The time and place which changed by life:

In August. 1959, I was a 22-year-old kid raised in the cultural desert of the subsistence level rural southern bible belt. I had dropped out of college in my senior year because I had real problems coping with the failed first serious relationship of my life. I was emotionally numb.

Facing he military draft, I had gone ahead and volunteered for the draft, and had just completed basic training and training as an artillery surveyor. Having recognized that up until then, I had let other people and the surrounding culture define me, and had vowed to myself that, from then on, I was going to define for and by myself who I was and what I thought. I was open to new information, new thoughts, new learning, new experiences, and determined to take advantage of them if they came along.

Then I was shipped to West Berlin, Germany and assigned to the U.S. Army Hospital Berlin with work in hospital headquarters. For the first 30 days, I could not leave the hospital grounds, and I began reading literature to expand my mind -- Dostoyevsky. Mailer, Sal Bellow, Isaac Singer, Ralph Ellison, and others.

As soon as I was allowed to go into the city alive with culture, intellectual thought, aspirations, and intrigue. At the same time, it was a city under constant threat – 110 miles deep in Russian controlled East Germany and surrounded by between 200,000 and 300,00 Russian troops – with Khrushchev threating to attack the city if American troops were not pulled out...

For me, it was like being a kid in the most fantastic candy store I could imagine. There was so much to see, do, and learn. I left Berlin for the first time just after the wall went up, well on my way to being a different person. , I had become a lover of both classical music and modern jazz, a much deeper thinker. I had gained a much greater understanding of both international relations and of political ideologies. I had shifted to slightly left-of-center in my own political leanings, but at the same time much more anti-communist (having seen communism in action in East Berlin and having read THE NEW CLASS by Milovan Djilas.) I was well on my way to who I am today.

As a footnote, I was so fascinated with Berlin that I learned to speak German fluently and returned to the city for almost a year in 1962-63.