Came to the office to find voice mail from a fellow Monterey Mary, with whom I studied Russian in 1959 in Monterey, with whom I served now and again in Germany. What a trip! He called to say he enjoyed my novella Baumholder 1961 and, this is the highlight, he ordered copies for his children! In other words, here's what the old man experienced. I love it. I knew somebody had bought 5 copies of the novella recently, highly unusual, but I figured it was some bookstore somewhere run by a former Mary or something. This is even better. Giving a book to your kids means a lot of the experiences ring true. As they should. As they do. It's just so surrealistic, here and there, it's hard to convince folks it is TRUE, this is what your soldier boys were doing in the Cold War, O America.
It also was a hoot to get encouragement from a genuine banjo player (see comments below). For the first time, I am getting the right sound. Now it's about cleanliness and speed and timing. I will do this!
But I still don't know what to do in 3 weeks after my classes end. I'll see what my teacher has to say. If individual lessons, which of six available teachers do I choose? If not, I could really get into the DVD big time. I am self-disciplined enough to do this.
We'll see how the next three weeks shake out.
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Baumholder 1961 (a Novella, 75 pages) by Charles Deemer
Published by Sextant Press, 2009.
Baumholder 1961 is the tale of the personal crisis faced by an Army Security Agency Russian Monterey Mary in August 1961 when the Berlin Wall goes up, and he is involuntarily extended on the day before he is scheduled to return to civilian life. Should he recognize the truth of Engel's dictum that "freedom is the recognition of necessity," or should he go AWOL with his German girlfriend who appears to be an East-German spy? His best friend comes looking for him to keep him from making a mess out of his life, but will he succeed? You'll have to read the book to find out.
To those who doubt the verisimilitude of the novella, as an ASA Monterey Mary of that same vintage I can say that the characters were people I could have known, and the situations in the novella were familiar. The dynamic tension of the day described in the novella was, however, broken by the exposition of scene setting that could have better appeared in a novel-length work as a part of the lead-in to the events of the novella as its closing chapters. I think the topic is worthy of a longer treatment.
Deemer's comment about his pleasure at learning that a former comrade in linguistic arms had bought copies of the novella to give to his children, brings to mind the reason that I wrote my own novel. I wanted to record what it was like to fight the Secret Cold war for posterity. When the children of Cold-War veterans ask "What did you do in the Cold War?," most of them, have to say something trite, like "If I told you, I'd have to shoot you." I wanted to give voice to some of their stories so that they would not disappear when the generations of old ASA-ers and USAFSS-ers who are sworn to silence shuffle off this mortal coil. Voices Under Berlin may not be exactly the story that each and every one of them would like to tell, but it is close enough so that people who fought the Secret Cold War in places other than Berlin say that they felt right at home while reading it. I wanted Secret Cold War vets to be able to answer their children and grandchildren with: "I can't tell you exactly, but why don't you read Voices Under Berlin?
Deemer's novella is just another in a growing list of ASA memoirs and novels that can be found on Wikipedia
, and on Amazon.com under the tag "Army Security Agency".
A softcopy of the novella is available on Deemer's
blog. Hardcopy is available from Lulu.com.
T.H.E. Hill
author of Voices
Under Berlin: The Tale of a Monterey Mary.
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