A Reluctant Lieutenant at Bitburg Air Base

By Ted Ridder

The reluctant lieutenant will make you laugh with his self-deprecating, sometimes cynical humor and frankness. He was one of thousands of academically talented young graduate students yanked out of their happy, idealistic existence to replenish our relentless war in Vietnam. He became the lucky lieutenant when he drew orders instead for a three-year assignment to support the Cold War in Germany.
This collection of short stories will lead you through those years with wit and irony as he chronicles the remarkable events he experienced, the fascinating people he encountered, and the invaluable perspective he gained on leadership. Examples abound of sterling leaders and pathetic shirkers among both officers and enlisted men, of clarity and consternation, of boredom and panic, and of luck both good and bad. Through it all is romance and the adventure of living in Europe.
Ridder is a born storyteller. His insights into the people and systems that comprise the military will strike home with anyone who has served. Those who have not will experience a unique and authentic view of air force life from the inside.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 20, 2021
• ISBN: 9781098399665

Book preview

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A Reluctant Lieutenant at Bitburg Air Base

Copyright © 2021 by Ted Ridder

Print ISBN: 978-1-09839-965-8

eBook ISBN: 978-1-09839-966-5

All rights reserved.

Author Royalties will be donated to the Residents Activity Fund,

Illinois Veterans Home, Quincy, IL

To All Who Served

Table of Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

Stories:

Cindy

Henry’s List

Captain Mac

A Missile Mishap

The Thunderbirds at Bitburg

The Strange Case of the Vanishing WSSM

A Tale of Two Commanders

The McGuire Feeling

Appendices:

List of Acronyms

Air Force Rank Hierarchy and Identification

Air Force Wing Command Structure

Preface

I’ve told these stories many times over the past fifty years. Most people probably assumed I just made them up. They may have gotten a little more humorous with the re-telling, and I can’t say I remember every word of dialogue. But the important conversations are still quite vivid to me.

The significant events and places are real and as I remember them. I don’t have the imagination to make up stuff like this. I’m just a storyteller, not a novelist. Therefore, I have to write about things that really happened and real people that I actually knew. I’ve changed names to protect individuals from any inaccuracies in my memory. If you think you are one of my characters, and you remember it differently, write your own story.

A high school classmate of mine, Bill Anderson, did two tours in Vietnam as an infantry Marine. My military experience was like boy scout camp in comparison. I have deep respect and empathy for those who got caught up in that traumatic war. It’s because I never set foot on Vietnamese soil that I can write military stories that amuse people. But I was concerned that my sometimes ludicrous stories would offend a person with his experience.

Bill is now a retired state police commander, who volunteers at the local jail. I asked him to read my stories and tell me how he felt about them. He liked them and read them to the jail inmates. He said they liked the situations and characters, and he felt the stories modeled adaptive attitudes toward authority figures.

His response surprised me. I had not set out to do that. But it made sense. I recalled watching the movie MASH in a base theater full of GIs, many of whom had been in Vietnam. They loved it. Ultimately, that movie was about making the best of a bad situation. I suppose that’s almost the definition of adaptive behavior. I have heard Vietnam veterans tell some funny stories. Maybe both crying and laughing can be part of healing.

I recommend reading these stories in the order arranged. But each can be read independently. I hope you enjoy at least one enough to finish it and maybe read a second. I have always enjoyed making people laugh, but I’ve never done it for profit and probably never will. Any royalties from this book will be paid to the residents’ activity fund at the Illinois Veterans Home in Quincy.

Acknowledgements

I put the draft of my first story on the nice try stack to die, but I also sent a copy to Theresa Kearney, an old friend who had done some editing in her career. She liked the story but said I needed to completely re-write it. I was not enthused but decided to try it her way. Amazing how much difference a little advice from a good editor can make.

Once I got rolling, I couldn’t stop and wrote seven more stories. Mike Moore, John Smallfield, Joachim Schmidt, and George Mindling read and critiqued every story for me. Mike Moore and Jerry Steck helped me with details where my memory was fuzzy and provided me with pictures they had taken. Blair Balden and Maggie, Suzanne, and Tom MacAllister reassured me that no one in their family would be offended if I used the real names for Major Balden and Captain MacAllister. Recently I was even able to contact Henry Troast, whom you will meet in one of the stories.

John Stegeman, Carolyn Rapp, Roger Gould, Susan Leskis, and Bert Emerson also helped me with advice and encouragement. George Mindling provided valuable information and pictures from his website and the book he authored with Robert Bolton, U.S. Air Force Tactical Missiles, 1940-1960, The Pioneers.

I could not have published this book, however, without the help of my wife Cindy. She’s a retired high school teacher who has taught writing. I have dealt with professional editors in my career, and she is as good as any of them. For my style she’s perfect and deserves half credit. So, I feel compelled to mention her by name, even though it may spoil any suspense in the first story. Hopefully, you are all like me and don’t read acknowledgements. But if you do, read the first story anyway. It’s funny and absolutely true. Cindy also created the cover illustration.

