It seems that nostalgia is the assignment this week for the Chico crowd...it is usually my topic every week and this week is no exception.  On the way home from Church today I was listening to the Sixties on Six on my "rock and roll from outerspace" and the Stones came on with that distinctive opening riff from "Satisfaction".  For just a quick moment I had a glimpse of where I was living when I first heard the song.  And it dredged up a Sunday morning scene from who knows exactly when, but certainly sometime in the middle of 1965. 

I was living in the Headquarters and Headquarters Troop building of the 2/14th Armored Cav in Daley barracks, Bad Kissingen, Germany.  My platoon, the Support Platoon or "Fuel and Lube" as we called it, was housed on the second floor above the Squadron's Headquarters offices.  The building was a former Wehrmacht barracks, built in the 1930s.  The rooms' floors were hardwood;  the hallway floors were a ribbed hard rubber material that was a bummer to clean.  The walls were painted an institutional green enamel from about three and a half feet down and a whitewash above, also very difficult to clean.  The rooms on our floor varied in size:  some only large enough for two soldiers and some larger that could hold ten soldiers and several sizes in between.  The doors to the rooms were wooden and recessed about a foot into the hallway wall.  Along the hallway there were rifle racks that were good for nothing more than gathering dust.  The rooms had the same paint scheme.  The windows were the traditional German type, two complete sets of windows hinged like doors with about a foot between them...twice as many window panes to clean for inspection.  I started off in a six-man room but was soon moved across the hall to an eight-man room.  Four sets of bunks, eight double-door lockers and eight footlockers.  There were no monster stereos in the rooms;  we were not allowed to have any personal possessions that would not fit into the small area of our wallockers.  The only thing allowed on the walls was the fire exit plan.  It was pretty plain.  Every Friday after our normal dinner hour, we gathered together in the hallway and received our instructions for the weekly "GI Party".  My platoon was responsible for one end of the hallway and it took six or seven guys to do that job.  We started with a thorough sweep down with a couple very stiff brooms.  Then came long-handled scrub brushes and scouring powder and a lot of elbow grease.  If you have ever used scouring powder of the era you know that it worked well in cleaning but refused to get rinsed off.   So after the scrubbing, five or six mops worked like dogs for hours to rinse off all the white residue.  Hall detail was the hardest. 

But the rest of the platoon didn't get off easy.  If you had to work in the room, you had to start with getting everything off the floor,  a thorough sweep and mop to get all the dust and dirt and smudges up.  Then each soldier got a wad of steel wool the sized of a slow-pitch softball and started stripping the old wax.  We would put the steel wool on the floor and use our feet to scrub at the wax.  On a normal Friday we would go through about three wads of steel wool to get the floor stripped (that's three wads EACH...we usually had six guys working in the room).  After the floor was stripped and swept and mopped again, we used a buffer to apply the new wax.   Some units used a liquid wax that came in five-gallon cans but we almost always had a paste wax.  When it dried we buffed it over and over until the floor had a soft, deep sheen.  I have to admit, it really looked great when it was done. 

After the floor, we had to do all the dusting and wall- and window-washing.  The hall crew would usually get done about 2100-2130 (that's 9:00-9:30 pm).  Friday was the one day of the week when we could go to the club in fatigues so we would often finish our GI activities with an "After Action Report" at the club...those who got finished in time.  Of course, before anyone left the barracks, the platoon sergeant had to inspect everything to ensure it was up to standards.  Our platoon sergeant, Stantz, was tough,  so we didn't always get to the club;  in fact on a couple of occasions we all had to fall out into the hallway and do it over again.  But being tough himself meant that the First Sergeant (who was at every GI Party and would pop in unannounced to watch you work) trusted Stantz to have a satisfactory result and didn't need to spend a lot of time supervising the supervisors.  Not every platoon sergeant enjoyed that luxury.

We worked every Saturday; usually until noon.  Sometimes we had classes, sometimes inspections, but a lot of the time just regular work.  So Sundays and holidays were the only days we actually had the opportunity to sleep in and slob around.

So back to Sunday morning.  The hallway was empty and had a faint smell of the scouring powder and mops; it seemed to absorb most sounds but there were a few that leaked out here and there.  A radio show on AFN called the Monitor Beacon, an Omnibus kind of show that featured interviews, comedy skits, music, and a variety of entertainment was playing in one of the rooms, just barely loud enough to be discerned.  At the other end of the hall someone was trying to cough up a lung;  he really needed to cut down on his smoking.  The shower room was half-way down the hall and someone had taken a shower earlier.  No matter how tightly twisted the faucet, the shower heads would drip for ten minutes after they were shut off.  You could smell the Dial soap and Head and Shoulders shampoo.  Next door to the shower room was the washroom with two banks of sinks and mirrors...shower boy was shaving and you could hear the swishing as he rinsed his razor.  There were latrines at each end of the hallway;  each had a single sink and four toilets.  I won't even try to describe the old German toilets to you (well, maybe later) but they were different.  By Sunday noon the toilet paper was usually gone and you could hear guys in the stalls roughing up a page from the Saturday Stars and Stripes...creating traction for use as a TP substitute.  A smart GI would pilfer a roll of TP and keep it in his locker for the weekend (but try not to get caught...it was not allowed). 

On the way back to my room I heard PFC Walt snoring, a peculiar, bubbling snore.  Now and then you could hear a snatch of quiet conversation from one room or another.  When I opened the door to my room, the only other GI there who was awake was Jackson.  He had a small radio that he had just tuned into Radio Luxembourg, an English-speaking station that played top 40 music...we could usually pick it up in the evening and it was popular with the young GIs because it was more like home than AFN with its generic programing.  It was unusual to pick it up in daylight (go figure) but Jackson was excited because he had found it on this early Sunday morning.  No sooner had he tuned it in than  "Satisfaction" started up and left an indelible imprint in my memory.  My Sundays aren't like that anymore, thank goodness.  But if I hit a streak on Sixties on Six, I can spend several minutes in the soft lights and muted sounds of that long-ago-and-far-away hallway...how's that, Chico kids?