"Herr Reichsmarschall," I called each one of the German privates as a standing joke whenever I had to speak to them to translate or ask for something. "Fucking Fritz" was what I called each one of them to myself, without joking. Or "Nazi kraut bastard."

"Herr Rabinowitz," they answered with mock respect.

"Mein Name ist Lew," I always kidded back with them heartily. "Please call me that."

"Rabinowitz, you're crazy," said my assistant Vonnegut, from Indiana. "You're going to get yourself killed."

"Don't you want to have fun?" I kept trying to cheer us all up. "How can you stand all this boredom? I bet I can get a dance going here if we can talk them into some music."

"Not me," said the old guy named Schweik. "I'm a good soldier."

Both these guys knew more German than I did, but Vonnegut was modest and shy, and Schweik, who kept complaining he had piles and aching feet, never wanted to get involved.

Then one week we saw the circus was coming to town. We had seen the posters on our march to the food factory from our billets in the reinforced basement that had been the underground room of the slaughterhouse when they still had animals to slaughter. By then the guards were more afraid than we were. At night we could hear the planes from England pass overhead on their way to military targets in the region. And we would sometimes hear with pleasure the bombs exploding in the hundreds not far away. From the east we knew the Russians were coming.

I had a big idea when I saw those carnival posters. "Let's talk to the headman and see if we can't get to go. The women too. We need a break. I'll do the talking." The chance excited me. "Let's go have a try."

"Not me," said that good soldier Schweik. "I can get myself in enough trouble just doing what I'm told."

The women working with us were wan and bedraggled and as dirty as we were, and I don't think there was a sex gland alive in any of us. And I was underweight and had diarrhea most of the time too, but that would have been one screw to tease Claire about later and to boast about now. I could have lied, but I don't like to lie.

Claire and I got married even before I was out of the army, just after my double hernia operation at Fort Dix when I got back from Europe and the prisons in Germany, and I almost went wild with a pair of German POWs there in New Jersey for leering and saying something in German when they saw her waiting for me while we were still engaged.

I saw them first in Oklahoma, those German prisoners of war over here, and I couldn't believe what I was looking at. They were outdoors with shovels and looked better than we did, and happier too on that big army base. This was war? Not in my book. I thought prisoners of war were supposed to be in prison and not outdoors having a good time with each other and making jokes about us. I got angry looking at them. They were guarded by a couple of slouching GIs who looked bored and lazy and carried rifles that looked too heavy. The krauts were supposed to be working at something, but they weren't working hard. There were American stockade prisoners all around who'd gone AWOL and been put to work digging holes in the ground just for punishment and then filling them up, and they were always working harder than any of these. I got even angrier just watching them, and one day, without even knowing what I was doing, I decided to practice my German on them and just walked right up.

"Hey, you're not allowed to do that, soldier," said the guard nearest the two I went to, jumping toward me nervously and speaking in one of those foreign southern accents I was just beginning to get used to. He even started to level his rifle.

"Pal, I've got family in Europe," I told him, "and it's perfectly all right. Just listen, you'll hear." And before he could answer me I began right in with my German, trying it out, but he didn't know that. "Bitte. Wie ist Ihr Name? Danke schön. Wie alt sind Sie? I Danke vielmals. Wo Du kommst hier? Danke." By now a few of the others had drawn close, and even a couple of the other guards had come up to listen and were smiling too, like having a good time at one of our USO shows. I didn't like that either. What the hell, I thought, was this war or peace? I kept right on talking. When they couldn't understand me, I kept changing the way I said something until they did, and then there were nods and laughs from all of them, and I made believe I was grinning with happiness when I saw they were giving me good marks. "Bitte schön, bitte schön," they told me when I said "Danke, danke" to them in a gush for telling me I was "Gut, gut." But before it was over, I made sure I let them know there was one person there who wasn't having such a good time, and that person was me. "So, wie geht jetzt?" asked them, and pointed my arm around the base. "Du, gefallt es hier? Schön, ja?" When they said they did like it there, like we were all practicing our German, I put this question to them. "Gefallt hier besser wie zuhause mit Krieg? Ja?" I would have bet they did like it there better than they would have liked being back in Germany at war. "Sure," I said to them in English, and by then they'd stopped smiling and were looking confused. I stared hard into the face of the one I had spoken to first. "Sprechen Du!" I drilled my eyes into his until he began to nod weakly, answering. When I saw him fold I wanted to laugh out loud, although I didn't find it funny. "Dein Name ist Fritz? Dein Name ist Hans? Du bist Heinrich?" And then I told them about me. "Und mein Name ist Rabinowitz." I said it again as a German might. "Rabinovitz. Ich bin Lew Rabinowitz, LR, von Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York. Du kennst?" And then I spoke Yiddish. "Und ich bin ein Yid. Farshstest?" And then in English. "I am a Jew. Understand?" And then in my fractured German. "Ich bin Jude. Verstehst?" Now they didn't know where to look, but they did not want to look at me. I've got blue eyes that can turn into slits of ice, Claire still tells me, and a pale, European skin that can turn red fast when I laugh hard or get mad, and I wasn't sure they believed me. So I opened my fatigues one button more and pulled out my dog tags to show them the letter J stamped there on the bottom with my blood type. "Sehen Du? Ich bin Rabinowitz, Lew Rabinowitz, und ich bin Jude. Understand? Good. Danke," I said sarcastically, glaring coldly at each of them until I saw the eyes drop. "Danke schön, danke vielmals, für alles, and a bitte and bitte schön too. And on the life of my mother, I swear I will pay you all back. Thanks, buddy boy," I said to the corporal, as I turned to go. "I'm glad you had a good time too."

"What was it all about?"

"Just practicing my German."

In Fort Dix with Claire, I wasn't practicing. I was mad in a second when I saw them snicker and say something about her, and I was ready to wade right in, madder than I'd ever been in combat, as I moved straight toward them. My voice was low and very calm, and that vein in my neck and jaw was already ticking, like the clock of a time bomb just dying to explode.

"Achtung," I said in a soft and slow voice, drawing the word out to make it last as long as I could, until I came to a stop where they were standing on the grass with their shovels near a dirt walkway they were making.

The two of them looked at each other with a hardly hidden smile they must have thought I wouldn't mind.

"Achtung," I said again, with a little more bite on the second part, as though carrying on a polite conversation with someone hard of hearing in the parlor of Claire's mother in her upstate home in New York. I put my face right into theirs, only inches away. My lips were drawn wide, as they would be if I was going to laugh, but I wasn't even smiling, and I don't think they got that yet. "Achtung, aufpassen," I said for emphasis.

They turned sober when I didn't shout it. They began to see I wasn't kidding. And then they straightened up from their comfortable slouching and began to look a little bit lost, like they couldn't make me out. I didn't know till later that I was clenching my fists, didn't know until I saw blood on my hands from where my nails were digging in.