One of my one-man army-criminal-“empire” activities included the sale of Mandrax, which were the European equivalent of Quaaludes. Both pills were so addictive with so little medicinal value that they have both been outlawed. For the record they are in the category of sedative-hypnotics and at a dose of one for an adult they provided a pleasant feeling and a tendency to wipe away ones worries. If taken with just one drink of alcohol, say, for example, one beer, or one shot, then the effect is exponential

inasmuch as the person feels a sense of euphoria, they experience loss of coordination, perhaps equivalent to 6 beers for a regular drinker. Increasing the doses of either of those substance and things become very, um, interesting and unpredictable to say the least.

Traveling back to that time I’ll offer the following slang nomenclatures; the term that we used when consuming this little monsters was “bouncing off the walls” because, essentially ones coordination was shot at the doses that your typical G.I would use Mandrax. The slang we used for the drug was “Dogs”.

The nickname for our “hero” who is about to have his comeuppance was “Bake”. Seems fitting, eh?

Setting the stage further a couple of days before the following event took place I had brought onto post a jar of a hundred of this little bad boys and they sold out in hours. Whenever I brought these onto post it was always entertaining to witness my handiwork in the barracks, in the bars and even just on the post where there was a noticeable increase in staggering, if not general chaos.

So a couple of days after I had brought the fun-in-a-pill on post there was the yearly air show. Sometime in the afternoon I had consumed my share of dogs and beer, but there was the occasional happy customer who would come up and say, “Hey Bake, thanks for the dogs”, or “Hey Bake, have a dog” and toss something into my beer. My tolerance for these things over a year of fairly frequent flying was about as good as a human could have, I imagine. Still I have no idea how many I consumed and these

things caused a black-out pretty quickly after using them if you didn’t stop punching your ticket to intensify your ride, so I really have no idea how many of anything I had and the rest of this story was told to me, up to a point that will be obvious when it comes.

Obviously there would have to come a point where standing wasn’t an option, much less walking. In fact, if the paramedics are to be believed, and from what I’ve read it is practically an absolute certainty that they reported accurately, my respiratory system even quit. But first, as my pals told later, I was swaying back to front for a bit until the gravity on the back won out and I went straight back like a plank, bouncing a time or two when I hit. I count this fortunate considering what my face might have ended up

looking like at the time, or maybe forever, if it had gone the other way.

It was also fortunate that this occurred at an airshow because there was no shortage of ambulances and paramedics. The hospital was about 5 miles at the next closest post from us and the word came to me after regaining consciousness (spoiler alert: I didn’t die!) that I had stopped breathing on the way to the hospital and the paramedics provided me with artificial respiration until we got there. Once at the hospital my stomach was pumped and the first awareness that I had was being pummeled by my own limp hand. My guess is that the male nurse had become tired of trying to slap me to consciousness with his own hand and had taken to holding me by own wrist and flinging my hand at my face. I can’t blame the dude.

Standing right there with a gleeful look on his face, probably hoping that I had died, and I say that without exaggeration, was pasty-man himself, my company commander. “You really fucked up this time Baker” was all he had to say. I couldn’t disagree with that assessment then or now. And even though I slept for almost three days solid getting up only to go to the bathroom, and eating a bit out of my room fridge, it didn’t change my behavior a bit. With the benefit of retrospect and what I’ve learned about the subject it’s clear that I had been a full-on alcoholic/addict for years. Since adolescence I had something of a death wish anyway. Not to mention that I was foolish, fearless and probably thought I was bulletproof, so, I don’t think that it slowed me down an iota.

As something of an epilogue to this event I’ll say that I carried that mentality through my 20’s and into my late 30’s. Aside from eight motorcycle accidents and too many car accidents to count, which isn’t bad considering the hundreds of times I rode and drove wasted, there were 3 other instances where death was just moments away. One was a skydiving incident when I finally got my problem resolved I realized I was about 2 seconds from impact. But those incidents don’t fall within the army timeline. I did

once come off of the autobahn at high speed in a friends borrowed car and not expecting a winding off-ramp proceeded to collide with the guardrail. By the time we had extricated the car from the rail it was clear I had no business standing, much less driving, and while my friend was loaded on heroin it was deemed to be a better option to let him drive. I got away without charges but had to pay my friend for a totaled car. Oh well, it was just part of the deal when one chooses chaos over order.