so we did other things, mostly non-maintenance activity in the Depot Maintenance shop. There were a half-dozen or so of the real Army repairmen in the shop doing their thing on American manufactured equipment and about as many German civilian technicians working on German manufactured gear. When Army European hospital personnel could no longer cope with a broken piece of equipment, they sent it to our shop where we had more exotic tools and knowledge.

When I first arrived, I worked on cleaning, crating, and boxing repaired equipment going back to hospitals. German civilian carpenters did the real crating and boxing in a shop at the south end of Building 2115 under the rigorous supervision of Fritz, a large-sized former Sergeant Major in the German Army. If we GIs were nice, Fritz would let us lesser humans use his shop to crate and pack things such as fine china and cuckoo clocks we were shipping home. After a week or two, I was shifted into the Maintenance records office when the GI who had been doing the work was rotated home. I was the clerk in that office for the rest of my time in Germany.

While I was there, the Depot looked exactly as shown on the map in the “USAMDE Briefing Brochure, early 1960s,” dated 31 Mar 61. As I recall, buildings 2108, 2109, and 2110, served as troop housing on the upper two floors. The four-man room to which I was assigned was on the second floor of Building 2108. The ground floor of that building served as home for the very nice little library and for the Base PX where I bought the Agfa 35-mm camera that took our family pictures for the next 30 years. I also bought cigarettes by the carton even though I didn’t smoke. Many of us participated at some level in the gray market as a favor to our German civilian friends because there were no taxes involved at the PX.

The ground floor of Building 2109 served as Company Headquarters and day room. Such weaponry as existed on the base was locked up there. Selected individuals were “issued” one of the M-1 Carbines stored there. The assignment was supposed to rotate, but mine didn’t. Each time we had an Alert—once a month or so—or when we went on a field maneuver, those of us with a carbine assigned would report to the squad room to pick up the weapon and carry it until the event was over. I don’t know who cleaned the rifle, but it wasn’t me. At least once while I was there, we took a field weekend at the rifle range where we went through the motions of “qualifying.” We were led to believe that we were experiencing far more emphasis on field exercise and inspections than had our predecessors because someone in the command hierarchy had decided we should be able to pass for soldiers even if we were Medical Corps.

The ground floor of Building 2110 had the Optical Shop where, as far as I know, they ground all the lenses for all the Army spectacles in Germany and perhaps in Europe. There was also a dental clinic on that floor of that building. An Army dentist showed up occasionally to handle appointments for the people on the base.

In spite of the fact that I was always broke (the local rank backlog did finally break in time for me to make E-3 six months after I arrived, but I made E-4 less than two weeks before I left to come home), I was too far from home to visit on leave, and my mastery of the language was far from adequate, I now treasure my time at RMD. At the time, among other inconveniences, I resented having to fall out each morning and noon into formation in what the map calls the “Troop Area.” Even that had its comic relief. Often, while were standing in formation, jet fighters would roar in at low altitude for a landing (I believe at Ramstein AB) and drown out the lecture we were receiving. Our First Sergeant, a former boxer, liked to hear himself talk and would end up apoplectic and shaking his fists in frustration at the planes. They flew low enough that we could often make out the pilot’s helmet through the plane’s canopy and we were convinced the pilots knew the effect they were having on the ground.

As compensation for all this inconvenience, I was exposed to things not available on the farm at home. In Kaiserslautern, I saw and heard my first real, live opera (written by an Italian, sung in German) and saw my first live ballet (music by a French composer, danced by German dancers). By the magic of the three-day pass and tours offered by American Express, I visited the major cities in Switzerland and stayed in my first four star hotel. By the same magic, I walked the banks of the Seine, rode Paris taxies, and saw Winged Victory and The Madonna With Child in the Louvre.

I was able to hitch a free ride on a DC-3 to England and spend four days living in the non-commissioned officers’ section of the British Enlisted Men’s Club in London. I watched the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace and saw three Broadway plays starring world-class actors (Rex Harrison in Bell Book and Candle for one). When I was ready to return to Germany, there were no flights, so I shipped aboard an over-night Channel ferry from Dover to Ostend (I think) and rode trains back to Kaiserslautern through two or three countries with checkpoints at every border. I was in uniform, carrying my US Army ID and no one blinked at my not having a passport.

I took a boat on the Rhine to the Rock of the Lorelei and back to Bingen, a town not much changed for hundreds of years. I visited Heidelberg Castle. I visited Munich and listened to the singing over bier at the old Hofbrau Haus. I watched an ice show in Garmisch-Partenkirchen that rivaled any ice show I’ve seen since.

I also managed to get myself nearly killed in a traffic crash when an inebriated commissioned Army officer rammed into the rear of my roommate’s motorcycle (on which I was a passenger) as we slowed (with signals) to turn into the RMD front gate. The MPs let him proceed with a warning and we learned later that he had ended up in the hospital after wrapping his car around a roadside tree just a mile or two further down the road after leaving the scene of our accident.

I remember the food as good. German civilian employees did all the KP duty while US Army cooks did the food prep. The Enlisted Men’s Club was outstanding, with regular shows and excellent food and service. I worked evenings at the post movie theater for extra cash, first as a ticket seller/collector, and then as projector operator. It became a comfortable routine to drop by the EM Club after the theater closed each evening for the best beer and grilled cheese sandwiches I ever ingested.

I received flight priority for coming home and my orders called for a simple connection out of Frankfurt. That got complicated when someone decided that 10-15 of us already in Frankfurt should take the train to Munich and fill some empty seats on the last planeload of an entire unit being rotated home. That change led to two nights in a Munich hotel (where we learned we were to pay for our own meals although we had been given no travel advance to cover such) with a group of GIs and their wives and kids waiting for the plane to take off. We weren’t allowed to leave the hotel because a replacement engine had to be flown in from Amsterdam and they didn’t want to come looking for us if the engine appeared and got installed unexpectedly.

At the time of the changes in Frankfurt leading to my flying out of Munich, my orders had not been fully re-cut to get me any further than (then) Idlewild Airport in New York City, the destination of the unit rotating. After a lucky Greyhound bus ride to Fort Dix, some very kind civilian clerks worked past their 5:00pm quitting time to get me on a plane to Chicago Midway Airport and then on a train to Fort Sheridan where I mustered out on 16 Jan 1956.