Three was never a crowd

This is my August offering for Brazos Monthly magazine

We weren’t as debonaire or as suave as the three musketeers, nor anywhere near as learned and devout as the three wise men.  Sometimes, after a few beers, we were probably more like the Three Stooges.

We came closest to being the three amigos.

During all of 1973 and some of 1974 we were Army privates and roommates in E Company, 123d Maintenance Battalion in Germany.  We had done all of our growing up till then in small towns, Donnie in Arkansas, Wendell in West Virginia and me, the oldest by one year at twenty, in Oakwood in east Texas.  Donnie and Wendell worked in the small arms repair shop and I was a job order clerk in the office that shared its space tucked away in a corner of a massive airplane hangar that had been a German Luftwaffe base during WWII and was now where everything from helicopters and tanks to rifles, pistols and binoculars came to be repaired from the far-flung U. S. First Armored Division in western Europe.

The barracks and mess hall were in an attached building that had, three decades before, housed Nazi soldiers and flyers.  Our second floor room was a narrow long high-ceilinged chamber with a tall window at the end that looked out on the small post called Stork Barracks and, across a tall chain-link fence, the quaint Bavarian village called Illesheim.

 We worked in close quarters every weekday, ate our meals in the mess hall together or went occasionally for schnitzel and  a stein of local brew at a favorite gasthaus in the village.  On weekends we roamed, taking the train to places like Rothenburg or Nuremberg. In all our time together we never had an argument about anything more serious than which sports teams we pulled for. We’d sit big bottles of German beer out on the window sill on winter nights to chill and watch American shows dubbed in German on the small television set we’d bought at the base PX.  And we’d tell each other stories, probably embellished, about our hometowns and our various girlfriends and exploits back there. Sometimes Wendell would put a John Denver record on the stereo and play what must be the common anthem of West Virginians in distant places ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’. 

Finally, our roads did take us home.  And we didn’t see each other again for fifteen years, when we gathered for a reunion organized by another friend in E Company who lived in southern Missouri.  We spent three great days together, and nobody there was surprised that we three were never far apart.

When we said our goodbyes on the last morning before heading home we gave each other bearhugs and agreed we ought to repeat the get-together every so often.  Then we made sure we had each other’s addresses and phone numbers and promised to keep in touch.

But we didn’t.

I don’t know why.  Maybe just because life sometimes gets in the way when you have a family and countless obligations.  And maybe just because most people have made some promises we didn’t keep.

Donnie and Wendell and I are now senior citizens, a full half century removed from the young, energetic, up-for-any-adventure trio that bounded around in another place and time.  And one of the reasons none us made that phone call might be that we wondered (feared?) what we would have to talk about after going through some old memories.  Illness?  Grandchildren? Arthritis? Politics? Personally, I try to avoid talking about politics with anybody these days unless I know exactly where they stand on that now volatile subject. 

Maybe we let so much time slip by without reaching out that we thought it would be too awkward to do it now.  And maybe there’s another reason, another ‘what if?’  that kept us from picking up the phone. I admit it might have been one in my case.  What if, I’ve wondered, I call Donnie or Wendell and he doesn’t remember me.

Or, even worse, what if one of both of them are no longer there at all.

 Such scenarios present themselves when we consider crossing a bridge to someone or something that we should have connected with long ago.   It takes some courage to step onto that bridge and face what you find on the other side.  But that courage is counterbalanced by the safety of leaving the past in the past.

I think of Donnie and Wendell and all of our other buddies in E Company often.  Stork Barracks is still an operational Army post, nestled beside the old village called Illesheim (I Googled it).  I’ve sometimes thought it might be fun to visit.  But I won’t do that any more than I will probably not make those phone calls.

Stork Barracks surely won’t be the same as it was in 1974, any more than those of us who served and lived there are the same.

But we’re exactly the same in my memories.  And in this one case, at least, maybe that’s where we should stay.