"pyotr filipivich" wrote in message
...
"Jim Wilkins" on Fri, 2 Aug 2013
09:29:38 -0400
typed in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:

OTOH, I was in Turkey and Spain before the end of the draft,
Germany after the draftees should have finished their 2 years and
got
out.
...
That is a "problem". Coming from Turkey - Spain was the land of
the Big BX, coming from Spain, Germany was "Little America".

No one I've talked to thought much of Turkey. Did you have the
opportunity to sightsee in Spain?

...The Germans there were
indifferent and not too accommodating to non German speakers.

Not unusual, regardless of the language. One has to remember as
well, the Kaserne had been there a long while, first with soldiers
who
could speak the language, then with soldiers who couldn't. And they
all wanted the same things. At least the Deutscher Soldaten had
some
cooths.

The electronic techs I worked and partied with were well-behaved
Latinos. It was almost exclusively the uneducated black GIs, the truck
drivers, who caused trouble with the Germans and with the black NCOs
who were left to deal with them, as any white attempt to discipline
them exploded into a racial discrimination incident. This is why the
Army had to overlook drug use, which then lost its allure as rebellion
against authority. I saw the 80/20 rule in action, 20% of the people
do 80% of the work and support the useless, whining, drug-addled
remainder.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

We made friends with the bar girls and the bouncer and sometimes were
invited to their apartments to chat after the bar closed at 3AM. I won
a bet with the bouncer by memorizing and reciting a long German poem
similar to Poe's "The Raven". While I was practicing it in another
restaurant a Swiss professor noticed the oddity of an American soldier
(short haircut) reading a German poetry book and came over to talk.
Heidelberg was fun.

jsw