Friends, dear friends, Berlin friends
Friends visited Patrice and I in France last week (June 18-22, 2025).
I had met Alexandra, Jill, and Garrit in 1972 (thereabout) when I was a callow young Air Force officer in Berlin, Germany, where they witnessed me growing up (whether they noticed, I’m uncertain, for they, too, were growing up.)
When I arrived in Berlin in December 1971, I was a jerk to women. [Curious what I imagine a jerk might be? Try this scene from the upcoming novel Berlin Diary).
Of course, I always felt like a jerk when I dumped, disappointed, or made myself rare and vague, but Judy Collins soothed my guilt (whereas Linda Ronstadt could make me feel just awful).
while
Lindar Ronstadt excoriates a jerk.
The Soviet Army had primary influence on my transition from shithead to dedicated USAF officer (See here),
But the Alexandra, Gerrit and Jill friendship has retained its power over the decades. It is a mystery the novelist or even better, the poet, addresses.
I arrived in Berlin as a bachelor Air Force officer who had spent his first 23-odd years working: working the family farm, working my way through college, and working the Ho Chi Minh Trail. I arrived in Berlin from Southeast Asia in December 1971, rich beyond my wildest imagining (an O-2 over two was paid $667.80 monthly, plus a $47.88 food allowance, plus quarters). I bought a car, was assigned an apartment overlooking the Berlin Grunewald, and assigned to Able Flight, 6912 Security Squadron, doing shift work. My expenses were 20DM weekly for Frau Jager, the cleaning lady. The rest was mine, all mine, to spend.
My mission was to command 70- 80 men (and post end-of-the-draft women began to arrive around 1974, but that’s another story), whom the senior sergeants supervised. We monitored the Soviet 16th & 37th Tactical Air Armies (which had been barely upgraded since the MIG-17).
I met Alexandra, a 17-year-old English girl, at a dinner with a colleague’s family. She was beautiful, stacked, and seventeen-years-old. Though at that age, I was a jerk with women, I didn’t seduce children,
I don’t deserve a great big atta-boy for putting the child off-limits.  Berlin was a bachelor’s heaven; the city was full of gorgeous women: colonel’s daughters, US Army nurses, PANAM and BEA flight attendants, American and British teachers, radical German students, and American college girls touring the continent open to a little fling with a good-looking GI. It was fishing with hand grenades.
Alexandra was a woman of grace, charm and beauty, safe, off-limits, requiring no emotional nonsense, who would accompany me to military soirees, making my fellow officers eat their livers out with envy. She was also a starving student. She cleared the buffet tables at diplomatic receptions. I fed her American steaks, which she demolished in minutes. Over time, I came to realize that Alexandra was on her own journey. Over time, our friendship grew. Over the years, we shared one another’s victories, defeats, heart-breaking loss, ungrateful children, adoring grandchildren (why do grandchildren and grandparents get along so well? Answer: They have a common enemy.)
So too it was with Jill (Canadian) and Gerrit (German) who became my friends in Berlin in that first half-decade of the 1970s. I will ponder further what Jill and Gerrit meant to me, and think/write about it ( in fiction?).
I love these people.