and I hated myself for missing the camp. It was only when I came home that I realized how lucky I was—Captain Couch could have court martialed me. I had classified information in my office files. Kurtz could have killed me, stolen valuable information, maybe sabotaged a military asset or killed the twelve Army guards that watched the prisoners. Three thousand POWs could have escaped. Done things our boys would have done if they had the chance. The Germans were at Camp Ulm because the government believed they were low-risk enemies, but . . .”
Gloria, who’d been standing by the fireplace all the while, now sat by his side on the sofa. “You must have felt terrible.”
“I felt like hell. I could’ve compromised the war on the home front. Eisenhower closed off the eastern English coastline to all civilians to guard the date of the invasion. Security is a soldier’s first duty.”
“Remind me to send Captain Couch a Christmas card. But, Jerry, what’s Heineman doing in America? Wasn’t he repatriated?”
“Cutter says Kurtz and his Marlena married in Hildeshein in ’49, and he came home with her. He’s been teaching high school for almost fifteen years.”
“Now he’s 100 percent American. Well, there’s no debate. We have to go. Maybe he and his Marlena can come for Thanksgiving chickenkraut.”
Jerry nodded. “What I can’t understand is how the hell somebody like Kurtz became a flyer for Hitler’s war machine. There’s no way he was a true believer of that Nazi crap Hitler spewed—he spent most of his childhood in Georgia.”
Gloria put her arm around his shoulder. “I asked your Mama once why people who hated slavery fought for the Confederacy. She told me all about how the Colonel was married to former slave for a while—she left him when her real husband found her after the war and they went to Chicago. And then she told me that the Colonel fought in grey because he loved his land and his heritage. Maybe Heineman felt the same way.”
“That blood and soil thing Hitler was always ranting about . . .”
“The same way you felt about American blood and soil when Pearl Harbor was attacked.” She went to the phone and called the airline. It would cost them, but they could change their reservation. There was flight to Madison, but none to Morganfield.