January–March, 1986
It was REFORGER 1986—Return of Forces to Germany. The exercise was called Certain Sentinel.
For those unfamiliar, REFORGER was a NATO exercise designed to test the rapid deployment of U.S.-based units to reinforce NATO forces in Europe, should the Eastern Bloc ever decide to push into Western Europe. It was the Cold War’s dress rehearsal for the unthinkable.
I was a member of the Big Red One—the 1st Infantry Division—stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas. Our unit was among those selected to participate in the exercise. We loaded up and shipped out, part of a massive show of force involving approximately 85,000 soldiers from across the NATO alliance. This was a mechanized field training exercise: tanks on tanks, infantry filtering through the gaps as was doctrine at the time. The real deal, or as close to it as peacetime would allow.
Before we flew out, the entire unit assembled in the gymnasium. Troops in the stands, all of our gear on the floor below. MPs walked through the ranks and made the standard announcement: if anyone had any contraband in their bags, now was the time to come clean. There were limits on what you could take overseas, including, if I remember correctly, a two-carton limit on cigarettes.
Now, there was a sergeant in our unit—SGT Kabachinski—who was a chain smoker of the highest order. Two cartons was an insult to his lifestyle. Kabachinski had stuffed four cartons into his own duffel bags, and then—because four still wasn’t enough to sustain a man of his habit for a deployment of unknown duration—he’d talked me and another friend into each carrying an extra carton for him. Six cartons total. Three times the legal limit. Distributed across three duffel bags to beat the system.
The MPs ran dogs over our gear.
The dogs found the cigarettes. Of course they did. Kabachinski got pulled down to the floor to explain himself. It was priceless—watching this man, a sergeant, the LTC’s personal driver, standing over his open duffel bag trying to justify four cartons of cigarettes to a military police officer and a German Shepherd. My carton and our friend’s carton apparently passed without incident, which tells you everything you need to know about the precision of military drug dogs and the imprecision of military planning.
The trouble started before we even left the ground.
We flew out of Dover Air Force Base on a C-141 Starlifter—the workhorse of military airlift in those days. But we sat on the tarmac too long. The wait stretched past whatever window the base had planned for, and in that time, the aircraft iced up. The de-icing crews had already been sent home. So we sat. For a couple of hours, eighty-some soldiers strapped into webbed seats in the belly of a cargo plane, going nowhere, while someone tracked down the de-icing crew and called them back in. Not an auspicious start.
It got worse over the Atlantic.
Somewhere mid-ocean, we hit wind shear. The C-141 dropped—not turbulence, not a bump, but dropped, like an elevator with the cable cut. My stomach went to my throat and my hands went to whatever I could grab, and for a stretch of seconds that felt considerably longer than seconds, I was certain we were done. That this was how it ended—not in some Cold War confrontation with the Soviets, but in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean in a cargo plane full of duffel bags.
And here’s where it gets better. The flight was no smoking—of course it was, it was a military cargo aircraft. But Kabachinski, the chain smoker who’d already been busted by a German Shepherd that morning, was jonesing. The man couldn’t help himself. He’d snuck into the latrine to take a puff. That’s where he was when the plane fell out of the sky.
Kabachinski came out of that latrine looking like a man who had just been spoken to directly by God. His face was white. His eyes were wide. He was absolutely, thoroughly convinced that he had caused the plane to drop—that somewhere in the chain of cause and effect, his unauthorized cigarette in the lavatory of a C-141 Starlifter over the Atlantic Ocean had angered the aircraft, the atmosphere, or the Almighty, and this was the result. He didn’t say it in so many words, but you could see it on his face: I did this.
He had not, of course. Wind shear doesn’t care about your nicotine habit. But try telling that to a chain smoker who’d already been caught once that day and just experienced what he believed was divine retribution at thirty thousand feet.
The company leadership was riding in the back of the aircraft, behind the pallets of duffel bags and equipment. When the plane dropped, our First Sergeant—Top—was thrown from his seat and landed on a wooden crate. He broke his back.
