Smitty the Cook

Now there was somebody that you could make a movie about. When I first got to Berlin, there were lots of guys who had re-enlisted to fill their own vacancies and planned to spend their whole 20 year army careers right there. We called all the career guys "lifers", but we also called the permanent Berlin guys "brown baggers". That's because most of them were either married to or shacking up with local girls, lived off post, and carried their stuff back and forth in brown leather bags that were kind of a cross between a briefcase and a suitcase, just like the German civilians. The rest of us all had gym bags, which we called "AWOL bags", that we used for short overnight visits, but carrying a brown "brotchen" bag was the mark of a true Berliner.

As the Vietnam War was ramping up, a new rule was passed that a guy could only spend a maximum of six years in Berlin, and then, if he re-enlisted, he would be sent someplace else. Some of the brown baggers took their wives with them to their next duty station, and some of them didn't re-enlist when their hitch was up, planning to stay in Berlin for the rest of their lives. I don't know how that worked out for most of them, the only one I ran into later was Smitty the Cook.

Smitty had been in Berlin for a long time. I don't think he was married, but his position as our company's head cook opened up a number of business opportunities of which he took full advantage. It probably started out with the C-ration cigarettes. None of the guys liked them, said they "tasted like shit", and they could buy good cigarettes at the PX, so nobody complained that the cigarettes that were supposed to be included in every C-ration meal, were never there. I wasn't a smoker yet, but it was common knowledge that the German cigarettes, which were quite expensive, tasted even worse than our C-ration cigarettes, and there was a significant black market demand for any kind American cigarettes. Being a savvy businessman, Smitty reinvested his cigarette profits into other less-than-legal enterprises, and, by the time I knew him, he was notorious for being the one guy in Berlin who could get you anything you wanted.....for a price.

When Smitty's enlistment was up, everybody said that it was hard to imagine a Berlin without him, and we didn't have to for long. A couple months later, Smitty showed up slinging hash at the EES snack bar. (EES stood for European Exchange System, which was kind of a concession deal where German owned companies could operate small businesses on U.S. military posts.) Smitty was unwilling to abandon his business interests in Berlin, but he needed some kind of legal job in order to get residency status as a civilian. Since Smitty knew, like everybody, it wasn't hard for him to land a job with the EES for which he was certainly overqualified. I don't know what became of Smitty after I left, but I wouldn't be surprised if he was still there, slinging hash by day and wheeling-dealing by night.