14th Armored Cav “Life on the Fulda Gap”
She was beautiful. No, not the first main battle tank I saw in the motor pool, not even that 105 self-propelled howitzer from Captain Briones’ artillery battery, my first unit assignment after infantry, airborne and artillery schools. I’m referring to the young woman who answered the door next to my landlord’s apartment at my and Lieutenant Meyer’s new off-post quarters at Am Ziegelberg 18 in Fulda.
Gisela Schmidt not so politely informed me in perfect English that the landlord was obviously not home and I could “stop banging on his door and behaving like a noisy American.” I introduced myself and asked her to the Fourth of July party at the Officers’ Club. She turned me down flat. Gisela and I have now been married for 54 years. To say that the 14th Cav and my border assignment changed my life would be an understatement.
That’s how the adventure started barely six months into my tour of duty with the 14th. Gisela as it turned out was from Baumholder, home to another major US military installation. She had moved to Fulda to work as a specifications interpreter for the USAREUR Post Engineer detachment. By the time we married a year later, she’d worked her way into a new job as a payroll analyst at Downs Barracks with the 7th Army 42nd Finance Group. Since then she’s been the vanguard of our family finances and the main reason I’m not living under a bridge somewhere.
So first, for me there was romance. Then, adventure. We were part of the Cold War. 20 Russian Armored and Infantry Divisions were said to be poised less than a few kilometers east of us threatening the Fulda Gap, the legendary east-to-west invasion route. NATO strategy was a “defense in depth.” If attacked the 14th was charged with delaying any enemy advance long enough for the US 2nd and 3rd Armored Divisions, 8th Infantry Division and others, plus our allies, the Belgians, German Bundeswehr and BOAR – the British Army of the Rhine – to deploy on the vast, armor-friendly plain that was Central Germany.
We were well trained and, reflecting on our weaponry, sometimes too well equipped. After I left the Army and joined Caterpillar, a few of my associates asked me about our armament. For example did we actually have tactical nuclear weapons? When I told the guys that some of our Cav units had Davy Crocketts, I got blank stares.
Yep, Davy Crocketts, Jeep-mounted smooth bore 106mm recoilless rifles equipped to fire the M-388 nuclear projectile. This was a fat little low yield atomic bomb that looked like a football with tail fins when perched on the recoilless rifle’s muzzle. Never saw one fired but years later I read declassified material that documented that in tests nobody had ever gotten one to impact within a mile of its designated target. As a Tennessee native, I’ve always wondered, why then the nickname, “Davy Crockett?” After all Colonel Crockett was long and lean and died too young at the Alamo. But he was an expert shot and deadly accurate.
The 14th was always training. When deployment alerts came down, we didn’t know immediately whether we were deploying for more training or about to meet the target-rich Russian infantry and armored divisions and their allies, the East German Army. When President Kennedy was assassinated, we spent several weeks our forward combat positions, locked and loaded. That was the longest of three red (operational) alerts in my tour of duty and I, like the rest of the men around me, was always nervous. But we were prepared. In fact all of the 7th US Army was prepared.
The 14th had live artillery training for howitzer battery semi-annually and tank gunnery training, as well as small arms qualification, annually. Two training sites, Grafenwöhr and Wildflecken, are etched permanently into my memory.
And when I made my first visit to meet Gisela’s parents in Baumholder, their house was close enough to the main US post and its 8th Infantry DivIsion firing ranges that the impact of artillery could be felt in the floors and walls, sometimes all night. But her parents, both school teachers and long time local residents, had gotten used to it.
My first assignment indeed gave me my closest friend, wife and soulmate, but it also surrounded me with the best organization, and some of the most awesome people I’ve ever been associated with, not just the soldiers of the 14th, but the men of all the US forces and their allies. Less than a week after I’d joined howitzer battery, we deployed on my first training alert. As I sat in my jeep in the bivouac area poring over a map to mark the coordinates of my FO position, Battery First Sergeant Campbell, a 6’-4 African American who’d seen and mentored his share of raw ROTC officers, approached on foot and came to a halt beside me.
