Up until about late 1965, if you were an enlisted man traveling on orders to Germany, you reported to Fort Dix Replacement Depot (REPO-DEPOT) and sat around until they rounded up about 1999 others like you to fill up a troop ship. Travel on ships to Germany was the first common area new guys had with the old hands at their new duty stations. "What ship you come on?" "Rose...what a tub" "The Upshur is the worst" "Patch was a pretty good ride..." and so on. If you were one of the last to arrive, you only had to stay at Dix for a day or two, if you got there in time to see the buses pulling out with a boatload, you could be there for a couple weeks. Well, I said "sit around"...that isn't exactly what happened. Every morning you stood in a formation and every facility on post would come by and pick up "detail" soldiers to work on different projects around Dix. Or you could wind up on KP in the biggest mess hall I ever saw. It had four serving lines and a monster dining area and fed up to 3000 at a meal. Or you could get selected to pull guard duty, or if you were slick and lucky, you could stay in formation and watch all the others being marched off to their personal hells. In that case, where you were not picked for a detail, you could return to the barracks, do some buffing and sink polishing, and spend the day doing nothing. Or playing cards. Or dice. Or board games. Or read. Or nothing.
I arrived there in November of 1964. The boat had just left. I was facing up to two weeks in the depot. The old WWII barracks were wooden, drafty, cold, and primitive. But the floors were shiny. And the bunks were either too hard or too soft. The first couple of days I didn't get selected for a detail so I sat around all day (my specialty), reading and playing cards and doing nothing. November in Jersey is pretty cold. The third day I was selected to go on a "range clearing" detail. I had no idea what that meant except that we were told to dress warm, it was outside work. We were driven to an artillery range and given metal bars about a quarter-inch in diameter and two feet long. After a short explanation, we were lined up shoulder-to-shoulder across the impact area and got on all-fours. We moved on line slowly probing the ground in front of us for UNEXPLODED ARTILLERY ROUNDS. Since we were "trained" for this detail, they asked to have the same people back the next day...and the next...and the next. I think I was a prober for a week or so. All I remember clearly is sore knees, cold hands, and durn-near ulcer-generating anxiety. But no one got blown up and we cleared the range, worked ourselves right out of a job. I managed to get a couple of KP days, too. But we gathered up enough troops to fill the ship in less than the threatened two weeks. On a dark, freezing, windy morning, we stood in formation with our duffle bags and AWOL bags and went through the required milling around ceremony. Finally, we loaded on a fleet of Greyhounds and departed Jersey for Brooklyn Army Terminal. It took all day to move up there, get in another formation, board the ship (we had to learn the mandatory two-salute entry onto a ship), get assigned to a "berth", locate the berth, then stow our bags, return to the upper decks for the the tradional waving-to-the-crowd ceremony as the ship was untied and pushed out into the channel, I heard a soldier behind me somewhere shout to the crowd on the pier, "We're in it for the money!". I stood at the rail feeling stupid, waving at a bunch of total strangers and wondering why. I had been on the pier-side of this ceremony hundreds of times, waving to the Chief (my sailoring dad) as his ships sailed away. But there wasn't a soul I knew within three thousand miles of Brooklyn.
As we pulled out, the crap-inducing horn on our ship blew, catching all us soldiers totally unawares. And then we were gone. Or actually, the pier was gone, we were still standing on the deck, some were still waving at unseen family or friends or just people. The journey had begun.
Our ship was the USNS Geiger, a Barrett-class troopship, a little over 500 feet long and a little under 75 feet wide. My berth was on the lowest level of the forward hold, right up against the forward bulkhead (that's "wall" for you landlubbers). So not only did my bunk roll left to right, it rose and fell, too. Mine was the lowest of a four-stack bunk system. Laying flat on my back I had maybe eight inches clearance to the bunk above me. Settling in was awkward, there were two guys in my hold that I knew from my training at Fort Ord. They were the only people on the ship that I knew, cared to know, and who like me. The fellas I was now very close to in our bedding arangements didn't like me even a little. It was hard to avoid contact with them, but I tried to accomodate their dislike.
On the third day of our 6 day trip, two things happened that had a great affect on all of us. Thing one was the Navy guys handed out a newsy little fact sheet about the Geiger, informing us about the ship's history and the fact that she had sunk three times, once while tied up to a dock, and Thing two was that we ran into a huge, furious, North Atlantic storm that tossed our semi-sea-worthy little boat about like a cork. Because of the storm we were not allowed to go out on deck for about four days. During that time, anyone who had been borderline sea-sick became fully committed. We watched a young buck sergeant who wore a green beret coming down the hallway, swaying left to right with the motion of the ocean, enter the day room (They stretched canvas over the hatch covers on each level of the troop area and called it a day room) and immediately blew chunks all over a game of Casino. These incidents were common and always triggered a chain of sympathetic hurling. The good news for those who had developed sea-legs and were able to keep things under control, was that the mess hall lines were short and there was always room at the tables.
The last night out we had a calm sea, gentle breeze and fairly mild temps and they let us stay out on deck for a while past our normal recall. We tied up in Bremerhaven and a group from the Replacement Station came on board. They started processing us and notifying us when we would debark and what group we were in and all that. Sometime after sundown, my group was called out and we boarded buses that took us to the train station. We rode a train overnight from Bremerhaven to Frankfurt. Somewhere on the way a rumor reached us that the Geiger had sunk again while tied up at Bremerhaven...I don't know if it did or didn't...but I wouldn't be a dis-believer.
My big sea adventure was over. In the nine days we spent on the Geiger, I learned two new card games: Tonk and Casino. I read three or four books. I didn't chuck up at all (sailors' sons are not ALLOWED to be seasick!)...and I managed to reinforce the decision I had made several months earlier...Not to go into the Navy.
When Vietnam started draining resources out of Germany, including the troopships that carried us, it became normal to fly to Germany instead of riding a boat. So one of those old legacies, and tale-generators, fell by the sea-side. But if you overhear some of the old gray-beards swapping tales about their first trip to Germany, you can bet they'll start comparing notes on the "Old Rose", "Breckinridge", "Upshur", "Barrett"...and for me..."Geiger