From October of 1977 until May of 1983 I was at Patch Barracks, Stuttgart-Vaihingen, Germany; home of the Headquarters of the United States European Command - the highest US command in Europe. I have written a lot of articles about events that transpired there, mostly related to my job in the Protocol Office. MamaCharlie and I regard Patch as some of the best years of our life together. It was a great combination of facilities, good schools, and good military duty. It just seemed to be the confluence of all the good stuff a family could want.
One of the things we did there that contributed to the "cool" factor was what we called our "International Supper Club". We had six or seven couples who would get together for dinner once a month. We would rotate the host duties. Whoever was host for the month would pick a country for the theme, research the types of food dishes that were popular in that country, decide on a menu, make assignments to the other members, and provide the recipes. During the dinner, the hosts would provide some cultural information about the country as well. As you might imagine, these couples were all military and had traveled extensively so there were lots of interesting dinners filled with first-hand experiences in some exotic places. We looked forward to these dinners; they really were a highpoint of the month. And being a military community, we saw many of our members come and go. One of the couples that joined our group for a while were civilians. He was a physicist who was on sabbatical from the University of Toronto. They were in Stuttgart for a year while he did some research work at the Max Planck institute in Stuttgart. His field was light. He once explained how everything was waves and the frequency of the wave's vibration determined what it was. I called him "Professor". I couldn't hang with it. This was a brainy guy. And as Skinnyguy pointed out in his post; physicists are different, they don't think like normal people. But he was a down-to-earth guy; his wife was a sweet lady, and he had some cool kids. His teenage son made a ruby laser from scratch for his science project in school - without any help from Dad...that's cool. The kid explained in detail how he designed it and what he needed to put it together and make it work. I didn't understand 75% of what he said.
The Professor never talked down to any of us, though. In fact, he was most interested in hearing about our experiences in the military, especially those of us who had been to Vietnam. He had never served.
The Professor and his family were only there for a year and it seemed like we had just gotten to know them and it was time for them to leave. At the last dinner we were there together, he asked if he could make an announcement to the group. He explained that he had grown up in an academic family, and when he graduated from college he was given an opportunity to go to Toronto to study wave theory and attend graduate courses. He liked it there and took up permanent residence. He was a US citizen by birth but never considered that it meant much. He explained that the last year he had been reconsidering his attitude. He had been impressed with the quiet patriotism and the stories of sacrifice and service he had heard from the group. It had kindled in him a since of patriotism that he had never felt before. He felt a pride in his country for the first time in his life. So he had started putting out feelers and had been accepted in a research position at a university in the States and he was going home.
He told us that he felt he should apologize for himself and his colleagues; that there was an attitude among them that the military was a place where people went when they "couldn't cut it" on the outside. The prevailing opinion was that the military was populated with knuckle-draggers, red necks, and semi-literate people who were like "working welfare" recipients. His association with us for the previous year had opened his eyes to a community of quality individuals who impressed him with the willingness to do whatever necessary to protect and serve a nation. He said that none of his friends in academia would ever consider flying a helicopter into enemy guns to pick up wounded GIs - as one of our group had done many times; or expose themselves to the enemy to deliver goods and material to troops in the fight; or go on a patrol, or sleep out in the open in the rain waiting for enemy troops to come down the trail, or any of a dozen other exploits he had heard talked about in the group. Even the sacrifices of a peacetime military were not only unknown to his academic friends; the things required of the military on a daily basis were unthinkable to them. So he thanked us and apologized to us and he moved back to the States, his home, promising to ensure that he and his family would never take the service of the military for granted again, or forget for a moment that he was an American.