“Mornin’ Lieutenant,” he said and saluted crisply. I returned his courtesy. He pushed his helmet back and looked down at me. “Sir, you by ANY chance know the most dangerous thing you’re ever likely to encounter out here?”
“No, First Sergeant,” I replied, wondering what was next – some gem of soldiering?
He nodded toward the unfolded paper in my lap. “A damned new Second Lieutenant with a map.”
I and my driver burst into laughter as did the First Sergeant. He might have been joking, but some of my later misadventures and encounters would demonstrate the wisdom in his humor.
My first full year in Fulda I lived in the BOQ with Lt, (now Colonel, Ret.) Ruggerio. He was later my best man in our civil marriage ceremony at the Fulda Standesamt. Fidel Cicero, “Moon” Mullins, Father Tom Waddell, the Chaplain, and others bunked in the BOQ as well. Our quarters were much too close to the Officers’ Club and bar next door.
The club was a favorite place for some of our allied officers too. One particular Friday afternoon I sat at the bar beside the Bundesgrenzschutz (German elite border police) commander. We sipped beer while the 40 year-old Hauptmann tried to teach me the words to a famous German Army marching song, “In Dem Schatten Dunkler Lauben.” The captain had been a young sergeant in the Wehrmacht in the latter stages of WW II.
“Leutnant Wünsch,” he said, “you haff a good German name. You must haff ancestors here somevhere, no?” I nodded. He continued. “You know if the verdammte Americans in ’44 had ever attacked on time, ve Germans could haff won!” He raised his beer stein. “Prosit. Liebe Lola, lass das Weinen…” He returned to song.
Later the same year, 1962, I as an artilleryman tried to show off to my armor branch cohorts by over-indulging in French 75’s at the club. Howitzer Battery’s new commander, Captain Ron Bissell with me as his new XO hosted the St Barbara’s Day celebration, St Barbara being one of the “Fourteen Holy Helpers” and the patron saint of artillerymen, firemen and miners.
French 75’s when properly made are a chilled half-and-half mix of brandy and sekt, named for the famed rapid-firing French field artillery piece from 1898. I downed several salvos, both right and left, at the urging of my new boss. One of my comrades-in-arms can perhaps describe what ensued back in the BOQ, but it wasn’t pretty. I still cannot abide the thought of what I came to call “Artilleryman’s Punch.”
In early 1963 USAREUR approved a plan for off-post housing for bachelor officers. Lt. Steve Mack, also a howitzer battery forward observer, was one of the first to move. He went to a small village south of Fulda where he later distinguished himself as a member of the local volunteer fire department. As described already, I paired up with Lt. Ron Mayer, a tank platoon leader and gourmet chef and we moved to Petersburg, one of the eastern Fulda suburbs.
Hard to believe today but we had no telephone in our apartment and in general the waiting list to have one installed was more than two years. So when we had alerts our jeep drivers came out to get us. The civilian communications situation never improved during my tour of duty. In fact when Gisela and I left Fulda for the States in February 1966, we still had no phone. Whenever we’d needed to quickly talk with family members in Germany or the US, we’d driven to the Fulda Bundespost and used a pay phone.
If the Officer’s Club was the gathering place during the week, several nearby “hot spots” offered a change of pace and glimpses of local culture on weekends when there was no patrol, duty officer assignment or other commitments. The Laterne, a downtown Fulda bar, was where Gisela and her co-worker, Ingrid, introduced me to Nikolaschkas, a shot of Cognac topped with a lemon disc, sugar and powdered coffee. One must first belt down the brandy, then chase it by eating the topping. One of those an evening was enough for me. In fact I was never much of a late night bar hopper- period. Ingrid once said to Gisela, “Larry’s a really nice guy, but what a bore he is after 10 o’clock.” I doubt that Ingrid had ever had to arise at four AM for PT but she was in pretty good shape anyway. Nor had she ever tasted that other brandy-based concoction, French 75’s
.When we needed a break from mess hall food, the officers’ club dining room or if we’d just come back from severaL days of standing in chow lines on maneuvers, Fulda had its share of great restaurants and gasthauses. My favorite was the Haus Oranien and their German take on the Swiss specialty, Zürcher Geschnitzeltes – sliced veal strips, white wine, cream and demiglace. Mom never made anything like that back in Tennessee.
