After several months of this work, I was asked by the Colonel if I would like to keep doing the job as a civilian employee of the Exchange Service. "Naturally," he said slyly, "it would require your immediate discharge from the Army and would pay more money."
Actually, immediate discharge from the Army was all I needed to hear.
I signed up for a one-year contract to work as a civilian with privileges equivalent to an army captain. At the time, they were just beginning the civilian employment program in Europe and no one was quite sure how to discharge me from the Army in Germany and retain my rights to transportation back home to Ohio.
Finally, they set up a discharge facility in Bayreuth, Germany, and it was there that I returned to civilian life with an honorable discharge from the U.S. Army dated the 18th day of December, 1945.
Now -- after three years, three months and 23 days in the U.S. Army -- I was a private citizen again. Yet it would be another two full years before I returned home to Ohio.
As a civilian employee of the Army Exchange Service stationed over seas, I was entitled to lodging and rations equivalent to that of an Army Captain and had to wear an officer's style uniform.
Instead of the insignias of rank and organization that customarily adorn the lapels, sleeves and epaulets of the uniform, the civilian version was a set of embroidered dark blue triangular patches containing the letters "US." I was assigned to work for another civilian, Walter J. Narkus, a tall lanky fellow who was well qualified as an expert in commercial photo developing and printing. He had run large photo finishing plants in the U.S. and had most recently installed large photo finishing operations in Great Britain to serve the American troops there. Now his job was to build new facilities to develop and print the black and white photographs taken by the occupation troops stationed in southern Germany, Austria and northern Italy.
To provide technical support he had brought along an Englishman, George Seagrove, to serve as a mechanic, electrician and general handy man.
Clerical, accounting and secretarial services were provided by a young German woman, Elizabeth Oeser, who lived near the Third Anny compound.
I rounded out the crew with an assignment to procure all of the necessary supplies to keep the operation running.
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