Free Major Conflict by Maj USA (ret.) Jeffrey McGowan Page B

she began to cry. I took two steps to where she stood and gave her a big hug.
    â€œLook, I promise that I’ll call every week and I’ll send you some beer.”
    â€œI don’t drink beer!” She laughed a little and slapped my arm tenderly.
    She was right, though, I thought, it was pretty far away; it was halfway around the world, in fact. But I was beginning to warm to the idea of living in Europe. I’m a big history buff and have a gift for languages, so I knew the experience would probably be a good one for me.
    Knowing that I’d probably never live there again, I took one last long walk through Jackson Heights a few days before I left for Germany. Across Eighty-second Street and up Thirty-seventh Avenue, while the number 7 train, the Redbird, roared by on the elevated tracks every few minutes, making its way out to Flushing Meadow and to Shea Stadium. The loud, colorful neighborhood out in northern Queens, in New York City, had prepared me well. I was a soldier now and ready to see the world.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    Old Castles and Licensed Whores
    By the time my plane landed in Germany and I was actually on European soil, all my disappointment at not having been assigned to the Eighty-second Airborne had vanished in light of the opportunity to live and work in Europe. Few twenty-three-year-old American kids get that chance, and it had finally dawned on me just how lucky I was. I’d been reading books about history, mostly European history, my whole life, and now I had the chance actually to experience the places and the people, the food and the culture, that previously had existed only in the books I read and in my own imagination.
    First thing, though, was sex. I had a vague understanding that the Europeans viewed the matter with a little more sophistication than we Americans, but I had no idea just how different it was. There in the shopping promenade of the airport, in full view, merchandise spilling over onto the clean white floor, was a sex shop. Large pink dildos, cheap satin lingerie, candy-colored vinyl bustiers, and a blur of contorted faces and knotted bodies on assorted magazines and video jackets greeted the weary traveler with an unapologetic brashness. I had to laugh and found myself feeling a little embarrassed at the same time. Need gum for the flight out? Why not buy a cat-o’-nine-tails duty-free since it’s right next door? Want a newspaper or the latest issue of the
Economist
? Gee, before I do that, let me pick up some of that lube on sale two for one. It was like having a branch of the Pink Pussycat, the well-known sex shop in New York, located in the middle of JFK or La Guardia. I couldn’t believe it. It was downright hilarious. I realized that I was gawking and smiling to myself, while everyone around me passed by as if it were nothing more interesting than a luggage store or one of those sunglass huts. People just hurried on by. Apparently, it was no big deal to accidentally crash your carry-on into a bin of edible underwear in the airport in Germany.
    As I rubbernecked by, trying my best to look blasé, I imagined what would happen if a branch of the Pink Pussycat actually opened up in one of the New York airports. I knew it would never get past the initial planning stages, but if it did, and they managed to open the store, it would be headline news for days on end. The Catholic groups in Queens would be up in arms, the Queens Borough president would stage big press conferences, Evangelicals would be bussed and flown in from every far-flung corner of the nation to stage demonstrations. It would be clear to all that this was just one more sign that the republic was falling deeper and deeper into irreversible moral decline. Airport sex shops in America? Wasn’t going to happen. But I wasn’t in America anymore, and though it may seem a little silly, seeing this sex shop planted in the middle of a busy airport, seeing the whole subject of sex being