The U.S. military has not countenanced a bearded face since gas masks became a necessity. It’s a shock, then, to walk into an office at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center and see a bearded sailor sitting behind a desk. And a further shock to see that the desk’s “in” box holds a copy of a newspaper called Die Welt (The World) and that in front of the sailor are a pair of flags: one American, one bearing the yellow, black and red bars of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Approach the desk, and the sailor behind it springs to his feet. His khakis conform perfectly to his slim frame. He wears fashionable oval eyeglasses. His hand charges forward, and he introduces himself: “Senior Chief Olaf Salzbrunn!”
At any time, there are 100 to 150 foreign sailors at Great Lakes. Most are there to learn to fire and maintain the guns on ships their countries have bought from the U.S. Navy. Others, like a lone Moroccan here learning electronics or an Egyptian officer whose father was his country’s chief of naval operations, have been invited to study in the United States because it’s good public relations.
“Any time the U.S. government sells a ship, sells a piece of equipment, they send their sailors over here to learn how to operate it,” said Petty Officer 2nd Class Bob Waugh. “It’s all to better foreign relations.”
As head of the base’s international program, Waugh has a number of tasks, most of them unrelated to military training. He has taken a group of Australians on a field trip to the Miller Brewing Co. in Milwaukee (“Australians drink beer like it’s water,” he said). He has escorted Mexicans to the top of the Sears Tower and guided Germans through the Museum of Science and Industry, where they saw one of their navy’s submarines displayed as a captured trophy of war.
During the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, Waugh has to make sure that sailors from Egypt and Saudi Arabia have access to a galley after sundown for prayers. And once he prevented an international incident by persuading a Turkish sailor that it wouldn’t be a good idea to defect.
Waugh also is a one-man guide to America, a bridge between the liberal West and the traditional cultures from which many of the sailors come.
“A lot of them, they’re overwhelmed by the size of our road system, our airport,” he said. “O’Hare is the first thing they see. They don’t understand our toll roads. They say, `Is this a tax?’ Most of them, though, they’re open to our way of life, that we’re more liberal, that we treat women differently. They don’t like it, but they accept it. I have a woman who works for me, and some of the Muslim countries, they have a hard time accepting a woman as an authority.”
The Australians are not fond of the weak beer, the Germans aren’t crazy about studying until 8 in the evening (in Germany, duty ends at 4 p.m.), and the Moroccan thinks Chicago’s winters are too harsh. But most, while they’re in this country, try hard to live as much like American sailors as possible.
Salzbrunn, who has been at Great Lakes for two years and still has a year to go, is in charge of all the German sailors who pass through the base. “My boys,” the 29-year-old petty officer calls the young sailors he nannies through the program. He helps them with their English, orders German magazines for them and keeps them up to date on the news from home.
At the moment, he has three Germans on the base, all young men in their early 20s: Petty Officer 1st Class Frank Schedel and Petty Officers 3rd Class Michael Lawrenz and Tilo Jahnke. All are training to maintain the missile systems on a class of destroyers commissioned by the U.S. Navy in the 1960s and recently passed on to the Germans.
Even after 4 1/2 months at the Defense Language Institute in San Antonio, their English is prim and halting. (“The first three months, here, I didn’t understand a damn word,” admitted Salzbrunn, who now uses Amercanisms such as “Hey, guy.” “The slang almost killed me. In Germany, we learn Oxford English.”)
Schedel is closest to fluency, so he answered most of the questions about his group’s experience in America. “We’ve been to Milwaukee and downtown Chicago,” he said. “We’ve been to the Taste of Chicago and some clubs.”
The Taste of Chicago, he marveled, “was absolutely huge. The parties are not so huge in Germany.”
Like many Europeans, all three have learned that America is the bargain bin of Western civilization.
“Some things are so much cheaper–clothing, gas, traveling is much cheaper here, all the computer stuff,” Salzbrunn said. “The prices here–Germany will never beat this. It’s expensive in Germany to run Internet access. And you have other things, like the free refills of coffee in restaurants.”
After two years here, Salzbrunn has begun to go native. He has an apartment in Winthrop Harbor and recently got the German Navy to extend his appointment from two years to three. When he leaves his country’s service in four years, he hopes to parlay his English skills into a U.S. posting with a German company.
Although the international program’s aim is not to seduce sailors into a love affair with the American way of life, Salzbrunn seems won over.
