Last week I wrote about being in NYC and watching Tiny Tim’s wedding on The Johnny Carson Show. As weird as Tiny Tim may have been, my watching the show was even weirder. Or more exactly, while I was watching it I was in one very weird mood.

My weirdness had nothing to do with Tiny Tim, Johnny Carson, the wedding, or anything on TV. Instead, it had to do with li’l young me, and li’l young me alone: The next day I was, to quote John Denver, leaving on a jet plane, winging my way to Frankfurt, Germany, to start a two-year tour of duty on a tiny base in Bremerhaven.

Sound exciting? Well, of all the words I’d use to describe how I felt at the time, “excited” would’ve been the last. Uncertain, apprehensive, alienated, isolated and confused, would’ve filled the bill far better than “excited.”

To understand the Mulligan stew of my melancholic musings, you need to know what preceded my European Adventure, which was six months at the Navy Communication Training Command in Pensacola, Florida.

The school’s mission was to train us to become proficient Morse code operators. Inadvertently, I also learned the essential rules for success as an enlisted man. Rule One was: Never volunteer for anything. Rule Two was: The unofficial uniform of the day was your Invisibility Cloak — the less you caught the attention of the NCO’s, the better. Rule Three was: Five hours spent in the library or the gym was always better than five minutes in the enlisted men’s club. And Rule Four was: Never trust anything an NCO tells you, unless it has your name on it and is signed by both the Chief of Naval Operations and the Secretary of the Navy.

Since I followed the rules scrupulously, I had only one major problem — the orders I’d get for my next duty station. There were lots of fine duty stations … and there were lots more crappy ones. I’d get my orders at the end of our fifth month there, and for those five months the only orders anyone got were Guam, Subic Bay or Adak.

To me, each was an equally lousy option.

Guam is a small Pacific Island that was the scene of a WWII battle. It has year-round temperature average of 80 or so and two seasons — rainy and dry. It’s an ideal tour of duty if you like such leisure time activities as treasure hunting for unexploded hand grenades and such, watching bombers take off for Vietnam, playing golf and tennis, and getting hammered with your pals in the EM club. Since I didn’t like any of those things, the mere thought of being there for 18 months made me break out in hives.

Subic Bay, Philippines, was a huge base in a third-world country. This meant it was a Navy oasis surrounded by a desert of gin mills, schlock shops, cat houses and ripoff artists of every ilk. The weather was pleasant — at least between typhoons, tsunamis, floods and mudslides. So at least there was a lot of activity — again, none of it my cup of tea. But at least it had activity — in contrast to Adak.

Adak, an island in the Aleutian chain, is a cold barren rock often socked in by fog as thick as pea soup. The prime leisure activities there are fishing, working out and getting loaded on cheap booze. The phrase everyone uttered when Adak’s name was mentioned was, “It had a woman behind every tree.” True, as far as it goes, since there were no trees. I figured I’d be completely out of mine long before my year there was up.

By month four, we’d filled out a form for three choices of duty stations. But where we ended up was to use that too-often uttered phrase, “dependent upon the needs of the Navy.” Thus why that form was called A Dream Sheet.

The closer I got to getting my orders, the more morose I became — especially since all the graduating classes were still getting sent to either Guam, Subic Bay or Adak. Things got so bad for my tortured psyche that I would’ve traded my orders, sight unseen, for Adak since it had the shortest tour of duty.

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The promise…

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Finally, our orders arrived. And when they did, pandemonium broke out! What happened, for reasons known only to The Great Spirit, is everyone got orders we could only have dreamed about, mostly in Europe. On the hit parade were Scotland, Spain, Italy, Turkey, and in my case, Germany. The only guys who got orders to the Pacific got assigned to Hawaii, Taiwan and Japan — all of which were as close to heaven on earth as it gets for an enlisted man. Still, others got cushy Stateside duty.

With my orders I got something no one else in my class got — a commercial airline ticket. Everyone else flew with MATS (Military Air Transport Service). From what I’d heard, it was the equivalent of an airborne cattle car, with everyone jammed in like the sardines in the tin. I, other other hand, was going to be flying in high style with Pan Am.

It sounded too good to be true … and ultimately it was. Yeah, sure, the MATS passengers were The Steerage of the Air, but they were in it together. Plus, they’d land together, which meant they’d be under military auspices and would be guided to their duty stations. I was going to arrive in Germany all by my lonesome.

As I said earlier, I’d be landing in Frankfurt, but my duty station was Bremerhaven. Once I knew that, I hied over to the library, grabbed an atlas, and checked out the distance twixt the two. It was about 325 miles. So how was I to get from one place to the other? No idea.

I decided to ask my instructor, an E-6 named Burgess. He was pleasant, but hardly the fastest ship in the fleet. Plus, being an instructor in that A school didn’t exactly try the souls of men. Or to put it more bluntly, it was a dream billet for a laggard. It was a school, but the instructors didn’t really have to instruct. We spent almost all our time copying Morse and all the instructor had to do was turn the recorder on and off. There also were some vague attempts at presenting something that pertained to the fieldwork, but I can’t remember anything about them, a sign of the classroom rigor — or lack thereof.

Anyhow, after a class I approached Burgess and told him my dilemma.

“Don’t sweat it,” he said with dismissive certainty. “There’ll be someone there to take care of you.”

Remember Rule Number Four? If you forgot, it was Never trust anything an NCO tells you. But even if I’d never known Rule Number Four, at that moment I was sure Burgess had no idea what he was talking about.

And guess what? I was right.

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…unkept

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When I landed in Frankfurt I wasn’t met by Rear Admiral Dupawitz and the Navy Band. Nor, in fact, was I met by anyone at all. There were only two people on duty; an exhausted-looking ticket agent and an even more exhausted-looking janitor. And why wouldn’t they be — it was 0200, in a poorly heated building, in the middle of the coldest German winter in 25 years. Adding to the ambiance of frosted gloom was that while my seabag had arrived, my suitcase was nowhere to be found. So I had my uniforms, but not a stitch of civilian clothes.

Since the airport was a civilian facility, how did I get to the military one? I asked the ticket agent, who told me the military bus would be there in the morning (a mere six or seven hours away). But she said there was a phone for the MP’s on nearby wall. I hustled over to it, only to find it was as out of order as my life at that moment. When I told her that, she just shrugged, turned off all her equipment, and split, leaving me and the janitor in her wake.

It was time to take stock. This wasn’t difficult since I had no options. I was stuck in the airport lobby, which was the temperature of a walk-in cooler, and I’d be stuck there until the military bus showed up. Till then I just had to gut it out.

I tried to get comfortable in one of those classic plastic waiting room seats, pulled my pea coat collar up around my head as far as it could go, and hoped to be able to sleep. It was a forlorn hope and one of the longest, most miserable nights of my life. But there was one high point.

Sometime around 0500, the janitor came to my section, half-heartedly pushing his broom. As bad as I felt, he looked like he felt a lot worse. He was rail-thin, had a racking cough, and looked old enough to have been in day care with Bismarck.

As he shuffled by me, he took a drag of the cigarette hanging off his lower lip, shook his head and said in German, “This is not a life for an old man.”

I nodded. And then in my rudimentary German I said, “Yeah. And this is not a life for a young man either.”

Then he nodded.

And neither of us smiled.