But sometimes off duty we just wanted to get even more “local.” The nearby Rhön mountains offered that opportunity. Less than an hour’s drive southeast of Fulda the Wasserkuppe, 900 meters, was a high plateau and home of a famous German glider school. This extinct Jurassic Age volcano had the closest ski runs. There was only one lift in 1963 and it always had a long waiting line, so those times when I made it down the run intact and was determined enough to try again, I rode the bus from Obernhausen, the village in the valley, back up the 2 kilometers to the top.
On a second lieutenant’s pay I had better things to do with my cash than pay for lift tickets or skiing lessons, and anyway, rookie Cav officers are invincible. Having learned parachute landing falls in jump school probably saved me a couple of fractures in my downhill ski endeavors. But a word of caution: good PLF’s are difficult to achieve with skis and poles.
Gisela had no desire to ski so on some weekends, we found ourselves and other couples at Kloster Kreuzberg. This spot on the crest of the next mountain peak south and west of the Wasserkuppe was a gigantic beer hall run by Franciscan monks in the basement of the monastery. They’d been making beer there since the 1600’s. An order of nuns also lived on site. They prepared rohschinken, fantastic hard cheeses and made a dark double-baked rye bread. As far as I know they are still at it.
So how did we get to all those places? Most officers had an automobile, and our subsidized gasoline ration was only about 25 cents a gallon. Shortly after I met Gisela I ordered a new Mercedes coupe. When my wife-to-be found out, she announced that I was insane and threatened to stop dating me. We ended up with a used red VW beetle. Great transport as things turned out because the “bug” came equipped with a Philips under-dash 45 rpm record player. I never did figure out why the records never skipped when we were driving. But Gisela loved hearing her Elvis records on the way to the Kreuzberg.
Two years into my assignment with the 14th, Gisela and I were engaged. And Colonel Webb, the 1st Squadron commander, informed me that I was promoted to first lieutenant. That was all the good news. The bad? Because of my “demonstrated communication and organizational skIlls,” I was to be Colonel Webb’s new adjutant. For a regular Army officer with two years active service, I had thought I would soon have a command position – maybe replacing Captain Bissell as Howitzer Battery CO. But that was not to be.
I had many memorable moments as Colonel Webb’s, then Colonel Lamar’s, adjutant and that’s where I gained people and leadership skills that are with me even now. One memory? Colonel Lamar and his Squadron XO, Major Haumerson, learned a few days before Gisela’s and my church wedding in Baumholder that none of my family would be coming from the States. Yes, we had not only a civil ceremony, complete with organ, at the Standesamt, we had a church wedding in Gisela’s home town the next day. Exhausting, but the process truly makes a person feel married. Not unusual for Germans of that era who tended to formalize any event, even the process of obtaining a marriage license.
Back in Tennessee, my father had suffered a mild stroke, not because I was marrying a “foreigner” who he and Mom had never met, but because of simple untreated high blood pressure. In any case Colonel Lamar got the OK of the V Corps commander, General Creighton Abrams, to travel by helicopter with his XO and their wives, plus my friend, Lt. Degenhart, to be my “family” at the wedding.
And that eventually led to another memorable moment as an adjutant. General Abrams was one of my heroes from studying military history in the advanced ROTC program. I knew that in WW II, he’d commanded the 37th Tank Battalion, the spearhead of Patton’s Army. Known as an aggressive armored commander, Patton had said of him, “I’m supposed to be the best tank commander in the Army, but I have one peer – Abe Abrams. He’s the world champion.”
Brigadier General Abrams would pay one visit to Downs Barracks while I was the squadron adjutant, and I was privileged to mass the troops on the parade field and present the 1st Squadron, 14th ACR to him for review. That was the adjutant’s duty. However it is not the whole story of that particular afternoon.
The general decided to excuse himself from Colonel Lamar in the reviewing stand and step down to the field to take my troop presentation salute. General Abrams though missed the bottom step and pancaked face-down onto the cinder parade field. Gasps came from some of the crowd of civilian on-lookers but no laughter. Fortunately, too the squadron, some 400 men assembled to my rear, remained silent to a man and at rigid attention. I simply held my salute until the Corps Commander had righted himself and returned my salute. We carried on. Somewhere I suspect General Patton smiled.