“I see no big future in Germany,” he said. “The economy in Germany is down.”
Lately, he said, he has even started dreaming in English.
Lt. Omar Nasri is the first Moroccan sailor ever to study at Great Lakes. The tall officer graduated first in his class at Morocco’s naval academy and as a result was given the opportunity to study electronics here.
“I am here first for cooperation between Morocco and U.S.A.,” he said. “You have so many more ships than we have. . . . Here, we are in touch with every technology, everything you dream about.”
The systems Nasri is studying are more advanced than any the Moroccan Navy possesses, but he reasons that “maybe someday they might buy systems and equipment (from the United States), and they might need me.”
In the meantime, he said, he expects to oversee a training program when he goes home.
Nasri has been in the United States for a year, through a long winter that seemed “hard, cold” to someone from a desert country. Although he is well traveled, he said Moroccan diplomats sat him down and gave him a full briefing on American customs before he left Morocco.
“They talk about Americans, their behaviors,” Nasri said. Among the tips they gave him to minimize friction: Don’t put your feet up on the table and don’t belch.
Which leads us to the Australians. Some say it is a country; others say it is a 200-year-old party with its own flag, currency and national anthem. Certainly, no one on the base could match a recent quartet of Australian students for informality and high spirits.
Unlike American sailors, who address each other formally by rank or surname, the Australians call to each other in nicknames. Senior Chief Pete Lipscomb is “Lippy.” Senior Chief Rod Robertson goes by “Robby.” Petty Officer 2nd Class Megan McDonald? She’s “Macker,” like every other Scot in the Royal Australian Navy. And Petty Officer Aaron Williams is “Bungy,” like every other Williams.
“We kind of call each other by our first name or our nicknames,” Robertson said in a broad, open-mouthed Australian accent. “Here, they call each other by their last name. It’s all a little impersonal.”
The Australians, who recently returned home, had been studying the same weapons system as the Germans, a surface-to-surface missile launcher.
Lipscomb and Robertson are veteran sailors who have both trained in this country before, but McDonald and Williams, in their early 20s, were both here for the first time.
Williams said he applied to study in America “to work on that particular missile system.” This provoked a loud laugh from McDonald, so he amended himself: “It’s a good chance to see a part of the world that I’d probably never have a chance to see.”
Only here March through July, he already had seen more than some Americans: The group took a long trip that looped through Detroit, Toronto, St. Louis and Milwaukee. And they had seen 10 baseball games. Baseball is played semi-professionally in Australia, but a few players have made it into to the U.S. major leagues, including Dave Nielsen of the Milwaukee Brewers. The Australians went to see him pitch and took along an Australian flag as a calling card. Nielsen’s wife noticed it and arranged a meeting with her husband.
In a small way, the Australians were trying to educate their American teachers in the field of language studies. Inked up on a board in their classroom were a list of Australian slang terms. “Esky” is a beer cooler, “fairy floss” is cotton candy, a “bum bag” is a fanny pack, and “goffers” is soda pop.
But no matter the language spoken, there are a few words that have meant home away from home for nearly all foreign sailors at Great Lakes for nearly 20 years: Jim’s Grille & Lounge.
The Australians and Germans in particular have made the small bar and pizza parlor on Martin Luther King Drive in North Chicago, just across Sheridan Road from the base, their after-hours home.
On the walls are national flags with the signatures of sailors who have passed through recently as well as a flag labeled “From the Federal German Navy to the Royal Australian Navy.” A cap labeled “H.M.A.S. Perth” dangles from a hook behind the bar, next to a German hat with a gold eagle above the bill.
“We’ve had a lot of foreign students,” owner Mary Katris said with maternal pride. “We’ve had them for over 18 years. They’re really great people. We have a really good rapport with them. They write us letters when they get married.”
To accommodate her foreign boys, Katris added an “Australian burger” (a hamburger with bacon, egg and cheese) to the menu and began stocking Warsteiner German beer.
Katris excused herself, disappeared into a back room and returned with a photo album stickered “Royal Australian Navy.” Inside are group photos of Australian sailors, beginning at Christmas 1995.
“We have hundreds of pictures,” Katris said. In return, she presents the foreign sailors with T-shirts when they leave so they don’t forget Great Lakes or Jim’s. They don’t.
“You’d be amazed,” she said, “at the amount of people who call us from overseas just to say hi.”
Now that is foreign relations.
