Foreign relations
National media went wild this month and high ranking U.S. government officials went wilder after reports leaked out regarding Secret Service agents and military personnel bringing prostitutes into their hotel in Cartagena, Colombia.
Those highly trained young men were there to set up a safety zone for President Obama’s meeting with other leaders. Investigations and castigations could go on forever.
This event brought back memories of my dealing with young American men and foreign prostitutes; however, the situation was much different. Only similarity was it involved national security risks to lesser extent — 60-odd years ago.
A preface for “the book” I’ll probably never finish goes like this:
“On day two of foreign service, I watched destitute German women selling themselves to American soldiers on a wooded hillside near Marburg. That scene was a teenage Pfc.’s jolting welcome into the “real world” of a war-devastated nation, its desperate survivors and their conquerors.
“My writing deals with the lives of American Occupation troops, the defeated people they were sent to ‘democratize,’ and how those diverse humans dealt with each other.”
That’s part of my preface, but for now we’ll deal with one facet, sex. At war’s end, American soldiers were forbidden to “fraternize with the enemy,” not even speak to them unless necessary in the line of duty. A little later, talking was allowed, but no “public displays of affection,” such as “holding hands.”
A half million young men cannot be shipped into a foreign country and expected to refrain from hanky-panky where 4 million women of child-bearing age have no husband or male friend because most of those have been killed.
Army authorities were slow in figuring this out, but within a year of war’s end, the unenforceable rules were ignored and venereal disease began to soar. First rules said G.I.s getting sexual disease would be put behind bars. There weren’t enough barred facilities to hold a week’s supply.
Next move was to restrict unlucky lovers to 60 days confinement in their unit compounds. My outfit, the 7772 Headquarters Signal Battalion, was housed in a secure compound containing former Gestapo barracks. It was surrounded by a sturdy, woven-wire, eight-foot fence with barbed wire along the top.
Everything went in and out through a gate with armed guards, while women of all ages stood outside or paraded past, hoping to pick up a G.I. who would pay them enough for some food, shelter or maybe medicine for a sick baby brother. The ultimate hope was escape from Germany and “go to America.”
When I made sergeant at my “day job” in ETO Headquarters, I volunteered to serve in the Information & Education section back at our barracks. This would keep me from pulling Sergeant of the Guard in the rain and snow. Got an assignment supervising programs to keep troops from getting VD, an impossible job. “VD control NCO.”
Here’s just one of my adventures. One evening a naive new Pfc. came running to my room. “Sergeant! Sergeant! Look out the window. Two of the restricted guys are ____ girls through the fence.”
I could write a book.
G. George Ostrom is a national award-winning Hungry Horse News columnist. He lives in Kalispell.