It is the late 1960s. Cold war tensions and the Vietnam conflict dominate the media. John Bluderin, a drafted, dejected nineteen-year-old army specialist, has been assigned to military intelligence in Germany. Fluent in German and absorbed into the social fabric of Schwäbisch Gmünd, no one would ever suspect him of doing anything out of the ordinary. Specialist Bluderin is about to prove everyone wrong. As John begins his first assignment, he meets Leda Beschwörung, a petite, dedicated agent able to jump twenty yards at a clip and infiltrate the enemy seamlessly. Leda, a practitioner of Gestalt psychology, makes Bluderin feel worthy again and becomes the catalyst in his coming-of-age journey, changing his life forever. Under Leda's diligent mentoring, Bluderin's perception of human nature sharpens. He soon encounters Günter Mann, a clairvoyant shepherd whose advice leads him to a Norwegian goddess. Solveig Evensen introduces him to a new world of emotional, intellectual, and erotic passion where both learn to transcend their past barriers. But it is Bluderin's final assignment that places his life on the edge of death. In Green Sleep is a compelling tale of one man's philosophical voyage to seek and understand the truth in a world riddled with deception.

In Green Sleep

A Tour of DutyBy JERRY ACKERMAN

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2011 Jerry Ackerman
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4620-0244-3

Chapter One

February 1967

Although he had been ordered time and again not to, Specialist 4 Wiley Couch banged the spring-loaded door wide open to Specialist 5 John Bluderin's office and sprinted into it like a man on an urgent mission. He plopped an olive-drab satchel on Bluderin's desk.

Bluderin jerked back from the desk when he heard a shotgun blast, the sound the huge, thick door made when it closed itself. The crackled shot ricocheted all along the corridor and into other offices. It was not the sound anyone wanted to hear in a military building at Hardt Kaserne, especially one that was built like a bunker and once occupied by a battalion of Nazi infantry officers.

"Gotcha," Couch said, belching, patting his beer-belly with one hand and scratching the crotch of his pants with the other. He leaned over, pressing his forearms and elbows on Bluderin's desk. "Hand over the hashish."

The soldier's imposing presence was as exasperating as his diction. His thick head of dark hair—shone to a midnight blue—was always clean but unkempt and usually longer than military regulations allowed. His eyes, which were blacker than his hair, were pierced with pupils the diameter of pencil erasers.

Bluderin believed that Couch was forever under the influence of alcohol and hashish. His constant smile was wide and wet, showing the considerable gap in the center of his upper teeth. Whenever he laughed, and he always laughed at his own quips, such as referring to himself as Smiley Wiley, the lower buttons of his fatigue shirt either tightened severely or busted loose from the pressure of his inflated girth.

Bluderin was accustomed to Couch's careless rhetoric and behavior. His coarseness seemed to be the only way for him to release his pent-up frustration with Bluderin, who (although three years younger than Couch) outranked him and was better looking. Bluderin's six-two, one hundred eighty pound physique—wired with hard, tight muscle—was softened only by his ash blond hair and cerulean eyes. The Führer doubtlessly would have approved of his physical features. However, Bluderin's acceptance of all ethnicities as equals would have landed him in brutal heat with the megalomaniac.

"What can I do for you today?"

Couch opened the satchel and took out a sheet of paper. He looked it over several times, apparently to make sure he had the right item.

"This thing needs to be retyped," he said. "I spilled some beer on it. Can you get Tyler or one of the other grunts to redo it and make around two-hundred copies? But I need you to check it out first, John. Last time I ran a memo the brass gave me all kinds of shit about my spelling and grammar."

Bluderin read the memo and, upon picking up an army pen intended for such purposes, began to make corrections. By the time he had finished, the memo looked stained in rivulets of blood. Even the tips of Bluderin's fingers were marked with miniscule blotches of red ink.

"I don't know how you do it, Wiley. Ten misspellings and a dozen or so grammatical errors in a hundred-word memorandum."

"They didn't teach me much about readin' and writin' down at the farm in Missouri," Couch said. "More or less picked up what I could, and it ain't much."

"Why did you come down from Göppingen? Just to have copies of this notice made?"

"The copier in Göppingen shit the bed again," Couch said, "and, as you saw, the memo is about a change in payday hours and location. I do not want to upset Ma Fella Americans, as President Johnson says, or my fellow GIs, by not keeping them up to speed on the new changes."

From previous discussions with him, Bluderin surmised that Wiley Couch had as much regard for his fellow GIs as LBJ had for Vietnam War protestors. Bluderin suspected that the reason Couch drove down from Göppingen was to spend some time in Schwäbisch Gmünd.

Wiley Couch was not a difficult guy to please. He thought that Schwäbisch Gmünd had everything, meaning great beer at cheap prices, farm girls he could bed down for the price of dinner, and a few regulars at a local Gasthaus with whom he could play cards or otherwise socialize. Like Bluderin, Couch enjoyed the advantage of being fluent in German.

Joining the army and being sent to Germany had been a windfall for Wiley Couch. Poverty-stricken when fresh out of high school, he now always had cash at his disposal and had improved his hygiene considerably. He recently purchased a 1956 Mercedes-Benz 220S black sedan. The gap in his teeth widened whenever he spoke of that possession.

"Like you, my friend, I have it made here, and you're doing better than me. Setting your boss up with a drop-dead gorgeous German broad certainly didn't hurt your standing."

"I must admit," Bluderin said, trying to withhold a smirk, "that the captain has been nice to me since I introduced him to Ingrid Dannette. Sure makes military life easier, and Ingrid is a classic European beauty, don't you think? I wonder, though, how she and McCandley relate to each other. Her English needs to improve, while his German is helpless."

"Come on now, Johnny boy. You're always so goddamn polite and distant. Be real. You know the score. Fucking is a universal language."

"Like music and mathematics, I suppose."

PFC Joseph Tyler walked into the office, taking the memo from Bluderin and listening carefully to his instructions. Bluderin could not help but notice how diminutive Tyler looked when he passed Couch on the way out. At five-six, the PFC was a full head shorter than Wiley, and the circumference of Tyler's chest was less than a third of Couch's. The PFC's clean-shaven skull made the two contrasting images look even more emphatically like a portrayal of David and Goliath.

After Tyler left, Couch grabbed his satchel and pulled out a flask of Jägermeister. Guzzling a large swig of the liquor, he offered some to Bluderin, who waved him off.

"Put that away." Bluderin said in a loud whisper. "You never know when the brass is going to make an appearance. In fact, McCandley could be here any minute. He needs to approve some documents before he lets me go on a three-day pass. Do you have to drink something with such a strong, licorice aroma? I hope the captain doesn't smell it. As it is, he'll probably reprimand me for letting the door slam shut. That's bad enough. Alcohol could make him renege on my pass and have you demoted."

Bluderin was anxious for Couch to leave so he could finish his work for McCandley and go to his apartment. Although no unmarried GIs were allowed to have a private residence, Bluderin had gotten approval from McCandley to have a "temporary private place, given the cramped barrack space, provided he can be contacted at any time." The fact was that Bluderin was going to be assigned, from time-to-time, to temporary duty (or TDY) covert missions, supposedly from orders out of the 8th Military Intelligence Unit in Ulm. A private apartment could be a necessary accommodation to fulfill some assignments. McCandley knew all about that, of course, but for the record he had to come up with some other "reason" for allowing Bluderin to have an apartment. So the TDY business was tucked into something vague—with not a word said to anyone—and with a pledge of secrecy.

Arranged by intelligence agents, Bluderin's private...