I was in the actual crew called C Trick at the same time and place as the setting of 
Don Cooper's work of fiction, "C Trick: Sort of a Memoir."  I eagerly read everything 
I can find about our duty station, Field Station Berlin, Germany.  

The book is based on experience of Cooper and some of his colleagues at FSB.  
The tale is valid as the point of view of one ill-informed and immature man's opinion.  
That is what most of us were as young soldiers.  

I do recommend "C Trick: Sort of a Memoir," as a retrospective of FSB that can job a veteran's memory of the experience.  However, I report it with a warning, and comments of 
dissatisfaction overall.

The reader will be hit with an unrepresentative sampling of copious obscenity and 
profanity.  Noisy and foul-mouthed enlisted men and non-commissioned officers there 
surely were, but they did not predominate.  Most of us were well-mannered, reasonable, 
rational, disciplined, goal-oriented, and professional in bearing.

These "memoirs" have a blatant anti-military message.  The arrogant disdain 
for professional militarism is unjustified, but certainly entertaining in some 
quarters.  Service at FSB was not an absurdity or travesty.  The ignoring or blatant 
disrespect to the good and just role and deeds of FSB in honorably and peaceably 
winning the cold war is more than just excusable as an oversight.  It is intentional 
blindness.

Cooper surely could have used a proofreader to eliminate the many spelling and grammar 
errors, and to organize the book in a bit more logical way, I felt.

Cooper and I would most likely agree on one thing:  there is a surely a need for more 
writing on FSB from a more flattering point of view, from both a fictional and 
documentary approach.  I anticipate with some excitement the upcoming publication of 
FSBVG member Dr. Stephen Bowman's history of FSB for a more realistic 
depiction of the late, great outpost of freedom on the hill called Teufelsberg.

As a member of the crew called C Trick,  I did not have Cooper's attitude.  He 
has a right to his opinion, and point of view.  Many others shared his feelings.  
I would fight to the death to defend that right.  I have a right to mine, too, 
and here it is.

Frankly, "C Trick" left me with a bad feeling that I had wasted my time with a 
book that is overly disrespectful to a subject I choose to honor.  I feel as if 
I was looking for a walk in a memorial park, and half-way through stepped in a pile 
of dog crap and fell in it.  I was not satisfied with the book.  I do not get the 
feeling of worthiness of a critical work that I got from the irreverent "Catch-22" 
or "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's nest."  Those novels covered with scorn institutions 
that sorely needed reform.  "C Trick" was not in their league by any measure.  
Moreover, the degree of irreverence shown for FSB was not justified.  

Our duty stations in Berlin are subjects that deserve to be reviewed with honor and 
respect, but, yes, definitely with recountings of such actual absurd or embarassing 
episodes as Cooper relates.  In the book's defense, it realistically depicts the 
feeling of not getting the respect we deserved that probably most of us young soldiers 
had at times in the US Army.  It is an egocentric and vain feeling that quickly passed 
in most of us when we adjusted to military discipline and life in the service. 

Cooper says he went to Berlin to avoid Vietnam.  He sketches the outlines of the 
sacrifices we Berlin vets made in going to Berlin instead of Vietnam.  I would not 
agree that we should describe our service at FSB as a sacrifice for us.   We made the 
best of it, as American trooprs always have done, but it was no picnic.  In Cooper's 
book, it was actually a pub crawl.  There is some veracity in the way he describes 
our behavior, and some delusion, too.  Promotions, if you wanted them, were not slow.  
There was no danger.  Life was good, if you played the army game for which we all 
volunteered.  We were not draftees, servants, or slaves by any measure.  This is an unappreciating, spoiled-brat adolescent, self-centered, ungrateful point of view.  Really, though, that is what most of us were as young radio intelligence operatives in Berlin.  
That describes the characters in this book, too.  They were punks, barely out of 
their teens and into early twenties.  That is how the career sergeants and officers treated 
us, as if they were baby-sitting us.  It was that way, but some of us still hold a 
grudge about that treatment.  Some of us  had little military attitude.  Some of us 
treated the duty as an opportunity for one long beer bust.  We did our job, had fun, 
did not get hurt, and drank some beer, in most cases.  Some of us stayed in the army, 
but most of us did not.  Those of us in the majority who served honorably came home feeling 
like our time in Berlin was time well-spent, and proud of it.  We do not hold grudges for 
anybody or anything.  Those who do still, after decades, hold grudges, just never grew up,
or out of that.  Their stories do not hold a Peter-Pansy cuteness entertainment value.

