Another brief tale from the RTO from my brief duty as “PFCIC”:
The RTO staff, military and civilian, had several different work schedules. After I’d been oriented I was assigned to cover the “information clerk” duties for the morning arrival of the Duty Trains. Passengers from the earlier Bremerhaven train were on their own in 1969 but the Frankfurt train delivered all sorts of people with questions. I was to be the only GI on duty until 8 a.m., along with a German ticket clerk and German baggage room staff. I was briefed on some common issues and told how to tell an Airborne soldier to take their pants out of their boots.
I was quite pleased with this assignment. What the Army didn’t know was that in college I had been an Assistant Tour Director (go-fer) and before that had spent lots of time in the Vancouver, Washington and Portland, Oregon train stations waiting for newspaper shipments and listening to customers and clerks. I felt flattered that I was being asked to represent the Brigade even though I was a newbie.
When I couldn’t answer a question or had an inadequate answer I made note of it and tried to be ready for the next time — most questions are repeated over and over. I noticed what the favorite pensions were for budget travelers and even visited a couple of them on my own time to see them first hand, like a travel agent would. I studied the transit system.
Most of the time things ran smoothly. On one morning my ticket clerk was late because her S-Bahn train caught fire. On another I was chewed out by a SMOD for the litter on the platform. I explained that we would have police call after the other GI staff arrived. He told me that he would talk to the TC people in HQ, who I’m sure told him the same thing.
Then the bottom dropped out. My sergeant told me that the Transportation Corps had received a commendation from some visiting higher up from the “Zone” for my work. Why was that a problem? He confessed that TC wanted to dispense with that duty due to the work load of Vietnam-induced household goods shipments. I had been assigned the information duty because I was new and the hope was that I would screw up and then they would discontinue the service on the grounds that no one else was available.
“Now,” he complained, “we’ll be stuck having to do this for a while!”
As it happened another assignment came up so I left Transportation. Ironically, the things I had learned about getting around the Divided City paid off in getting a better job than being PFCIC at times in the RTO.
-- rwr