In the late sixties the war in Vietnam had begun to wear down the Army's retention program.  Pay was still embarassingly low and lots of Army-trained tradesmen found they could do better on the outside...and no one was shooting at them (unless they lived in Detroit or East LA).  The Army started coming up with pay incentives to keep folks around.  One of the extra pay opportunities was based on an annual test of each soldier.  Each MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) had its own test and if you did really well on it, you could earn extra money...it was called a Proficiency Test and of course, the money was called a "Proficiency Pay".  If I recall correctly, there were three levels and the better you did on the test, the more you made.  I earned Pro-Pay at the highest rate for a few years and I think it came to about $30.00 per month.  Doesn't sound like much nowdays...a good lunch for two at Applebee's.  But in 1967 it was a pretty significant chunk of change.  MC and I could go out to one of our favorite German restaurants, have Schnitze,  Pommes Fritz and a couple of drinks for about 10 DM (Deutsche Mark...at about 3.60 DM per dollar, that dinner ran less than $3.00).  So $30.00 extra was nice.  And of course, the obvious result was that a lot of soldiers paid more attention to their jobs and studied for the tests, which really served to raise the proficiency level in each field.  Knowledge is a good thing.

But the real money wasn't in Pro-Pay...it was the re-enlistment bonuses.  Re-Up bonuses were based on your base pay times the number of years you re-enlisted for.  However, there was a catch.  All your bonuses through your whole career couldn't exceed a certain limit...I seem to recall that it was $2500.  The drain on skilled trades positions was severe and the Army decided to throw more money at the problem in the form of bigger bonuses for those fields which were most sapped by the drain.  They developed the Variable Re-enlistment Bonus for those MOSs that were losing the most soldiers.  In my field, Motor Transportation (fancy-speak for trucks), a senior truck driver, an E-5 with four or five years in the Army, would make around $250.00 per month.  Driving a similar rig in the civilian world was worth that much in a week.  See ya!!

The VRB for Motor Transport Operators was the highest level, VRB-3.  So after figuring the re-up bonus in the regular way, then they would apply the VRB-3 (multiply the bonus 3) and suddenly, instead of making a good down payment on a new car, Joe could pay cash outright for the new car.  And that is just what thousands of them did.  The car dealers around every Army base in the world suddenly had orders for the hottest sellers, the tire-burningest, tailpipe roaringest, bright paint jobingest, gas-guzzlingest cars money could by.  Almost overnight, bases were crawling with shiny new Camaros, Road Runners, GTOs, SS Chevelles, Hemi-Cudas,  4-4-2s, Challengers, Firebirds, Novas, Super Bees....and the beat goes on.  Parking lots on post sounded like the pit area at the NHRA Championships.  It was great....except:

In Fort Huachuca in 1967 when I was promoted to E-5, there was a decision made by my superiors that I was real "sergeant" material.  They promoted me into the 64C bracket, making me a buck sergeant.  At the time,  a soldier in the motor transport field started out as a new driver with an MOS of 64A10.  64As were light vehicle drivers.  Heavier trucks, semis and the like, were operated by 64B20s at the E4 and E5 level, 64B30s at the E6 level and so on.  These jobs were "specialists" and wore an emblem with an eagle on it instead of stripes.   Being promoted to 64C instead of 64B meant that I would wear the traditional three stripes of the buck sergeant, a real honor at the time.  It also moved me out of the field that was eligible for the VRB.  I had never heard of a VRB at the time so it didn't matter much to me.

In October of 1967, when I re-enlisted, after taxes and other expenses, I drew a whopping $900.00 for a Re-Up bonus.  Others who made the same pay, did the same job, re-enlisting for the same number of years, were dragging down more on their first re-enlistment than I would be able to draw in all my bonuses combined through my whole career.  Bitter?  Nah...just another opportunity to shake my head and go hoooff.

In the 41st Trans Company at Mannheim, Germany's Turley Barracks, I had drivers working for me who drove around in their new muscle cars while I putted along in a string of second, third, or eighth hand VWs, Taunuses, and such.  But it was a good plan overall;  we kept guys around for four or five or six more years who probably would have left the Army without the VRB.  Unfortunately for them, the allure of the shiny paint and spinning tires dulled their instinct for survival...many of them would wind up going to Vietnam with the extra time they incurred.  And when you consider the quality of draftees and enlistees we were receiving from the States, it was a good thing to keep the more experienced drivers.

  So there I was...playing softball at the field across from the American High School on Columbusstrasse in Benjamin Franklin Village.  On the other side of the fence was B38, one of the main routes out of Mannheim that ran out to Weinheim.  It was  wide open, almost an autobahn,  a six-lane highway with a speed limit of about 60 mph or so.  I was leaning on the backstop when I heard the roar of high-performance engines that no German factory ever produced.  I looked out at B-38 and saw a brand new '69 Chevelle SS-396 running away from an American Motors AMX.  The guy in the AMX had spent some extra money on ladder bars for the rear suspension, headers and glass-packs to make a lot of noise, and an after-market hood scoop and decals.  He should have spent a little extra under the hood because the stock SS was smokin' him pretty good as they passed us.  I stood there thinking about the '65 GTO I had had to sell before I left for Germany and glanced at the '60 Taunus I was driving at the time.  It was painted flat-black, looked like a miniature '53 Ford, and was powered by a V-4 with a four-speed on the column.  The worn-out muffler made it sound a little cool...not a lot cool...just a little.  Those were dark thoughts.

B-38 was a common raceway for all kinds of cars, from the edge of the city to the autobahn, about five miles away, it was a controlled-access freeway with an unenforced speed limit.  So that evening was not so unusual, the pairing not even that close or exciting, but it sticks in my mind yet today after 42 years because it so clearly displayed, at least in my scope of reference,  the way life works...not fair.  Just not fair.