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I flew to Germany from McGuire Air Force Base, outside of Fort Dix, New Jersey, on November 20, 1978. I had taken 30 days of leave after my graduation from Officer Basic and was anxious - in both senses of the word - to report for duty. I had already been notified that I would be joining my unit in the field, where they were conducting ARTEP evaluations. ARTEP stood for "Army Training and Evaluation Plan," a master document by which each type of unit in the Army is supposed to plan, conduct, and evaluate its training. In common usage, the troops used the word "ARTEP" to refer to the evaluation portion of the training cycle. The evaluations were conducted by the unit's higher headquarters and were essentially a test. An artillery battalion must fire live ammunition to train, and this firing could of course only be conducted on suitable ranges. So I would be spending the next month at a place known to nearly everyone who has served in the peacetime Army since World War II - the infamous Grafenwoehr training area; or, as it was usually called, simply "Graf."
Grafenwoehr, like almost all the facilities used by the U. S. Army in Europe, was originally a training area for the German army. I have never researched the exact dates, but the popular history of the place states that it was constructed sometime in the 1920's. I don't know if this jives with the restrictions put on the German government by the Versailles treaty at the end of World War I, but it seems reasonable based on the appearance of the buildings and facilities. The stories also state that it was about as popular with its original German occupants as it was with the soldiers of my time (and probably those of today.) Supposedly, the German soldiers gave it a nickname that roughly translated as "the land beyond the moon." Having spent many a day and night in its desolate training areas, it seemed like a pretty good moniker to me.
It was a long, exhausting flight from the U. S. to Germany. I flew in a chartered DC-8, in which I was seated behind a bulkhead that arose from the floor about six inches from my feet and angled unpleasantly toward my head starting at about chest height. I am only five feet, nine inches tall, but I felt like I had to duck my head for the entire fourteen hours. Needless to say, it was not a pleasant flight. And it had a cruel little twist at its end - The Rhein-Main Air Base, which was to have been my destination, and the adjoining Frankfurt International Airport, were both closed due to thick fog. So we were treated to an additional hour or so of circling in hope that the fog would lift. Of course it didn't
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