The position as squadron adjutant had its other perquisites, as well. Gisela and I were privileged to represent our unit at a celebration ball for our NATO allies, the Belgian Covering Force, at their northern German headquarters in Celle. That I believe was my only time in dress blues. In Fulda I replaced both the squadron and regimental commanders occasionally as our unit representative to the Fulda German-American Society. The permanent chair of that group, Monsignor Doctor Haribert Abel, once gave me a tour of both the Fulda Dom and St Michael’s Church. First constructed around 800AD, this medieval structure is considered by Catholics to be the oldest Holy Sepulchre church in Germany.
Earlier in this piece I described my earliest lesson in practical soldiering, the one First Sergeant Campbell provided about how dangerous new officers reading maps might be. As the squadron adjutant I was to grow much more as a soldier and an officer under the tutelage of two more senior NCO’s, HQ & Hq Troop First Sergeant Harold Porter with whom I spent many cold days in an open Jeep in German winters. And second, the squadron’s Command Sergeant Major, T. Frank Mouri. Both men were soldiers’ soldiers – like First Sergeant Campbell – no-nonsense fellows who valued honesty and courage and led quietly by example.
I spent the most time around CSM Mouri. We shared the adjutant’s office. It should have been labeled “Sergeant Major’s Office.” He was the only man in the unit who could rein in Colonel Webb without putting our mercurial cavalry CO into an uproar. And he gave me some excellent mentoring as well. Several months into the adjutant’s job I remarked, “Sergeant Major, this is a good position in the squadron, but I’m hoping for a command of some kind, somewhere soon.”
“Lieutenant Wuench. Sir.” CSM Mouri smiled, “In my experience one gets recognition and reward when he’s mastered his current assignment.”
Over the years after I left the Army I lost track of both CSM Mouri and First Sergeant Porter. But at the 14th Cav’s fiftieth reunion in Virginia seven years ago, we reunited and at least began exchanging occasional correspondence and Christmas greetings. Last year no card arrived from CSM Mouri and Daisy, his wife. In February 2018 I found his obituary.
Reading of CSM Mouri’s life and passing at 92, barely two month’s after Daisy’s death, finally put into perspective the unstated respect I had developed for this uncommonly humble but heroic soldier. The son of Japanese immigrants, Tadashi Frank Mouri graduated from high school at age 13. He received a full academic scholarship to Northwestern but had to work on the family farm until he was old enough to enter college. Shortly after he began his studies, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Frank and his family were interned in a Japanese camp in Wyoming. While there he was drafted into the American Army and fought with the 442nd Regimental combat Team in France and Italy until WW II ended.
He’d had enough combat by then and was good enough at baseball that he was accepted into the New York Yankees minor league system, along with a teenage Mickey Mantle. But once he realized he’d probably never wear the pinstripes, Frank rejoined the Army and went to war in Korea, then later Vietnam with the 7th Cav. Frank Mouri’s last active duty assignment was Command Sergeant Major of the US Military Academy at West Point.
My last assignment with the 14th ACR lasted barely six months. The Regimental Commander, Colonel Marcello W. Bordley tapped me, a newly minted captain, to be his Regimental Adjutant. Greg Wilcox, a West Point graduate and today a retired colonel, replaced me as the squadron S-1. Greg and his wife Dee are still our friends, and we maintain fairly close contact.
As Regimental Adjutant Colonel Bordley helped me branch transfer to Armor and in typical Army fashion, having had four years experience mainly as an artilleryman in an armored unit, Gisela and I were soon reassigned Stateside to an infantry division.
I retired from the service less than a year later from the reactivated 1st Infantry Division where I’d been a rifle company commander. But the friends and comrades I was privileged to serve with on the Fulda Gap will always be on my mind and in my heart. My firm belief is that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. I am happy Gisela and I were able to contribute to that mission.
SUIVEZ MOI!
Robert L Wuench, Captain, Armor (Ret.)