We requested an emergency landing at RAF Mildenhall in England. Denied. Clearance was not granted. There was talk of diverting us to a U.S. Air Force base in the Azores, but that would have added even more time in the air than continuing on to Germany—which, for a man with a broken back in the cargo hold, was not an improvement. Our scheduled destination was Ramstein Air Base, and that’s where we were going. So Top rode it out. Hours more in the air, hours more on a cargo plane with a fractured spine, because the flight plan said Ramstein and the flight plan was not interested in his suffering.
We hadn’t even touched German soil yet, and the deployment had already tried to kill us and broken our First Sergeant’s back. In hindsight, it was a preview of everything that followed.
The exercise was supposed to kick off at dawn. The weather had other plans.
The exercise called for cold temperatures and frozen ground—at least twenty centimeters of frost depth—to support the weight of heavy armor rolling across the German countryside. Instead, we got unusually warm, rainy weather that turned the training areas into mud and mush. You’d think, training must go on. And under normal circumstances, you’d be right. But here’s the fact of the matter, and I want you to keep this term in your mind: maneuver damage.
Maneuver damage is the cost a host nation charges for the destruction done to the countryside during military exercises. With the ground soft and saturated instead of frozen solid, the projected cost of tearing up German farmland with tanks and tracked vehicles exceeded the entire budget allocated for the training exercise itself. The math didn’t work. The damage bill would have been astronomical.
So the field training exercise—the FTX—was cancelled. Just like that. Training continued as a command post exercise, a CPX, which meant the officers and senior NCOs pushed paper and played war on maps while the rest of us were left with a whole lot of time and not much to do.
Now picture this: some 85,000 troops spread across NATO countries, young soldiers with no real mission, idle hands, and access to European nightlife.
What could possibly go wrong?
Leadership tried their best to keep the reins on us. To their credit, they did make an effort. They organized Armed Forces Recreation Center tours—AFRC trips—which, I have to say, were phenomenal. Beautiful European destinations, cultural excursions, the kind of thing you’d never complain about.
But then they did this.
They consolidated units into tent cities, mixing soldiers from different outfits who’d never served together, didn’t know each other’s chains of command, and had absolutely zero accountability to one another. Strangers in green, crammed together with nothing to do. Again—what could possibly go wrong?
And then, as if the recipe for chaos wasn’t already rich enough, they added the final ingredient. Inside these tent cities, they set up entertainment tents. And in those entertainment tents, they served beer. German Bier. And get this—at no cost. Free. Unlimited. To thousands of idle young soldiers with no mission and no supervision worth mentioning.
If you need proof of what unlimited free German beer does to soldiers who have no business drinking it, let me tell you about the sergeant.
We had a sergeant in our unit—a marathoner. Hispanic guy, clean-cut as they come. A non-drinker. The kind of squared-away NCO you’d put on a recruiting poster without changing a thing. This man had discipline in every measurable category of soldiering. And then he walked into the entertainment tent on one of the first nights and, for the first time in his life, got drunk.
Not a little drunk. German-beer-on-an-empty-history drunk. The kind of drunk that rewrites your understanding of yourself.
I was in our sleeping tent—one row over and two cots down from his—reading, because I am a reader. The sergeant rolled in a few minutes after lights out, climbed into his sleeping bag, and promptly puked his guts out inside of it. Not beside it. Not hanging over the edge. Inside the sleeping bag, zipped up, with himself still in it.
There was a mad scramble to make sure he was good to go. A couple of the guys he was close with got him up, got him to the shower tent, cleaned him off, and then went to the logistics tent and procured a brand-new sleeping bag. Fresh. Clean. Uncontaminated by the sins of German Bier. They got him settled into the new bag, still drunk as anything, and we all thought the crisis was over.
It was not over.
A few minutes later, the sergeant climbed out of the new sleeping bag, stood up, pulled it out of his sweatpants, and urinated directly onto the sleeping bag they had just acquired for him. The brand-new, freshly issued, hard-won replacement sleeping bag. He watered it like a houseplant and then stood there swaying, apparently satisfied with his work.
This was the most squared-away sergeant in the unit. This was a marathoner, a non-drinker, a man who had never touched alcohol in his life. And free German beer turned him into a man who vomited inside his own bedding and then christened the replacement. If it could do that to him, imagine what it was doing to the rest of us.
