A story

[Dr.Device]

I wrote a short-short story this weekend that seems relevant to here. It's completely unedited or polished, and will probably stay that way, but I feel like sharing anyway.

 

Fear Itself

[Duke Bushido]

Well done!

 

 

[Cancer]

I like that. 

 

I'm going to take the opportunity to post a story of my own.  It has been put on the Web before, but that site has been permanently taken down, so it hasn't been available anywhere in about four years.  The 20th anniversary of the event causing its original posting comes up next March, and I was going to wait until then to "republish" it, but this chance seems appropriate to jump the gun a bit.

 

I need to prepend two explanatory bits to it.  First, "DDR" is Deutsche Demokratische Republik, which is the name the government of East Germany called itself before the reunification in 1990.  Second, this isn't fiction.

 

Spoiler

Sometime in probably 1963 or 1964, not that long after the Berlin Wall
went up, there inevitably came a time when the DDR started letting people
out, people who were of no real value to the state.  But the DDR might
possibly gain some propaganda points if they released them to the West
for at least a while, and more still if they could be got off the public
dole.  If the story related to me is accurate, the first was a little
girl.  She had been orphaned, and was being released to go live with
her grandparents in the West.

 

The details of the release were somewhat delicate.  An unmarked civilian
car was to be driven by an American civilian through Checkpoint Charlie
to a specific place inside the Soviet Sector.  The girl was to be let
in the car, and the car was to drive back through.  Sounds simple enough,
but since this was the first time this kind of thing was to happen, there
was substantial doubt about the mission.  Even if the driver was
completely  above board -- that is, completely without attachments to the US
Government,  including all its intelligence operations -- it could not be
guaranteed that he wouldn't be seized as a spy and imprisoned on trumped-up
charges. That kind of thing supposedly had happened before, depending on whose
side of the Cold War propaganda you believed.  If the driver was imprisoned,
execution was considered very unlikely, but it couldn't be ruled out,
either.

 

So, the driver had to be a civilian.  He had to be completely without
ties to US federal agencies in any capacity (because the Soviet and East
German intelligence agencies were pretty good, and it had to be assumed
that any cover, no matter how good, would be penetrated).  And for safety
(state safety, not his personal safety, of course) he had to be someone
who really wasn't at all important to the strategic situation.  In short,
he couldn't know anything, and as far as the US was concerned, well, if
he was seized and tortured, it would be too bad but it wouldn't really
matter.  The word is "expendable".  

 

The man selected was on the bottom rung of the American Red Cross office
in Berlin.  His only government papers were his passport and his
discharge from the US Army Air Force about a dozen years previous.  (He'd
been drafted, like most young men of his age, and had been lucky enough to
serve his duty during that narrow interval between the end of World War II
and the beginning of the Korean War.)  He'd been with the Red Cross for four
or five years, and in Berlin since August 1962.

 

As it happened, the release went off without a hitch.  Approach the
gate at the scheduled time, present papers, get waved through, drive
in, stop, girl gets in, turn around, approach the checkpoint, get waved
through again, back out to the American Sector and safety.  Just a
little extra wear and tear on the nerves leading up to the event, both
for him and his wife; he wasn't a stupid man, and it's easy to draw
conclusions about what your government and your office boss think about
your value when you draw that assignment.  He never did tell his children
about it, since at the time (the oldest of them was seven or eight) there
was nothing they could do but worry, and by the time they were able to
understand he had other things to talk about.  His sons didn't learn
about it for nearly forty years, and even then it was from his widow.

 

Goodbye, Dad.

 

 

[Old Man]

14 hours ago, Dr.Device said:

I wrote a short-short story this weekend that seems relevant to here. It's completely unedited or polished, and will probably stay that way, but I feel like sharing anyway.

 

Fear Itself

 

Looking forward to more in this series!

[Pattern Ghost]

Thanks, Doc! Well done. More, please.