A Minor Casualty of the Cold War

When World War II ended, Vienna, like Berlin, was partitioned into three zones—American, British, Russian. It became, if it wasn't already, an espionage hub, the main crossing point of spies and information between East and West. By the time I got to Germany, 12 years later in the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment (our horses had tank treads), the partitions had been recently dissolved, and the Russians officially had moved to Czechoslovakia, where it was our job to monitor them through binoculars, radar, and radio interception from the German side of the border. Some of them, a year before our arrival, had rumbled into Hungary and snuffed a revolution there.

Our counter-intelligence corps had an office in Vienna, but we hadn't heard of it then. If anybody knew about it, it was the Russians. Soldiers looking like civilians, with backpacks on BMW motorcycles and maybe Motoguzzis, would emerge from the city mornings, ride due east into the hinterlands, snap shots of Russian installations, and return evenings. There were, of course, other activities, but they were understandably kept under wraps. Of this, though, we knew nothing then.

I found myself at an Army post called Fort Skelly, in Regensburg, once used by German Luftwaffe pilots, an old, old city on the Danube in Bavaria. Regensburg was almost as old as Vienna, which could trace its lineage back two millennia to a Roman army outpost on "the frozen Danube." In June, I think it was, 1957, my roommate Jack and I took a two-day pass to Vienna. If we'd had the inclination and the time, we could have dropped a canoe onto the Danube in Regensburg and paddled our way to Vienna in a couple of days, helped along by the current on its way from the Black Forest to the Black Sea. By train the trip took about three hours.

Jack and I detrained in the Vienna bahnhof about 5:00 in the evening and set out to discover a hotel, dinner, some wine or beer, and Viennese women. We found all of these things, except the women, by about 9:00 and decided to chance a dance club we were directed to called the Graben Cafe. From the sidewalk we could walk up half a flight of steps to the entrance to a coffee house. Also from the sidewalk we could see, through tall, uncurtained windows there, a few solitary, hatted men and women at tables reading newspapers over their coffee, looking a lot like my view of World War II. (My memory has unsmiling women, their eyes disclosing nothing, wearing '40s hats). Or we could walk down half a flight of stairs to drinks and perhaps dance partners, so we did. We found a small dance floor, a music trio, and cabaret tables, at about a third of which two or three women per table sat sipping drinks and chatting. Without hats. Couples were at a few of the others. Jack and I sat down at an empty one, ordered drinks, and began smiling at the women, most about our age—early 20s.

The empty tables, when we came in, seemed to be across the dance floor from the single women. Now, as we sipped the full-bodied Austrian beer, we tried to look cool, not an easy thing to do, because as soon as we sat down we found we were the objects of their attention, not the other way around. If you're an American, even in your civilian clothes you stand out elsewhere in the world like Donald Duck in a tintype. Or used to. Yes, there was conversation, but all the single women were gazing at us as they spoke. Well, we were the only two single men there—it was early. We settled upon two sitting together and decided we'd start with them. We asked, we danced, we joined them at their table, and an hour later all four of us were out on the sidewalk, laughing and teasing (this was when I discovered Austrian beer was more than six percent...