Oh, and one more thing. They were hosting a Super Bowl watch party.
Super Bowl XX. January 26, 1986. The Chicago Bears versus the New England Patriots. The “Super Bowl Shuffle” Bears—Ditka’s squad, the ’85 defense, Walter Payton, Jim McMahon, and the Fridge. This wasn’t just any game. This was an event. And it was being broadcast to a tent full of soldiers who’d been drinking free German beer since God knows when.
Now let me set this up properly.
I was assigned to a Chemical company. The specific unit will not be named here, to protect both the innocent and the guilty—and believe me, there was plenty of both to go around.
Here’s what you need to understand about Chemical companies in the 1986 Army: they had a significant number of women soldiers. This was not the case across all branches. In fact, it was far from the norm. And that detail is about to matter a great deal.
Our company was positioned on a hill in the area of operations of the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment. And sharing that tent city with us—sharing the entertainment tent, sharing the free beer—was an Infantry battalion.
Now, in 1986, Infantry battalions did not have women soldiers. Not a single one.
You see where this is going.
But let me sharpen the picture a little more. Most of the women in our Chemical company weren’t single. They were paired up—with the men in that same Chemical company. Boyfriends, lovers, the whole tangled web of relationships that forms when young soldiers live and work in close quarters. These weren’t strangers to each other. These were couples.
So now you’ve got the full setup. A hilltop tent city. An Infantry battalion full of young men who haven’t been around women in weeks. A Chemical company full of women who are very much spoken for. The men those women are with, watching every sideways glance. Unlimited free German beer flowing like the Rhine. And a Super Bowl party to bring them all together under one tent.
Do you see it now?
A note before I go any further. Names will be withheld throughout this account. I don’t have signed waivers, and I don’t have consent to identify the people involved. So fictitious names will be used. The events, however, are real.
PFC Abigail D. Becker.
Becker was a member of our Chemical company. She was young, blonde, and very attractive—the kind of attractive that turns heads in a garrison environment and becomes a five-alarm fire in a tent full of infantrymen who haven’t seen a woman in weeks. She was also married. Her husband was a soldier in the same company, but he had not deployed with the rest of us. For whatever reason, he stayed behind. So Becker was on that hilltop without her spouse, surrounded by men from two different units, all of them drinking for free.
And there was another fact of life. Becker and her husband were a biracial couple.
Not that it mattered. Well—it shouldn’t have mattered. In a perfect world, in the Army we all claimed to be part of, it wouldn’t have registered as anything worth noting.
But this wasn’t a perfect world. This was a tent city on a muddy hill in Germany, full of young soldiers with too much beer, too much time, and not enough supervision. And somehow—inevitably, predictably, disgracefully—it was made to matter.
Now for the catalyst.
Joel C. Caterino. Italian, as the name suggests, and everybody loved Caterino. He was one of those soldiers who lit up a room just by walking into it—charming, funny, the kind of guy you wanted at your table. Everybody called him Rino. Not Rhino—though I realize, given what I’m about to tell you, the comparison could certainly apply.
Here’s the thing about Rino. Sober, he was the best version of a soldier and a friend. But when he drank, something shifted. When Rino drank, he believed he was King Kong, Godzilla, and every comic book superhero in existence, all rolled into one. The beer didn’t just loosen him up—it transformed him. And on a hilltop with unlimited free German Bier, that transformation was not a matter of if, but when.
And here’s the detail that ties the whole thing together, the thread that pulls this story tight: Rino was the best man at Becker’s wedding.
But here’s the other thing about Rino, and I need you to hold this image in your mind. Rino stood about five foot two. A buck and a quarter soaking wet—and I might be exaggerating his stature. This was not a large human being. This was a compact Italian firecracker with a heart the size of a howitzer and a body roughly the size of the shell.
Rino was known—well known—for letting his drunken demeanor write checks his body could not cash. Sober, he knew his limitations. Drunk, he had none. And the distance between those two versions of Joel C. Caterino was measured in exactly one thing: free German Bier.
