Since discovering this website, I have heard many accounts about how all hell broke loose at the detachments along the German/Czech border in August of 1968 when "Ivan", as Czechs like to call the Russians, effectively put an end to the Dubcek era. I have related my story to many former ASA buddies in various abbreviated forms. Here now is the full story for the reading pleasure (?) of all those interested.
I've always thought that there are only two kinds of language students: those who love it and those who hate it with every fiber of their monolingual being. Fortunately, most of us who were sent to Monterey fall into the former category. We arrived at the Presidio full of tempered optimism that the crap we went through in basic training was over. And except for an occasional inspection, a day on KP, or a night in the Orderly Room, we had it pretty damn good. As freshly promoted Pvt. E-2s, we dove into languages that many of us had no idea existed before we received our orders at the end of basic. My language was Czech. I had heard of it, but that was all.
We varied greatly in our ability to pick up languages. Some had real talent, and some never quite mastered the verb "to be." But most of us fell somewhere in between, and we survived the year without much difficulty. And no matter what our abilities were, most of us developed a sincere fondness for our new language and the people and culture we associated with it.
The last period of every Friday was the highlight of the week at the Czech department. It was our "cultural hour", a brief interlude where privates and colonels became equals. Well, almost equals. With Dennis on the accordion, Jim on the piano and Pan Vit leading the "choir", we developed a special bond as we sang the folk songs of our newly adopted country before heading off into the sometimes sunny, sometimes foggy Monterey weekend. Today, it's hard to imagine that a bunch of guys could have had such a good time in the absence of beer.
I left Monterey with the conviction that someday I would visit the land where my newly acquired language was spoken. I wasn't sure how or when, but I knew that I would make it there. I had an insatiable curiosity to witness firsthand how the average Czech lived day in and day out and how the people coped with the political situation.
A few months later I found myself on top of a mountain on the eastern border of Germany in the dead of winter where the snow nearly covered the top of the 10-foot-high perimeter fence. Schneeberg they called it. Snow Mountain. Few places on God's earth have ever been so aptly named (see Dick Routt's pictures). And this is where I remained until discharge in April 1966.
The following fall I returned to school. I was now really into languages and declared a double major in Russian and German. A year later I returned to Germany to study at the University of Bonn. When the academic year was over in July '68, I traveled to Austria to attend a Russian language institute run by the University of Vienna. With the Czech border now only a stone's throw away, I was ready to realize my long-held dream of seeing what the "Land of The Hooked R's" really looked like on the inside. This was the Dubcek era (also known as the "Prague Spring"), and travel restrictions on Czechs and foreign tourists alike had all but been abolished. When the course in Russian was over, I made my way to the Czech embassy where I was immediately granted a visa. Hot damn! I had a genuine Czech visa! With passport and visa in hand, I was ready to head east. I rode the tram to the end of the line in the easternmost part of Vienna and began hitchhiking (my favorite form of transportation back then).
When I came to the proverbial fork in the road, I was faced with a major decision: should I head north to Prague or continue on eastward to the Moravian city of Brno? Prague was much farther away, and it was already getting late. I decided to make a dash for Brno. I was confident that I could get there before dark. I got a ride to within sight of the border and walked to the checkpoint. The fact that I was entering the country as a pedestrian was not unusual. Both the Czechs and Austrians then operated regular bus service to and from the border with coordinated schedules. Bus-loads of people were arriving on one side of the border, walking through the checkpoint, and catching a bus on the other side. It was all very convenient.
I changed the obligatory amount of "hard currency" into Czech crowns and made my way to the bus stop. There I met a group of Czechs who were on their way back to Brno. They all worked in the same company and had simply decided to take a day off to tour the region along the border. This, in my opinion, is the real reason why socialism ultimately collapsed. People in East Block countries enjoyed the greatest of all freedoms -- freedom from work! Hard work was equated with capitalist exploitation, and no one wanted that, right? Nobody ever seemed to figure out that the shortage of meat, toilet paper and pantyhose was directly linked to low productivity. The "workers paradise" was simultaneously a "consumers hell." [end of tirade]
Back to the story. At the bus stop I struck up a conversation with some of the locals. To my dismay I discovered that my "Czech" came out 70% Russian. Those who have tried to learn two closely related languages know this phenomenon well. Somehow I managed to make myself understood. The Czechs thought it was amusing that an American had made an effort to at least try to learn their language and they were willing to overlook my "Russian shortcomings." One topic led to another and then one couple offered to put me up for a few days. I jumped at the chance. Hot damn! I was going to stay with a real Czech family! They had large house with an extra room. The room even came equipped with a telephone, which was destined to play an important role in my story. Another gentlemen in the group said that his daughter was a student, and offered to bring me together with some local students. Fantastic! A good trip was getting even better.
