Bad Tolz

When I was in the army, sergeants attended an NCO academy either before or shortly after the promotion to E-5. It’s a month of rigorous training in the classroom and the field on leadership, military skills, and personnel management/training skills. The 7^th Army NCO Academy had a reputation of being the toughest. When I attended, it was housed in old SS barracks in Bad Tolz. The barracks buildings formed an interconnected square around a large central courtyard. Inside the buildings, there was a stripe of polished black down the center of each hallway. Once, that polished stripe could only be stepped on by the elite SS officers – enlisted men had to sidle down the narrow brown tiled strips on either side of the black. But the NCO academy, run by NCOs, taught by NCOs, attended by enlisted soldiers, has no officers. None of us walked on the black stripe, except to cross on rubber mats like bridges. It wasn’t to honor those old Nazi officers – it was an act of disdain, to refuse to put our feet where they had strutted.

The American Army is extremely diverse. The current Commandant of the 7^th Army NCO Academy is a black man, as was my primary instructor when I was there. In our shared barracks rooms, we polished our boots and exchanged tall tales and blasted hip-hop until the windows shook. We studied the stuff in the back of the drill & ceremony manual and practiced ridiculously complicated marching patterns in the courtyard until our instructors got annoyed and told us to knock it off. We helped each other line up our boots and competed to see who could make their bed the tightest. In the field, we huddled together in our canvas pup tents to stay warm in two feet of alpine snow, and we walked our buddies to the latrine at midnight so they didn’t get lost in the blackness of the woods. When one of us failed a test, we would stay after class to tutor him for the retest. When one of us got hurt, we all pitched in to make sure he could get through the field training and graduate with the class. We flirted and fought and gambled and shared stories and paperback books and boot polish and cigars. 

On graduation day, my husband and my first sergeant came to cheer me on. They had been informed that I was the honor graduate for my class. I didn’t know until it was announced during the ceremony. My husband brought flowers, sat in the auditorium and listened to the man behind him complaining that they gave the top honor to ‘some girl.’ The award was named the General Patton award, and I was given a metal-tipped commemorative swagger stick. I haven’t kept much army memorabilia, but I still have the swagger stick, collecting dust on my bureau. I don’t know why but it amuses me; probably because I can’t imagine having the audacity to actually carry such a thing.

I’ve never been much of a student of military history, but I looked up Patton just now and found this quote of his: “If you tell people where to go, but not how to get there, you’ll be amazed at the results.” Thinking about this in the context of my experiences at the Academy – we all came from different places, different backgrounds, brought different skills (and weaknesses) to the task, but with resourcefulness and teamwork we all made it through to the goal. Not one failed. And that is what we carried with us, back to our units and our lives.

The Academy has since moved to Grafenwoehr and continues to train new generations of sergeants. Flint Kaserne in Bad Tolz is no more. There is a Flint bowling alley, and the old SS barracks seem to be public buildings now, housing a tourism office, employment office, the Jugendamt, and a bank. The courtyard where we drilled is green with grass and trees. I wonder if the black stripe still runs down those old hallways, and if the people who work there know the stories of all that happened there.