So let me paint the final picture. The man who stood beside Becker’s husband at the altar, the man left holding the unspoken obligation to look after his best friend’s wife, was a five-foot-two, hundred-and-twenty-five-pound soldier who turned into an invincible superhero every time he drank—in a tent city pouring free beer, surrounded by an Infantry battalion full of men twice his size, all of them eyeing the one woman he’d sworn to protect.
I think I’ve kept you on the edge of your seat long enough. Let’s get to it.
The football had ended. The Bears had dismantled the Patriots in what barely qualified as a contest, and the television was off. But the night was far from over. A live band had taken the stage—and I have to give credit where it’s due: the entertainment the Army provided was top notch. Top notch indeed. Whatever else went wrong that night, the music wasn’t part of it.
The scene inside the tent was this. At two of the tables sat the chem-dawgs—that’s what we were called. A couple dozen of us, maybe a few more. Let’s cap Team Chem at thirty. Surrounding us, filling the rest of the tent, were a couple of companies from the Infantry battalion we were co-located with. Let’s cap Team Ground Pounder at two hundred.
Thirty against two hundred. And every last one of us had been drinking free German beer for hours.
One of the infantry guys made a lewd, suggestive comment toward Becker. She handled it with grace—politely rebuffed the guy, didn’t escalate, didn’t make a scene. Just a firm no and a turned shoulder.
Strike one.
Rino was sitting right next to Becker. I was directly across the table from both of them—front row seat to what was about to happen, whether I wanted it or not.
I didn’t hear the words. I want to be honest about that. The band was playing “Limelight”—the Rush song—and it happened to be one of my favorites. I was locked into Geddy Lee’s bass line, not the conversation across the table. So no, I didn’t catch what that infantryman said to Becker.
But I didn’t need to hear it. I saw it.
I saw the faint hint of smoke—a baby blue wisp, if you’ll allow me the metaphor—curling out of Rino’s left ear. And I saw the twitch. That left eye twitch. If you knew Rino, you knew what that twitch meant. I’d seen it before. More than once. It was the early warning system, the two-second countdown before Joel C. Caterino stopped being Rino the lovable Italian and became Rino the five-foot-two wrecking ball.
I thought to myself, very clearly: Oh shit. Here we go again.
A different ground pounder stepped up next. This one had consumed more than his fair share of Germany’s finest fermented liquid bread—then again, so had I, so I’m not one to judge the volume. He asked Becker to dance. Polite enough on the surface, I suppose, if you ignored the circumstances, the setting, and everything that had already happened.
Becker declined. What else was she supposed to do?
Strike two.
I looked at Rino. The smoke coming from his ears was no longer a faint baby blue wisp. It wasn’t quite a smoke screen yet, but it was building—thickening, darkening. And now his shoulders were hunched up, drawn tight toward his neck like a coiled spring. Anyone who knew Rino knew what that posture meant. The eye twitch was the warning. The shoulders were the launch sequence.
And here’s a detail I haven’t mentioned yet, one that makes the whole smoke metaphor almost too perfect to be true: Rino’s MOS—his Military Occupational Specialty—was smoke operations. He was a smoke specialist. One of the smokers of our unit. His literal job in the United States Army was to generate smoke.
So if you’ve been picturing smoke pouring out of this man’s ears for the last few pages, know this: it makes more sense than you realize. Rino was built for smoke. It’s what he did. And right now, sitting at that table, shoulders hunched, left eye twitching, he was generating plenty of it.
Now let me tell you who was sitting around me, because in about sixty seconds it’s going to matter.
To my right was my best friend. We’ll call him Chicago Bob. A chem-dawg through and through, solid as they come.
To my left was a guy I’d actually had a little fistfight with on my second day in the unit. Our beef was long settled. We weren’t friends, exactly, but we were friendly—the way two soldiers get after they’ve already thrown down and come out the other side of it. We’ll call him Hill-Billy. Not to be offensive—that’s what he called himself. HB had a well-documented preference for Evan Williams whiskey, but I’m drifting. The point is this: HB was Rino’s best friend.
So there I was. Chicago Bob on my right. Hill-Billy on my left. Rino and Becker directly across from me. The smoke thickening. The shoulders climbing. And the tent full of ground pounders who had no idea what was about to happen.
