Almost every guy my age knows at least a few things about General J. Pershing. One was he was often referred to as “Black Jack.” Another is he was the commander of the American Expeditionary Force in WWI. A third is he carried pearl-handled pistols. And last, on July 4, 1917, laying a wreath on the tomb of the Marquis de Lafayette, who helped us win our Revolutionary War, he uttered those stirring words, “Lafayette, we are here.”

As it is with so many things, half of those statements are wrong. The first two are true, but as for the others …

The Lafayette quote, stirring indeed, was neither penned nor spoken by Pershing. Instead, Colonel Charles Stanton, Pershing’s disbursing officer, said it. Pershing himself said it was Stanton’s quote — for all the good it did.

But Pershing had his own noteworthy quote that history has sadly overlooked. It concerns his famous pistols. In reply to a reporter who asked him if he carried pearl-handled ones, he said: “They’re ivory. Only a pimp from a cheap New Orleans wh***house would carry a pearl-handled pistol.” When it comes to both generals and their quotes, all I’ve got to say is they sure don’t make ’em like that no more.

When Pershing, Stanton, et. al. marched to the cemetery for that ceremony, hundreds of thousands of cheering people jammed the route so much that the soldiers had to push beaucoup of them out of the way to make any forward progress at all.

As I wrote last week, my arrival in Europe, thanks to the U.S. Navy, was both far less dramatic and far less populous than theirs. And my reception was cooler than Black Jack’s, both literally and figuratively, since there was no one to meet me in the Frankfurt airport in the middle of the night in the middle of Germany’s coldest winter in recent memory.

Essentially, I shivered my tuchis off for 7 hours, till the Army shuttle bus arrived to whisk me away to Rhine-Main, the American military airport. For reasons still unknown, I’d flown in on Pan Am and then been dumped solo in the German civilian airport, with my seabag, but without a clue.

Rhine-Main was a huge transport hub for troops entering and leaving Germany. When I made my less-than-dramatic arrival, over 325,000 American troops were in Germany, so to say Rhine-Main was a madhouse is an understatement. It was a roiling sea of army green, with one microscopic speck of blue — namely yours truly. Note: Of those 325,000 troops, the total number of sailors was around 400, all of them on a base in Bremerhaven, about 300 miles north of where I was, thawing but not chilling, jet lagged and sleep-deprived and with no idea how I’d get there.

I stumbled around for a while till I found the office that transported lost souls to their bases, and got my ticket for The Duty Train, which would leave late that night. That gave me about 14 hours to enjoy the sights and smells of Rhine-Main, which consisted of army green, cigarette smoke and B.O.

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Bremerhaven bound

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I can’t remember anything about my wait, except it did NOT fly by, and I was unable to get any sleep. But finally the bus for the duty train arrived and I and a bunch of soldiers piled in it, heading to the train station. And now a word about German stations back then: They were like giant Quonset huts, with open ends. So while you were on the platform, you were in the great outdoors … or in my case, the not-so-great outdoors. First of all, as I said, it was brutally cold, made even more brutal by my wearing street shoes and a cotton hat. Second, we had a fairly long wait, made into a really long wait: After the train pulled into the station, they found out the train car for Bremerhaven hadn’t been attached. So the train went back out of the station and while others enjoyed a case of German beer, I got to enjoy a case of German hypothermia.

Finally, the train pulled in and we boarded. I was in a four-man compartment that, while warmer than the outdoors, wasn’t a whole lot warmer. Without boring you with the details, I’ll just say when the train finally pulled into Bremerhaven, the only thing I could feel was sorry for myself. I was numb from my eyebrows down. About a half hour later, the base bus pulled up and dropped me off at the base. I hobbled over to the admin building, handed over my paperwork and now was officially an active member of Naval Security Group Activity, Bremerhaven.

Next, I went to my room in the barracks — another surprise. The base had been a German air force training command before and during WWII. And while I don’t know how warm the barracks were then, but now they were glacial. Since I had some time to kill before I checked into the radio shack, I decided to go to the snack bar, drink hot coffee and pray for a very early spring.

The snack bar was wonderfully warm, the coffee was steaming-hot and I began to think the feeling might return in my extremities sometime before my two-year tour was up.

Oh yeah, the NSGA was actually on an army base, so everyone else in the snack bar was army, till a fellow swabby came in and sat at my table. He was a pleasant-looking fellow who introduced himself as Ted Beck.

“So you’re the new guy,” he said.

I said I was.

“Well, you’ll be in Charlie section, the one I’m in.”

“How is it?” I asked.

“Lousy,” he said. The Chief is a drunk racist idiot who plays favorites. And of course his favorites are also drunk racist idiots.”

“Uh, how many of them in the section?” I asked.

“A better question is how many are not in the section,” he said.

“OK, I’ll bite,” I said. “How many in the section are not drunk racist idiots?”

“Most of the guys on the Line,” he said. “And none of the ones in the Bin.”

“The Line? The Bin?” I said.

“The Line is where all the good operators are and where you work all the time,” he said. “The Bin is short for Loony Bin. It’s the most boring work imaginable, cuz there’s almost never any traffic. So you just gotta sit there and listen to a buncha morons who can hardly string two sentences together.”

Then he added, “It’s also where you’ll first be assigned. So my advice is get out of it as soon as you can and sit on the Line.”

“What else should I know?” I asked.

“The Division Chief is a dunce, the Division Officer is a pompous ass. The captain is useless and I think his role model is Captain Queeg, which is why we’ve got scoop watches?”

“Scoop watches?” I said. “What’re they?”

“You know we work six watches and then have 80 hours off, right?”

I nodded.

“Well, we’re understaffed, probably because Queeg doesn’t really care about efficiency, morale or anything else,” he said. “So because we’re understaffed, the low enlisted guys have to come in on their days off and sit in the Bin.”

It should go without saying that I was the lowest of the low enlisted guys … and feeling lower by the second.

“I thought they don’t do any work in the Bin,” I said.

“They don’t,” he said. “And the supervisors know how crappy the scoop watch guys feel, so they don’t even make ’em pretend to work. Instead, you just sit there for 9 hours, praying either for the shack to go up in flames or the Russians to score a direct hit with an ICBM.”

I was mulling over what he’d said when he got up to leave.

“So,” I asked, “can you say anything good about this place.”

“Yeah, I can,” he said.

“And what is it?” I said.

“It’s that I’ve got 42 more days on my enlistment. Then my hitch is up, and it’s sayonara to Bremerhaven and the whole damned U.S. Navy.”

He nodded, as if to reassure himself that he wasn’t dreaming, said goodbye and left.

And now you might wonder if Ted was right. In other words, were things really as bad as he said they were?

The answer is No, only because they were a helluva lot worse.