AUGUST 16, 2020 – [Cont.] Fritz had no handle on spoken German . . . except . . . dinner table grace.
When Fritz was a kid, a family ritual was Sunday dinner with his grandparents. Part of the ritual was Grandpa Angst reciting a short grace—in German. Fritz learned to rattle it off just like my non-Norwegian speaking spouse can say (in Norwegian) the grace that her Grandpa said in his native tongue.
Fast forward to Fort Dix, NJ, the summer of 1967. Fritz learned where the German test would be administered. But finding the place on the sprawling base was another matter. By the direction of one soldier, he raced to one building. Upon learning that that soldier had been ill-informed by a full 180 degrees, Fritz ran off in the opposite direction—only to learn at his second destination that no, the test had been moved to another building on the far side of the first place where he’d appeared. Breathless, he finally found the correct building but about 10 minutes late. A jaw-jutting sergeant guarded the entrance. Fritz attempted to step around him.
“You’re late. Can’t go in!” the sergeant barked.
“But I couldn’t find . . .”
The sergeant lowered an eye onto Fritz’s name tag—ANGST. “You German?”
“Uh-huh,” said Fritz, sweat dripping from his upper lip. He could feel the tropical heat of Vietnam.
“Speak German?”
“Jawohl!” Fritz answered, pressing his chin to his chest and thinking of Sergeant Schultz on Hogan’s Heroes, answering to a scowling Colonel Klenk.
Fritz fought hard to collect his thoughts. He feared that his fate was in the balance, in the gruff hands of this sergeant.
“Let’s hear it,” the sergeant ordered.
Fritz pushed “Jawohl” Schultz aside and turned to . . . prayer . . . er, grace. Private Angst, the “German,” delivered four lines of German as if he’d been born and bred in Munich—home of his grandparents. The sergeant waved him in.
Fritz’s worries weren’t over. He passed the written exam, but that didn’t mean he could speak German, other than his grandpa’s grace. “Jesus Christ,” he said to a new acquaintance back at his barracks. “Now what the hell am I going to do?”
The newfound buddy turned out to be Fritz’s savior.
“It so happens,” the guy said, “that as a civilian I was a high school German teacher. I’d been an exchange student in Germany, so I’m pretty fluent at it. I’ll be your tutor. Between now and when you have to show you can, I’ll have you talking German like Colonel Klenk.”
Fritz did his grandpa proud. After basic training, he (and his savior buddy) were sent to intelligence school and wound up stationed on the East German border, translating radio intercepts. Herr Angst never got close to Vietnam before his honorable discharge four years later. He went to law school, got married, discovered the pageantry of drum and bugle corps shows, became an expert in the Uniform Commercial Code, and best of all, found truth and beauty in Canadian revenue stamps.
It could have ended so very differently but for the power of . . . grace.
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© 2020 by Eric Nilsson