And here is where strike three gets fuzzy.
I didn’t hear what was said. Not exactly. The beer had done its work on me too, and the band was still playing, and the tent was loud with two hundred–some soldiers who’d been drinking since the Super Bowl kicked off. But something came from one of the ground pounders—something directed at Becker. And whoever said it knew that her husband was Black.
I don’t know the exact words. I won’t pretend I do. But I know the shape of it. I know what it was about. And I know what I was told afterward, by people who were closer, who heard it clearly. What was said, in so many words, was that Becker was a n----r lover.
Strike three. Strike four. Strike five. Strike six. Strike infinity.
There was no countdown after that. No twitch, no smoke, no warning. The fuse had reached the powder.
Rino—all five foot two, all hundred and twenty-five pounds of Joel C. Caterino—stood up on the bench seat. One step. One single step on that bench, and he launched himself into the nearest twenty-five or thirty infantry guys like a human cannonball. No hesitation. No calculation. No recognition whatsoever of the math, of the odds, of the sheer physical impossibility of what he was attempting. He just went.
And one heartbeat behind him—one single heartbeat—HB was up on the table and launching himself into the fray.
Chicago Bob looked at me. I looked at him.
Our squad leader, a man we’ll call SGT E, was sitting nearby. A quick word about SGT E, because you need to understand who this man was. SGT E could grab a sign pole and hold himself horizontal—a human flag, arms fully extended, body parallel to the ground, like it was nothing. He was previously a Marine. He was a Golden Gloves champion boxer out of Los Angeles. He was, by any reasonable measure, one of the most physically dangerous human beings I have ever known.
SGT E giggled.
He didn’t yell. He didn’t bark an order. He didn’t assess the tactical situation. He giggled—the way a man giggles when he’s been waiting for something all night and it finally arrives. And then he popped up.
CB and I popped up right behind him.
And in two, maybe three ticks of the second hand, over sixty chem-dawgs and ground pounders were tangled together in a brawl that had no lines, no rules, and no referee. Punching. Kicking. Biting. Yes, biting—because I was one of the ones who got bitten. This was not a bar fight in a movie where chairs break cleanly over backs and people shake it off. This was a drunken, primal, ugly, beautiful mess of soldiers who had crossed every line there was to cross, fighting in a tent on a muddy hill in Germany because one man said something unforgivable about another man’s wife and a five-foot-two Italian smoke specialist decided he’d heard enough.
And then it got bigger.
The fight spilled outside the tent and into the night. To understand what happened next, you need to see the layout. The tent city was arranged in a horseshoe. At the bottom of that horseshoe sat the chem-dawg tent. To the left, facing out from our position, were the logistics and command tents, the entertainment tent, two mess halls, and the personal hygiene tents. To the right, running up the hill, were several tents—all housing for the Infantry battalion.
We were at the bottom of that horseshoe, going blow for blow with the guys the Army literally paid to do the fighting. Let me remind you what we were. We were a Chemical company. Our job was to make smoke, decontaminate, and reconnoiter. I was recon. We were not trained for hand-to-hand combat with infantrymen. And yet there we were, trading punches with them in the mud like it was our MOS.
It was an FPL event—a final protective line. For those who don’t know the term, an FPL is the last line of defense, the moment when every position on the line opens up at once, interlocking fire across the front, because the line is about to be overrun. That’s what this was. Everybody in, everything out, no reserves, no fallback.
By the time anyone thought to say boo, there had to be a hundred and fifty soldiers fighting. I believe every last one of our eighty-five chem-dawgs was out there at some point during the night. Eighty-five against the world.
And then the badges showed up.
Garrison MPs from the 11th ACR. A company of military police from the Tennessee National Guard—yes, the Tennessee National Guard, because apparently this situation required reinforcements from another state’s worth of law enforcement. German Polizei. And I’m fairly certain they called in the dog catcher too, because at that point, why not? Anyone with a badge and a pulse was converging on that hilltop.
Good times indeed.
— end of part one —
The badges kept coming over the hill. And in the morning, the Division Chemical Officer would have every chem-dawg standing at attention, bruises and all.
Every story here is true the way a war story is true: it happened, and it got better every time it was told.