I met Mike Anderson at AIT. His friends called him “Andy” and he was then, and he remains fifty years later one of the most unique and strangely wonderful human beings I’ve ever met. I’m not sure if it was because of his love for hallucinogens and the fact that he had taken a look “behind the curtain of reality” or what it was, but he was operating on a different frequency than the rest of us. At that point in my life I would say that I had gotten high on weed, or hash, perhaps 400 times, considering I was a daily user during the junior year of high school alone, but I had not yet experienced the wonders of hallucinogens.

Andy was maybe a year or two older but had tripped enough “to know”. I loved the dude right away for his quirkiness and it was great news to find out that he was assigned to the same army base in Germany as me after AIT. We weren’t in the same company, but his company barracks was only maybe a hundred yards, or so, from mine.

Andy had as much of an anti-army mindset as I did but he wasn’t the rebellious, maniac, risk-taker that I was. His approach was that he was going to do his time without rubbing it in their face, but still he was going to let his “freak-flag-fly”. So on the morning of January 1 st , 1977 I stumbled on post having been up partying all night, grabbed a quart of vodka someone had left on their first floor window ledge and went over to wake up Andy with my newly acquired New Year’s day present.

Andy didn’t drink as much as I did but he was open to the idea to drink pretty much when it presented itself. His room had a massive mural that he had painted that was some kind of acid inspired landscape that was quit fantastic. When I first saw it some months before that day I had asked him how it was that he got away with it and he said he just painted it and nobody has said anything about it. I supposed the same went for the upside down Christmas tree, complete with ornaments and tinsel that he had

hanging from the middle of his room.

New Year’s day presented came about on a long weekend and so I was brainstorming with Andy how to maximize our time for run. I was always happy to foot the bill for any excursion that Andy and I might dream up. What we decided to do was go see our friend from AIT, John Pavelcheck, who was stationed up on the Czech border. Of course this being 1977 and there being no way to contact him we simply decided that we would party our way up there (no surprise) and just let whatever happen, happen.

A quick search for the distance from the town where our post was to the Czechoslovakian border where he was stationed shows the distance it to be about 550 KM and 6 hour drive. Since our mode of transportation was trains with transfers and layovers it took about twice that. We left the stations on more than one occasion on drug seeking forays and seeking out general mischief.

I can’t remember what time we left from our post but we arrived at his post sometime in the early morning, probably around 3 A.M. We had been let out by the cabbie at the post gate not knowing where his barracks were and exhausted from a traveling party that included plenty of people along the way and which lasted at least 16 hours. We slogged through the snow in the middle of the morning, spent from the travelling circus we had created, not knowing where we were going.

We finally found his barracks only to find that he was not there. He was in “the field”, which is where soldiers go for wargames. In the army there is always someone stationed at the front entry who was the “NCOIC”, which stands for the Non-commissioned officer in charge. It’s his job to keep people out of the barracks who didn’t belong there. Pavelcheck wasn’t there, and that was all he knew and he had a general demeanor of “Oh well, too bad for you! . When we took the position that we were stuck and the

only option for us was going to be that he was going to have to call the MP’S and have us arrested because we had no other options. My guess is he didn’t want to deal with the immediate hassle, much less the paperwork that would ensue so he located some friends of Pavelcheck who came and escorted us to their room.

We chewed the fat for a little while but we were all exhausted and went to sleep until later the next day.

When I woke up I discovered that I was more or less broke. Andy didn’t have any money because I was funding the trip. We had to be in morning formation the next day or be AWOL. This was clearly a problem.

We scrapped together enough money from his biddies to get a cab to the train station where we had decided to hop into the next train going in the direction of Frankfurt and go into the WC (European for toilet) and see how far we could make it. If we made it all the way to Frankfort we might be able to figure it out from there. Once in the WC we were a bit cold after a while since those spaces where not meant for traveling in for hours. All things considered the temperature was not the big problem. What was hell was that we were two grown men in a tiny space where the best seating was the toilet and a distant second was the edge of the sink.

As we sat in there cold and very uncomfortable we’d hear those people who needed to use the WC, sometimes banging on the door, and we somehow thought our best strategy was silence. Given the benefit of 50 years hindsight I’d now go with the sound of retching along with drunken broken English.

Still it was probably a plan doomed to failure from the start. Eventually someone notified the conductor.

The door was opened and we were manhandled off the train with threats of calling the police if we didn’t comply.

By this time it had become late enough at night that we were left off on the platform where we were alone and the next train to Frankfort wasn’t due for hours so we tried our luck at hitchhiking. We had no luck hitchhiking. We probably tried for a couple of hours until the next train was due. When this one came we decided on hiding under the seats of separate compartment cars. This lasted until the next stop and the guys who threw us off this time were less gentle than the others had been. By then it was sometime in the early morning and we were due to formation maybe a hours with the next train due later than that. “Screwed,  e were” I would imagine Yoda to say. We came up with a plan to find a cab, which were Mercedes Bends back then and tell the cabbie that if he got us to our post on time that Andy would stay with the cab while I ran to the barracks and got the cab fare plus a hundred dollar tip.

The German highway system, known as the autobahn is well known for having no speed limits. A cabbie at that time of night, being offered a huge fare, a hundred dollar tip, and a challenge like that probably thought these two derelict young American G.I.s just made his night.

It wouldn’t have done much good to check out his speedometer since the speed was in kilometers per hour and I still can’t convert such things, but suffice it to say that we were flying. We made it to our post where I took off at full speed for the approximate half mile run to my barracks, grabbed my cash, ran back to the cab at full speed, paid the guy off and ran back to the barracks at full speed again. I was in very good shape back then and I flew into the barracks, threw on my fatigues, I ran down to formation. I still remember standing there exhausted and amazed at what had just transpired. Maybe a minute later came the call “FALL IN”! Followed by “Baker, report for special detail.” But I had made it!