After completing boot camp, Walter requested a reassignment from the barracks location, a three-hour drive from the small town in Northern Hessen to Frankfurt. He wanted to be closer to home. He was transferred to a unit located in Giessen, a provincial industrial and military town. A large number of American troops were also stationed within the city limits.
The main purpose of Walter’s new unit was to protect American missile and other warheads hidden somewhere in the German forests—a very cold job. The winter of 1968 was a bitter one; temperatures outside could drop to minus eleven degrees even without a wind chill factor. The soldiers in Walter’s company were armed with standard NATO rifles plus four magazines of live ammunition. Their command covered a square of real estate in the middle of nowhere that looked like a concentration camp or prisoner’s site in Vietnam or Guantanamo—just colder. Twelve-foot high, double barbed wire fences surrounded it, with a narrow path on which to patrol back and forth. At night, bright floodlights lit up the area. Visible in the center of the region were a number of slanted iron doors covered with soil, grass, snow, and ice. The few Americans on duty stayed invisible and always enjoyed the comfort of a small but heated building.
Duty involved two weeks of mind-numbing routine in the barracks. Occasionally there was a day exercise in the field, but primarily they cleaned equipment and marched within the barracks compound. The extremely tedious duty in town did not prepare them for the next week in the forest compound. Being in the woods, the soldiers felt stressed out and in a horrid space. Small off-duty quarters did not provide any distraction except playing cards. When on duty, they guarded two hours outside and were off duty for four hours to sleep, rest, eat, and play cards. Then again, two hours of guard duty and four hours of rest—repeatedly for a whole week.
Four soldiers had to be on duty at all times, plus a sergeant inside the small guardhouse with heater and communications. Their immediate instructions in case of trouble were to shoot anybody who attacked the fence. Before shooting, however, they were to yell three times a warning: “Halt stehenbleiben oder ich schiesse!” (“Stand still or I shoot!”) What it really meant was to shoot at potential demonstrators who hit the fences with a stick or throwing stones. The sixties were politically active times and demonstrations a constant in daily life. Anything could happen in the woods around Giessen. At that time, Americans were the main culprits because of their ongoing activities in Vietnam. Many Germans hated that war and expressed their feelings about it. Walter did not like the idea of actually shooting a person.
During one extremely cold and unpleasant night, around three o’clock in the morning, Walter walked up and down the fenced path with a steel helmet on his head and heavily wrapped in winter clothing, the floodlights glaring into the woods. Suddenly he heard a single shot, somewhat muffled, and then screaming followed by whining. After his round of duty, he found out that one of his comrades had shot himself in the calf. He spent some time in the hospital. When he returned, he fell, saying he slipped on an icy spot on the walkway. But everybody knew he just wanted to get out of this misery.
For the Easter holidays, Walter got leave to go home. As he walked outside the barracks toward his ride, he saw a crowd of loud, shouting people with banners, lined up in front of the main entrance, handing out pamphlets. Walter took one of the leaflets and started reading. Suddenly a bright, red light went on in his head with a bang, and he decided to put the paper into his bag. This was the first time a choice he made changed his life.
At home, as soon as matters calmed down, he studied the handout more closely. It was a two-color brochure that explained how to become a war resister and, thus, a conscientious objector. It contained each step, detailing the process for current members of the military: how to file, what to do first, what to write to which military or civilian organization.
Essentially all one had to do was express in one phrase, “My conscience does not allow me to do any duty in the military.”
After the Easter holidays, reality turned out to be adverse but controllable. Being the first soldier in the whole regiment ever to file to become a conscientious objector, Walter felt like an outcast. People knew about conscientious objectors from the news media, but to meet with a real live war resister was a novelty.
Walter told his officers how they had to treat him according to his new status; he showed them in writing what to do next. They assigned him an office job, where he spent two more months until he became a government-approved conscientious objector. He filled out forms, wrote a letter for his father to sign in which he stated that he had raised his son in a nonviolent environment. This was neither true nor Friedrich’s frame of mind, but his own war experience made it sound trustworthy. He had suffered the consequences of war, and he wanted to show that he was a good father and not the old Nazi one might presume, so he signed the letter. As backup, Walter visited a Protestant church official who had made himself a name by serving sometimes as a counselor in conscientious objector court cases. The clergyman consulted with him and appeared in court when the big day arrived, though he never said a word.
In court, Walter had to prove that his conscience was in the right framework to resist the war. He was prepared with numerous customary arguments, primarily from the brochure, but in reality, he explained to the judges that he did not want to shoot any protesting demonstrator who did not like the fence in the forest. The verdict gave him an honorable discharge from the military, under the condition that he spends eight months in civil-service work. Walter was free, and it felt wonderful.