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 Alexandra, Gerrit and Jill and their 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 the family farm, his way through college, and doing recce up and down 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 new car and was assigned an apartment overlooking the Berlin Grunewald. My expenses were 20DM weekly for a Frau Jager, the cleaning lady. The rest was mine, mine, mine to spend.
My mission wasto command 70- 80 men (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 only later discovered how dyslexia I was; Okay, I just had to study harder.)
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. I may have been a jerk, but I didn’t didn’t seduce children.
- Understand, Alexandra, besides being beautiful,etc, had, has, and always had her own mind.
- I don’t deserve a big atta-boy for putting the child, Alexandra, off-limits. Berlin was a bachelor’s heaven; the city was alive with 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 for a little adventure with a good-looking GI. It was fishing with hand grenades.
I made of Alexandra arm candy, a woman of grace, charm and beauty, safe, off-limits, requiring no emotional nonsense, who accompanied me to (French, British and American) military soirees, and made my fellow officers eat their livers with envy.
Alexandra was also a starving student. I fed her American steaks, which she demolished in minutes. She cleared the buffet tables at diplomatic receptions. I was clueless. This child was a poverty-stricken student. Well, anyway, I fed her.
Over time, I came to realize that Alexandra was on her own journey. And over time, our friendship grew. We shared one anothers victories, defeats, loss…heart-fucking-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?). We make decisions on the basis of incomplete information, get burned (or get laid, then get burned), and I write about that. I love these people.