I think it would be instructive to let young men of today read this book.  They might 
understand their own feelings about military service better to know that others long 
ago had anti-military, and unworthy and unhappy reactions, behaviors, and feelings 
about the armed services.  They might be better prepared to avoid the mistake of 
starting out disgruntled and staying that way forever.

Why did the Army send us to Berlin?  To do a vital job.  What did we accomplish there?  
We kept Berlin free until it could be reunified in freedom and independence.  It is 
simple to answer those questions now.  Why did we obey our orders, instead of fleeing 
to Canada?  We just did it without thinking, because we knew it was our duty.  Also, 
we had a certain intellectual curiosity to satisfy on the questions of Frauleins and 
Oktoberfest and beer!  We did know instinctively that freedom is not free, but we did not 
really think the price would be too high for us at FSB.  We were right.  We did pay our 
share of the price.  And we did drink our share of Schultheiss beer.  We did not all go 
to Berlin to get out of some other duty, as some explain that they did it to avoid the 
dangerous Vietnam service.  Some FSB troopers did "1049" (request to transfer) to Nam.  
I just think that if we were trying to escape our duty, we could have fled to many places 
to totally avoid our responsibility and duty to our country.  However, we did not do that. 
We did not become refugees.  We did our duty and did it well.  

Our job was a hardly a sacrifice for us at all, because the duty was easy.  There were 
fun and games, and nobody shot at us on Teufelsberg.  Sacrifice?  Yes, we left our 
friends and families to go work in a pressure cooker of world tension.  We did not 
generally understand at the time why there was that pressure.  So we accomplished our 
mission as we were trained to do.   Some still hold a grudge about being ordered to 
actually do some of the unpleasant work by really bossy people.  The indignity of it 
all was too much for some.  To those it was unforgiveable that they had to get sweaty 
and dirty sometimes on "kitchen police" or "Haus Maus" janitorial work when they would 
rather have been playing touch football, or skirt chasing on the Kudam.  

Some think nothing was achieved.  They are mistaken.  If it was not for our contributions,
United States President Reagan would not have had the confidence to tell USSR Premier 
Gorbachev, "Tear Down This Wall!"  Reagan told Gorbachev that we knew it was all over.  
We told Reagan what was up with the DDR, that they were paper tigers.  

There are statements of some that some of our early warning "Critic" reports never even 
reached the ears of those at the top in the White House.  How are these critics to know 
for sure?  They cannot.  There may have been delays, or shortcomings, but the system was 
reliable, the world's best.  I might believe that some President did not have the guts 
to act as boldly as we would have wanted in defense of freedom in reaction to our reports, 
but the warning system was not completely ineffectual.  It worked, despite the carping of
those who might have thrown their own reports in the trash to gum up the works of our own national defense.  The Cold War was won, and we helped.  That is all there is to it.  
We were the victors who chose to serve our country, even those who did it with disdain.  
We were freedom fighters against an evil and tyrannical system which was the Soviet empire, 
not the United States Army.

Now that chapter of Soviet despotism and glorious FSB victory is closed.  
It is so strange that we vets still have such divergent memories and attitudes 
about those events.  I choose to be proud of what we did.  Berlin service was a 
bright and shining era in the 20th century, though with some tedium, in the otherwise 
humdrum lives we lived.  The world is a better place for our having been in Berlin and 
for what we achieved.  It is a good thing that the USSR bankrupted and imploded, 
the Wall fell, and Germany was reunified.

Cooper's story has not put away the immature attitudes of youth.  It wallows in those 
selfish attitudes.  The book is not uplifting or educational.  It leaves me with the peeved
feeling I had when I had to stand by and watch the hijinks of those who would write "FTA" 
graffiti on latrine walls.

"C Trick: Sort of a Memoir" is available from Amazon books online.

Bruce Ford
FSBVG Webmeister