Dr. Richard Martin of Cape Girardeau County attests that his war stories are not as glamorous as others.

Martin took advantage of the Berry Plan, a Vietnam War-era program allowing physicians to defer military conscription until they completed their residencies.

He had attended Nebraska Wesleyan University and earned a medical degree from the University of Nebraska — both in the state capital of Lincoln. His residency would require five years of surgery work.

From 1971 to 1973, Martin worked in Los Angeles and Alameda Counties in California. He returned to Nebraska for otolaryngology work between 1973 and 1976, including time as a doctor for the Pine Ridge Reservation.

Because he utilized the Berry Plan program, by the time Martin entered military service, he already held the rank of major.

He reported to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio for a monthlong orientation program. After that, he requested to be posted in Germany and received the proper approval. Since he had not signed on for a three-year term, and instead opted for only two years, he had to live off base with his family. He made $19,000 per year.

Martin was assigned to an American military hospital in the Bavarian town of Augsburg and lived in a suburb called Stadtbergen. His landlord, one Herr Meyer, had been drafted into the German army in World War II, only to be captured by American forces and taken to a prisoner of war camp.

“They put him in the motor pool. In the motor pool, he became kind of a comrade to the rest of the guys. Learned his English there, which was actually not bad,” he said.

The worst experience Martin had with Herr Meyer was when he was moving in — Martin said the landlord had gotten ‘push’ and ‘pull’ mixed up when learning English.

Meyer’s son Hans, daughter-in-law Marietta and grandson Holger were Martin’s next-door neighbors. Only Holger could speak English, and he took the chance to do so with his neighbors whenever he could.

“Their little guy was always out there, and he’d recognize me as ‘soldier-man’ or ‘sports-man’ if I wore my softball uniform out,” Martin said.

Their other neighbors were Horst and Helga Brunner, the former of who would later become the mayor of Stadtbergen. Another acquaintance of the Martins’ was Dr. Rudiger Reichert, who said one of his earliest memories had been learning about the Battle of Dunkirk while sitting with his panzer division commander uncles in German-occupied Paris.

Martin said Reichert once claimed “we” – meaning Germany – could have won World War II – and Martin explained that, as a major in the United States Army, “we” had.

Medical moments

The hospital Martin worked at had been a Hitler Youth camp in World War II — old and wooden, with two dozen physicians serving 40,000 soldiers and their families. Each of them covered the emergency room one day at a time in addition to their regular duties.

During his time in Germany, he operated on hundreds of soldiers, as well as on officers from as diverse locales as India and Poland.

“I had made a pledge to myself to work as hard in the Army as I did in private practice, motivated by the fear that, if I didn’t, I would lose the skills that I had developed in my residency,” he said.

For three weeks, he also served as a medical attaché for war games at NATO’s Hohenfels Training Area. This was particularly notable because the Soviet Union was hosting similar war games at the same time just across the border in the Eastern Bloc.