Christmas 1961
It was the day before Christmas in Babenhausen, a small town south of Frankfurt and I had drawn "CQ"- Charge of Quarters. At noon I went on duty in our Corporal missile detachment's orderly room so now I was in charge of everything, including signing out everyone who was going off- post for visiting, partying, or Christmas shopping. One by one they came in that afternoon to sign out, most going into town but some going as far as Aschaffenburg or even Frankfurt but everyone was required to sign in by ten o'clock that evening.
I turned on the radio in the orderly room to listen to AFN Frankfurt playing Christmas carols. This was a big Zenith Trans-Oceanic that we all had clustered around to listen to live broadcasts of Project Mercury rocket launches. Being guided missile men we felt a special kinship to those at Cape Canaveral. Throughout the day on the hour AFN would announce "It is now Christmas in Guam" or wherever, advancing around the globe toward us in Germany.
Soon the sky was dark and as the evening wore on it became colder. In central Europe the climate in winter is cold and damp- the kind of cold that even my field jacket didn't keep out. Our unit work area was an old World War One cavalry building and the heating system was provided by a steam boiler but the German maintenance man went off duty early and without more coal the heat dwindled slowly away to nothing. I wished I had zipped in my field jacket liner but it was too late, that was back in my locker in our barracks.
Slowly the men began to straggle back to sign in. A few staggered in, a bit worse for wear from Michaelsbrau, the local brew. By ten o'clock everyone had returned, signed in, and headed for the barracks and bed. All over the kaserne things began to quiet down. No sound except the radio playing softly. Sitting at the First Sergeant's desk, I tried to stay awake. Sleeping on CQ duty is a serious offense but I also had to be alert enough to pick up the phone promptly if a call came in. Sure enough, the phone rang "157th Ordnance Detachment, Spec 4 Albaugh speaking" and the response was "This is an Alert, authenticate xxxxxxx". I guess someone up the chain of command was making sure that even on Christmas Eve we were ready to go to war. Our mission was to defend the Fulda Gap, named for a small town located on the East-West German border where a Soviet armored attack would probably pass through. At that time the Fulda Gap was the most dangerous place in the world; both East and West had an untold number of nuclear weapons trained on Fulda. Fortunately, the call was only a communications exercise- no real alert and I could hang up the phone and relax.
The time slowly passed, sitting there behind the desk in the semi-darkness trying to stay warm and awake. My feet were cold so I got up and walked into the workshop area where we had our 5-ton operations van, X-15, Captain Hamilton's jeep, and the arms room where our M14 rifles and a stock of fragmentation grenades were kept. We also were issued thermite grenades that even burned steel. If we fired all of our missiles, we would destroy everything and be used as riflemen.
I walked to the orderly room door and opened it to get a breath of fresh air to help stay awake. It had begun to snow! Big soft flakes of snow fell onto the rounded cobblestones outside and slowly melted, the wet stones reflecting the white light of a star that had been placed on the kaserne's water tower. There was no sound at all, everything was perfectly quiet as the snow fell. As I stood there alone in the doorway I thought of my family, thousands of miles away, probably still sleeping soundly in their warm beds, safe and sound. I prayed that it would always be so.
I turned to close the door and glanced at my watch. It was just past 12 midnight.
It was Christmas, the loneliest one I ever experienced.