Free Air Force Brat by Susan Kiernan-Lewis

This
was a Front-Line NATO Air Base during the Cold War which housed a
variety of USAF Tactical Reconnaissance, Close-Air Support and
Tactical Air Control units. Located in rolling farm country ten
miles north of Kaiserslautern, just off the Mannheim/Saarbruecken
Autobahn, amid the vineyards of the Rhine Valley, the Sembach was
constructed in the French Zone of Occupation under French
direction, for use by NATO forces and intended to be an American
Airbase from the start. Less than five years after the war, US
authorities officially took over the construction site from he
French and named it Sembach Air Auxiliary Field. 1
     
    On any Rhine river cruise trip to Germany
you will see mile after mile of medieval castle ruins dotting the
horizon. France has a bunch, too, but they seem (like most things
left to the French to maintain) to be in far worse shape than the
castles found in Germany. We kids were lucky in that, while, it’s
true, we didn’t have bombs and dead bodies and bunkers in Germany,
(as I mentioned before, the Germans tidied everything up before we
got there) we did have a very large, very cool castle in our
backyard.
    This area of Germany was similar to the area
we had just left in that, historically, it had been continually
invaded and occupied—this time by the French. Our castle was a
magnificent specimen of this constant antagonism with France.
    Hohenecken Castle was a spectacular ruin
with a moat, a dungeon and peripheral turret walls largely intact
and situated about two miles from our apartment. We kids probably
played in it once a month of the full two years that we lived in
Germany. We would pack up peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, a
blanket, and sometimes a transistor radio, and head out to spend
the day at the castle. We never saw anybody else at the castle the
whole of the time we lived there, and so claimed it as our personal
playground.
    Built in 1149 at the top of a very steep
hill studded with boulders and sharp rocks and wayward bushes,
Hohenecken Castle was hidden from view until you turned the last
corner and it suddenly loomed up on you.
    Hohenecken was an amazing experience for a
kid. To look at it today, that’s hard to imagine. It’s just an old
ruin. Just boulders and dark, creepy windowless dungeons. But you
could stand on one of the stone stools in the narrow towers and
look out the slits and imagine an archer standing just where you
were, sweating with fear and excitement, and preparing to defend
the castle. You could imagine the cooks laboring in the hot, dark
kitchen that ran nearly the full length of the castle to feed
everyone while you munched your Frito-Lays and drank your
Coca-colas or thermos full of Kool-Aid. And because we felt so
proprietary of the castle, and spent so much time there, we began
to feel how earlier inhabitants must have felt toward it—admiring
how the rising sun striking off the western rock face of the castle
(we camped there a couple times) and made the whole west side turn
rose-pink. We built campfires in the middle of the Castle floor and
sat around it.
    Once, I stupidly jumped ten feet from a top
parapet to an interestingly looking ledge on the outside of the
castle and was stuck there for two hours while my brothers tried to
figure out how to get me down without my breaking a leg. The ledge
was at least fifteen feet up from the ground. Eventually, Tommy
fashioned a fireman’s net out of our picnic blanket with Kevin and
Terry holding a side. I jumped into it, immediately ripping the
blanket out of everyone’s hands and skinning my knee as I landed.
But we still counted it as a great day.
    As you approached the castle, there was a
large statue of a German soldier hidden in the bushes off the
pathway. The soldier was complete with helmet and potato masher
gripped in an upraised fist. While it was hidden, it appeared that
someone was tending to it since the weeds were pulled from the base
and there were often flowers set around it in small vases.