Cindy

I had taken a leave day to pick up Cindy in Frankfurt. She was flying in on Lufthansa from New York City. I had her flight number and was comfortably early. It was the exact gate I had walked through myself a few months earlier.

I’d also picked up another second lieutenant there, who shipped in after I had. So I was familiar with the terminal and had found a chair with a full view of the arrivals gate — nothing to do now but wait for her plane to touch down.

Cindy had grown up in Connecticut and had gone to college in Maine. I grew up in southern Illinois, where I survived sixteen years of Catholic education, all in the same isolated town. We met in Denver when she and two other girls moved into the apartment building where I was living with three other second lieutenants.

Our building, located a block outside the gate of Lowry Air Force Base, bracketed an outdoor pool on three sides like a hotel. The entire complex was small enough that you could stand anywhere on the second-story balcony and carry on a conversation with somebody in the pool.

Each apartment had a kitchen set up like a small bar. It was visible to anyone walking by unless the drapes were closed, which they usually were not. If they were, it meant knock. If not, it meant walk in.

There wasn’t a married couple in the building. I felt like I’d died and gone to Heaven. With the Vietnam War in full swing, the female to male ratio in Denver was about three to one. So I figured even I had a chance.

About a week after our arrival, two of my apartment mates had met three girls from out East who were moving in a few doors away. They’d persuaded the girls to go with them to one of the nearby joints that always had a band. All they needed was a third.

I went along, had too much to drink, and did not make a hit. Neither did my roommates. That was good because the girl I was interested in was the one my roommate had decided was his before I was a party to the contract. That was Cindy, of course. She was quite pretty and had a delightful New England accent.

My code was that initial date-sorting contracts expired at daybreak. So, I set out the next day to try to redeem myself. My roommate had a date or two with Cindy after that, but I could see that was going nowhere.

I had grown up with four older sisters, so I read girls pretty well. It didn’t take me long to determine if a girl had any interest in me. And it took even less for me to decide whether she was somebody I wanted to spend time with.

The night I’d arrived at the base in Denver, I’d bought a car from a guy I met at the officers club. He was shipping out in two days. So, for four hundred dollars, I became the owner of a ‘61 Chevy. It nearly wiped me out financially, but the deal was too good to pass up.

After a week or so, I’d managed to establish enough of a relationship with Cindy that she felt comfortable driving up into the mountains with me for a picnic. We took a cheap bottle of Mosel wine and some cheese and bread, found a beautiful little stream to cool the wine in, and just enjoyed a gorgeous day together.

The normal duty day for munitions trainees was seven in the morning until four in the afternoon, with an hour lunch break. As officers, we were just one small class and did not have to follow the rigid schedule necessary for the multiple classes of enlisted trainees, who had to share access to large equipment and facilities like the chow hall.

So, the instructional staff gave us an option to come in at six and leave at one-thirty. Our only break, however, would be a fast run to the snack truck for something minimally edible. Of course, we all went for that option and would have killed anybody who objected.

For me, it meant the pool with a drink in my hand before two o’clock.

Most of our instructors were retired non-commissioned officers (NCOs). They referred sarcastically to our schedule privilege as the Gentlemen’s A Shift. Those guys seldom missed an opportunity to remind us that the NCOs we’d be supervising would have years of stored up resentment toward second lieutenants.

There was no need to study outside of class time. Well, some of us didn’t take one block of instruction seriously and had to report in the afternoon for a week of remedial bombs and fuses. Still, I’d never had so much free time in my life.

Within two weeks of arriving in Denver, Cindy had turned a recommendation from the research laboratory where she’d been working in Boston into a lab technician position at Fitzsimons Army Hospital.

That put her home at about four o’clock in the afternoon. Late afternoons we’d lie around the pool, listen to music, drink vodka with bitter orange, and talk until dinner.

We had a lot in common. She had worked summers, but her biology degree from Bates College had been paid for mostly by her extended family, including a kind uncle. She was working class like me, and we both had a strong desire to see more of the world.

We spent a lot of time together and started to become close. On weekends, we explored the area: Red Rocks, the little ex-mining towns in the mountains with their boot hills, the lakes, the ski towns, downtown Denver, even the zoo.

It was the first time I’d ever truly lived in the present. My entire life I’d been focused on some goal or future situation. Now life had become just about each day. It was a new feeling, and I liked it! I’d never experienced anything so perfect as those six months in Denver, and Cindy became the center of the whole thing. It felt too good to be real.

College had been easy for me, but I lived at home and worked a lot of hours. I always had one or two jobs: dispatching taxicabs, tending bar, working in a juvenile detention home, working in a factory, whatever I could get that would fit my school schedule. I had some great times in college, but not that often.

Then I got into a graduate program that I loved in clinical psychology.