My part in Desert Storm was an exercise called DEFORGER (Departure of Forces from Germany), a play on the older term REFORGER. In our case, we were loading out vehicles from US units in Germany headed for Desert Storm. My job was guarding this load-out from Rotterdam, Netherlands. I was on the deck of the Saudi Makkah in front of the ship’s bridge viewing the vehicles loaded on the Weather Deck. We were told a few weeks later that a bunch of this stuff got washed overboard during a severe storm in the Atlantic.
This was one of the more unique shrines, a grotto built entirely from tree roots and trunks. It stood in Wallerode, Belgium, a small village near St. Vith.
During the four years or so I lived in the village of Oirsbeek, Netherlands, I passed this old farmhouse at least twice each week. It’s on a street named Wolfhagen, and the arch and the room above it was under restoration during those years. It was old enough to garner government funding. As we were preparing to leave the country, I ran around taking lots of pictures of stuff like this. Here the restoration was nearly finished.
This is the old Ford pickup I drove from Oklahoma to Oregon. I took this picture in 1978 right after I bought the thing for $150. Turned out it required a rebuilt engine for about $200. Over the next few months, I added a rear bumper, rebuilt the front suspension and did a lot of other work on it before our big trip.
If you stood in the market square of our village, this is what you would see. That’s the Saint Lambertus Church in the background. Behind me were a couple of vendor trucks hawking fresh fish and some vegetables. I was the only one in the family who liked the local fish, so I would come down and buy a breaded fried herring steak now and then.
St Vith. Battle of the Bulge country.
The club that organized the march around St. Vith has the patch for 101st Airborne as their logo. All the volksmarches in that area take you past battle memorials and so forth.
Local fish? I would be all over that. 🙂
Wherever I went volksmarching, that was always one of the things I kept an eye out for. I once got some excellent grilled fish fillets on the coast of Belgium in a village called Blankenberge.
I feel like there’s not a lot of love for foreign fish dishes in America other than the Italian/Spanish/Mediterranean kind. I’m sure there’s some great recipes common to the northern Euro states that don’t get a lot of play in foreign lands (America).