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Page 14.
 Peter Towns met them at the main trolley station downtown. He was a stocky, powerful looking man of about 65, Dad’s generation, with wavy white hair and a florid face. He wore a dark blue sweater with white shirt collars protruding; and khaki pants with good brown walking shoes. He shook hands with both as Rob and Hannah introduced themselves.
As they began walking, he told them a little bit about his career, first in Vietnam as a combat infantry soldier wounded twice in the legs but lucky to survive; and then as an administrative NCO, stationed in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and finally the last twelve years in Heidelberg. “I’m still married to a German girl after all these years. We have three kids now in their twenties who are more German than they are American, and everyone is happy.”
They walked down the picturesque main street in the university quarter, which was lined for a good quarter mile with bars, shops, restaurants, a church or two, and a number of university clinics and office buildings. “This is one of the best tourist cities in Europe,” he told them. “I’ve seen them all, from Rome to Berlin, Prague to Budapest, and Vienna and Nuernberg and so on. Heidelberg is compact, only 150,000 or so residents, and still a small town while hosting a world-class university.”
During their walk, with hundreds of tourists, locals, and students circulating around them, Rob mentioned their dad. “You’re an old soldier retired and living in Heidelberg, sir. Our dad was stationed here many years ago.”
“What was his name and unit?”
“Dan Wilson, junior enlisted guy, basically worked as a file clerk and rose to office manager, I think that’s E-5 just a grade shy of NCO at E-6. Do I have that right?”
Towns’ red, grizzled face lit up in a grin. “That’s the Army for you. They always dangled the next promotion before your eyes, to get you to re-up. He probably made E-5 specialist just after reenlisting. That’s soft stripe; the hard stripe would be sergeant or buck sergeant as they call it. If he behaved himself and had a good record, he would probably have been on the E-6 list for Staff Sergeant right after reenlisting. What did he decide to do?”
Hannah said: “He had a real hard time. Bad marriage, baby that died, superiors who weren’t very supportive; and inlaws who hated him. Being peasants in a remote village, they hated anyone outside or different, including the ‘crazy Americans’ as we are known around the world.”
Towns’ face contracted. “Sounds like he had a run of bad luck. Everyone goes through at least one streak of that in the military. Everyone has the Boss from Hell at some point in his or her career. You just duck down, keep your mouth shut, and endure it.”
“Misery has company, eh?” Rob said.
Towns nodded. “For sure. I had my BFH during my one tour back in CONUS. I was just past my twenty, and almost separated out of the Army.”
“Oh!” Hannah interrupted, remembering… “What is ETS?”
Towns said: “ETS meant Estimated Time of Separation. For junior enlisted folks, that was the day they counted down to, their liberation. Their emancipation from the hell they saw as being in the military. They were fools, because they had three hots and a cot here, a dream, and they could travel all over Europe at will. I used to love driving down to Paris, or over to Brussels, and sometimes Vienna or Berlin. So ETS was your liberation date.”
“Why estimated,” Rob asked. “Couldn’t they give you a firm date?”
“Oh no,” Towns said with gruff heartiness. “Not the Army. You’ve heard the expression that there’s the right way, the wrong way, and the Army way? Well, when you are in the Army, everything you do is ‘at the convenience of the service.’ If they needed you to extend a couple of months, it was wide open. It never really happened that I know of, but it would have killed these junior enlisted people who were really still kids at age twenty or twenty-one. Every one of them had a short timer’s calendar with a picture on it, divided into a bunch of little numbered squares. It might be a boot, a hat, or a doorway. Whatever. They’d have a crayon handy, and every day color in another square counting downward to day zero—their ETS.”
Hannah and Rob nodded. “So that explains Dad’s notes about ETS.”
Towns nodded. “Separation from the service, and return to CONUS. Actually, if you chose to get out, your last day would occur someplace back in the Continental United States like Fort Dix.”
“Did you keep a short-timer’s calendar in your first enlistment?” Hannah asked.
Towns said: “And how. Every one of us did.”
“And you changed your mind.”
He grinned. “I had three hots and a cot that a tourist would pay tens of thousands of dollars for. I had girlfriends in three different cities—one in Heidelberg, one in Frankfurt, and one in Stuttgart. Hell, I tore up that stupid calendar and realized I had it made. I still had a lot of the world to see, so why return home and be a pig farmer for the rest of my life in Nebraska?”
Hannah sighed deeply. “I was never in the service, but I see what you mean. I work for a company in Paris, and my brother works for one in Frankfurt.”
“Think about it,” Towns said. “Lots of U.S. military and civil service retired here. We have universal health care and all sorts of social nets in all these countries, unlike the USA. We’re still living in the dark ages over there, pretending health care is some sort of evil communism. It’s every man for himself, while the medical corporations rake in zillions of our dollars and kill us at a rate of one every ten minutes (that's from a Harvard study in 2009). It’s a ridiculous brainwash… but don’t get me going.”
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