The next evening I went out on the town with the group of students as promised. There was Pavel, Vlasta, Jitka and Jiri. We all drank a lot of beer. Especially Pavel, Jiri and I. A lot of beer! And my Czech got better with each gulp. Around midnight a couple of my new "friends for life" showed me the way home, where I immediately conked out. Around 3 a.m. the phone in my room began ringing. It turned out to be the only phone in the house. My head was throbbing and my tongue was one giant ball of cotton. I tried to ignore the infernal ringing, but it just wouldn't stop. I finally struggled out of bed and answered the phone. A very agitated Czech on the other end was shouting words that sounded something like "soldiers", "planes", "landing", "invasion", "Russians". I wasn't sure my aching brain was properly processing all of this information, so I summoned my hosts to the phone. They confirmed my worst-case scenario. Russian troops were landing by air in major cities all over the country. It was August 21, 1968. I had arrived just in time for the invasion. Talk about bad timing! My hosts said not to worry about it, and told me to go back to sleep. Sure. No problem. I had visions of being arrested for espionage and shipped off to a Siberia to spend the rest of my life in a gulag or one of those Soviet funny farms that I was used to reading about in the western press.
Things remained quiet in my neighborhood until around 6 a.m. when I heard a heavy vehicle rumbling down the street. It was a Czech army truck full of Russian soldiers. The initial wave of Russian "liberators" arrived by plane and simply confiscated the Czech military hardware they needed. I could also hear a tank or two in the distance.
After breakfast, and after getting over the initial shock, I announced to my Czech hosts that I wanted venture into town to see what was going on. Not a good idea, they thought. They were afraid that if one Russian word came out of my mouth that it could be my last. I promised to keep my mouth shut and made my way into town by tram. Along the way I saw Russian soldiers guarding bridges and main intersections.
When I stepped off the tram in the center of town, I heard lots of loud whistling -- the European equivalent of booing. As the whistling drew nearer, I spotted a stake-bed truck overflowing with young Czechs -- teenagers and young adults in their twenties. The truck was zigzagging down the street as the kids in the back whistled and jeered. Behind it I saw a tank that was trying in vain to maneuver around the truck. The gutsy (read that stupid?) kids in the truck were effectively keeping the tank bottled up. The tank was also confiscated Czech hardware. A half-dozen or so Russians were sitting atop the tank clutching their weapons. They all looked extremely embarrassed. This was obviously not the reception they had anticipated. They had no doubt expected to be greeted by cheering crowds of grateful Czechs as they again arrived to drive the imperialistic forces of evil from the country.
As I walked through town I came upon one young soldier that a group of Czech teenagers had pinned against a wall. The Russian couldn't have been older than seventeen, and the Czechs were haranguing him with a mixture of Czech and Russian while he clutched his Kalashnikov in sheer terror. Eventually even the young Czechs realized that the kid had no idea where he was or what he was doing there and let him go on his way -- but not before one teenager took a pin of some kind from his jacket and pinned it on the Russian's uniform. The poor soldier must have thought he had landed on the moon, and I suspect he was in need of a change of underwear.
Make-shift banners with anti-Russian messages -- some in Czech, some in Russian -- were everywhere. My favorite was one that paraphrased the Czech national anthem. It read: "Kde domov tvuj, Ivanku?" (Where's your homeland, Ivan?).
Two days later things had quieted down, and I learned that the busses were still running to and from the border. Fearing that the Russians might decide to seal off the border at any moment, I decided to make a quick exit while I could. At the bus station my hosts asked around about the situation on the border. Everything was still business as usual, they were told. No Russian troops had yet been spotted along the route or at the border crossing.
I boarded the simple but solidly built (by Skoda) bus, and away I went. Half-way to the checkpoint the bus made a lengthy rest stop during which I observed a convoy of Russian trucks heading in the direction of the border. They were real Russian trucks with markings in Cyrillic, meaning that these troops had probably been driving day and night from somewhere within the Soviet Union and were finally nearing their destination. Now I was really getting nervous. Were these troops on their way to seal off the border crossing? Was I going to be sent to Siberia after all? As the border checkpoint came into view, there were no Russian troops in sight. Big sigh of relief.
At the checkpoint there was a line of cars and trucks waiting to cross into Austria. I approached two young Czech men in a car and asked them if they were going to Vienna. "Sure," they replied, "climb in." After about 10 minutes in the car they started getting suspicious. What was an American who spoke Czech (now only 30% Russian) doing in their country? I heard them whispering words such as "spy" and "provocateur", and then they informed me that they were not going to Vienna after all. They obviously held me responsible for the invasion. I left the two distrustful Czechs mumbling to themselves, cleared the checkpoint on foot, walked through the "no man's land" to the Austrian side, and hitchhiked off into the western sunset.
Epilogue
A year later I found myself in Europe and again I attempted to visit my friends in Brno. But again my timing was bad. I had a valid visa when I showed up at the same checkpoint on the Austrian-Czech border on precisely the first anniversary of the country's "liberation". My visa listed my occupation as "student", and I was informed by the border guards that they had orders to deny entry to all foreign students (read that "subversive western provocateurs"). Again, I was being blamed for the invasion.