Storied U.S.
Barracks Closes With Little Fanfare
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/08/world/europe/storied-us-barracks-closes-with-little-fanfare.html?ref=global-home&_r=0
HEIDELBERG,
Germany — For
Germans and Americans who had long imagined a dramatic coda to the cold war, it
came instead in a few solemn, quiet moments. After both national anthems were
played, seven American and five German soldiers lowered their national colors,
marched at the edge of a bedraggled parade ground and carefully folded the
flags for the last time.
The ceremony on Friday afternoon, before about 300
onlookers, marked the closing of Campbell Barracks, which, as the headquarters
of the United States Army in Europe, issued the orders for the millions of
American soldiers — 15 million in Germany alone — who have served on
the Continent since 1945. It was a day that most present, mostly an older
crowd, had never imagined could come.
“We had no idea that Heidelberg will ever
close,” said Regina Hingtgen, 62, who has worked with the Army for 41 years,
and first honed her English when her parents billeted G.I.’s. The Army was the
best employer, she said, affording her, among much else, a flexibility as a
divorced single mother that “no German company would ever have done.”
The day was
bittersweet, said the current commander, Lt. Gen. Donald M. Campbell Jr. — no
relation to the World War II staff sergeant after whom the barracks was named
—after the low-key ceremony. After the end of the cold war with the collapse of
the Soviet Union, then the absorption of new NATO members and alliance commands
at the base, followed by almost 10 years of preparation and a dwindling
military presence, power was passing forever from Heidelberg.
The Army has shifted to a new European headquarters in
Wiesbaden, where it sits atop a hill, isolated and thus secure, in this
post-9/11 world, from the kind of local interactions that long made the
Americans welcome here. As General Campbell noted, it is more effective to
concentrate Army might in five key locations in Germany
as well as in Vicenza, Italy, and in a cluster supporting NATO in Luxembourg, the Netherlands
and Belgium,
where NATO is headquartered.
The poignant end was a long time coming. The Berlin Wall
fell almost 24 years ago, and American troops in Germany
have spent more than a decade serving in Afghanistan
and Iraq,
or offering crucial support to those missions and others in the Horn of Africa,
and much else besides.
Starting in the 1950s, NATO central army operations were run
from the Campbell Barracks, a hulking structure built by the Nazis in 1937,
taken over by the Americans in 1945 and renamed in 1948. As NATO expanded to
include formerly Communist nations that were once intractable foes, new
buildings went up around the base to accommodate new partners. At least 20
flagpoles, now bare, used to fly the colors of nations engaged here.
But NATO left in
March for a command base in Izmir,
Turkey. The
city of Heidelberg
bid farewell in a Volksfest that drew tens of thousands of people on May 12. In
the ensuing months, remaining military personnel and their families also left.
Veterans wandered the
near-deserted base on Friday stunned by unruly foliage sprouting through the
parade ground. “Everything used to be just so pristine,” mused Joe Garvey, who
as deputy, chief of public affairs for the United States Army in Europe,
recently moved to Wiesbaden after 30 years in Heidelberg. “The hedges
were cut exact.”
Inside the unassuming
building that housed the offices of General Campbell and other top commanders,
Col. Bill Williams pondered the decisions made here on the wars in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. “If walls could talk,” he
said.
The Any Mission diner
is closed for good, its 1950s-style lamps and ceiling fans still intact. In the
cavernous gym, bigger than three basketball courts, scores of neatly stacked
weights and fitness machines bear labels like “Kaiserslautern,” indicating that they will
now serve soldiers at bases that remain open.
Interviews with
Germans and Americans who are still here or once served in Heidelberg suggested
that the conflict that began on Sept. 11, 2001, spelled the end for American
military life in this city of Mark Twain, known for its revered university, a
stunning castle dominating the Neckar Valley and the legend of the stuffy
“Student Prince” sent here to study but beguiled instead by a beer hall
barmaid.
After the Sept. 11
attacks, the American troops here hunkered down. Fences were erected around
military housing, where American children once played with German neighbors.
German friends who used to come freely onto base had to be signed in and
escorted, Mrs. Hingtgen recalled. “It kind of closed us off.”
Micha Hörnle, 42, a reporter for a local newspaper, The
Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung, said the security measures had created a “gated
community” and local resentment in a city long grateful that it had been spared
American bombing in World War II.
Closing Heidelberg will save the
Pentagon $112 million a year, mostly in costly security expenses for several
scattered facilities, Mr. Garvey said. Still, Lt. Gen. Mark P. Hertling,
commander here until his retirement in November, agreed with Mr. Hörnle.
“I think a lot went
lost,” General Hertling said in a telephone interview. “We Americans went into
a cocoon” that was “not all that effective, truthfully,” he added, recalling
German friends of troops at the Grafenwoehr base in Bavaria who wept when invited
back to the base for a beer festival in 2004.
General Hertling recalled his trepidation during his first
visit to Campbell Barracks, in 1975 at the age of 21, when he was a second
lieutenant. Heidelberg “was the center of
everything, almost like the Forbidden City to
go to, because that’s where all the generals were,” he said.
When he became a
commander himself, he said, he argued strongly to keep American troops in
Europe — “an ocean” closer than America
is to conflict in the Middle East or Africa,
and working alongside allies old and new whom they knew personally. As he
described the value of direct contacts with 51 European and Asian allies to
skeptical members of Congress, “you could almost see the light bulbs go on,” he
said.
Reflecting on the
changes since the end of the cold war, General Campbell cited his own sense of
wonder when, just three weeks ago, he stood in Red Square in Moscow with a
Russian counterpart after completing joint exercises. More are scheduled in Russia next
year.
Still, it was the glory days of the Marshall Plan or the
tensions over the Berlin Wall, which brought the United States Army’s forces in
Europe to their maximum strength of 277,342 in June 1962, that were front and
center for Friday’s crowd.
Mayor Eckart Würzner,
who delivered a speech in English and regaled an interviewer with tales of his
study in and annual visits to the United States, recalled that George
C. Marshall once said, “We have to teach the Germans the ABC of democracy.”
“The strong, successful
Germany of today owes its
role to the U.S.,”
Mr. Würzner told the crowd.
He said later that he hoped to develop a youth center for
democracy on the property. Will a center suffice to preserve one of the closest
of trans-Atlantic relationships among young people who know nothing of World
War II? “You have to be very proactive,” Mr. Würzner said. “It won’t just run
on its own.”