Chapter 17: Fast Forward

The third volley of seven shots rounded out the 21-gun salute as Hamp was laid to rest with full military honors. I was nearly twelve when I stared at the scene on our bulky Zenith television; though it was a color set, it was so old and burned out that the images almost appeared black and white.

My father had traveled to the funeral in Colorado on his own; armed with the latest technological breakthrough – a massive, shoulder-mounted video camera and an accompanying backpack unit with a bulky video cassette recorder – he unashamedly maneuvered his way through the mourners to record the event for the rest of Hamp’s posterity who couldn’t attend.

As I watched the recorded event unfold on the television screen, I can’t say that it necessarily affected me all that deeply. Having spent much of my childhood overseas, I hadn’t really known Hamp well as my grandfather. For my otherwise pragmatic father, however, the unexpected loss really hit home. When the tape came to the closing hymn, he told me – while choking back the tears – that O My Father had been Grandpa’s favorite hymn and that it was specially selected for the occasion. I think watching the event on screen rather than running around as the cameraman finally gave him the chance to take it all in, and an overwhelming sense of responsibility descended on him. Though he was far older than Hamp had been on his own father’s death, I imagine the sensation that overcame him was the same.

As Hamp’s only son, my father had just become the patriarch of a family that had now entered a new generation; the mantle had passed, and not just my father, but the entire Colorado Springs Stake had lost its patriarch. Though it had been some time since he had given his last patriarchal blessing, Hamp had still been serving in that capacity when he passed away.

His hospitalizations had become more frequent since a cancer diagnosis and his first heart attack a few years before, but he had also continued to keep himself busy – almost to the point of obsession – with the ambitious task of compiling the history of the Colorado Springs Stake for publication; that task was now left to his coauthors to complete.

My father’s video ended with a shot of a bulletin board full of newspaper clippings and certificates that documented Hamp’s achievements. In most of the photographs, he appeared in his full military regalia, and I wondered whether I ought to follow his footsteps into a military career myself. I sure wanted to fly, but given the early eighties political scene, at the end of that path I could only picture Slim Pickens riding a nuke to a mushroom-cloud oblivion.

I don’t know that Hamp ever saw any real political fruits of his labors with the U.S. Air Force in Germany, but I do have to commend his peace-making efforts. Throughout the history of warfare, one seldom finds an occupying force that rebuilds a country and then gives it back to its people. The Allied forces could have enslaved the Germans, walled them in as the Soviets did, or done much worse to them out of revenge; the surrender was, after all, unconditional. While there were, of course, ulterior motives for a U.S. presence in the grander scheme of things, one can’t detract from the efforts of those idealists who truly felt that the best approach after all of the violence was kindness, forgiveness, and brotherly love. In Hamp’s case, no doubt this attitude was aided by his missionary experience.

The emergence of glasnost and perestroika was still years away, but Hamp’s prayers were just beginning to be answered behind the scenes when he was felled by a heart attack in 1982. Ever since Thomas S. Monson had stood on the hills of Radebeul just a few years earlier, echoing Orson Hyde, John Taylor, and Karl Maeser in rededicating Hamp’s former mission field for the preaching of the gospel, the Church News had been filled with astonishing reports. The very last newspaper clipping Hamp added to his extensive collection, in fact, announced the creation of the first LDS Stake in East Germany – based in the historical Ore Mountains mining town of Freiberg.

Just a month before his death, Hamp had tuned in to hear his old friend Gordon speak in General Conference; interspersed among the news of President Reagan’s visit to Welfare Square, how to use the new edition of the scriptures, and special arrangements of O My Father and other songs by Crawford Gates, President Gordon B. Hinckley stood at that famous pulpit and made an announcement that would drive a chisel straight through the Berlin Wall: Negotiations with the East German government had begun; the German Democratic Republic would have a temple. It would be the first, and – though few would have predicted it at the time – the last temple to be built behind the Iron Curtain. It had seemed impossible for so many years, but sure enough, just a few short years after having dedicated the land for the preaching of the gospel, Thomas S. Monson once again made his way across the border and broke ground for the Freiberg Germany Temple the next year.

In his role as the Church Historian, Homer Durham frantically collected and recorded each piece of news emanating from the East Bloc into the official Church archives. He felt honored to witness prophecies being fulfilled first-hand as the temple walls rose. When his best friend Gordon prepared to travel to East Germany to dedicate the newly completed temple in 1985, he had hoped to come along and witness the historic event for himself. But Homer’s health, unfortunately, was failing, and a trip became out of the question. Just before midnight on a cold, winter night in Salt Lake, while the scene continued to unfold in Eastern Europe, a heart attack took the life of the renowned educator, author, and historian.

Gordon felt the loss particularly hard as he spoke at the funeral. He had to smile, though, as he touched the casket one last time before it was wheeled out of the funeral home. Just the week before, Gordon had visited Homer in the hospital. Knowing that due to his position, he would have a Church-sponsored funeral, Homer appealed to Gordon’s well-known frugality by joking that the Church could save a few dollars of material costs by ordering the shortest casket available.

Of the foursome, the tallest and shortest had now passed away; only the two prophets remained to witness the miraculous global events that were ensuing. Rulon preached of the end of the world and used the signs of the time as justification to further isolate his constituents in preparation for Christ’s imminent reappearance; Gordon preached about the opening of doors and used the same signs of the time to step up the work, travel abroad, and bring Mormonism to an ever-expanding audience.

When Gordon traveled to East Germany just a few months after Homer’s funeral, he passed through the same areas that he and Homer had visited exactly half a century before. He was amazed at the change: time had not progressed nor even stood still in these areas – it seemed to have actually reversed course. Fifty years before, the streets had been sparkling clean, with a backdrop of whitewashed buildings accentuating the bright red Nazi flags hung in preparation for political rallies. Now, fifty years later, the dismal scene reflected the horrific events that had transpired in the meantime.

While much of the western world had modernized and prospered, living conditions in East Germany had actually worsened. Everything was drab and gray, and Gordon could sense a mood of despair. He passed churches that had deliberately been left in ruins as a purported reminder of the fruits of fascism; he knew full well that this intent doubled as a smokescreen for the perpetual lack of reconstruction funds available to the pervasive government.

As his entourage pulled into Freiberg, though, Gordon’s hopes rose once again. There on the hill, the temple stood in stark, contrasting white. A crowd of thousands had gathered for the occasion. As he shook hands and greeted the local leadership, he almost mistook a short, elderly gentleman for Homer. He missed his best friend dearly and had to force himself back to the present to acknowledge the stranger.

“Nice to have finally meet you,” Herbie said in a broken English phrase he had memorized just for the occasion.

Gordon smiled and gave him a warm hug. “I’ve heard so much about you, dear Brother Schreiter,” he said, “I’m very much looking forward to our meeting.”

Following the temple dedication – within the walls of the miraculous edifice and with the aid of a translator – Gordon held a lengthy interview with Herbie and set him apart as a temple worker.

~~~~~~~~

Half a world removed from this sensational setting, a scrawny kid with a Midwest mullet sat in his bedroom, spinning a globe around and stopping it with his finger to see where it might take him. I was a newly declared teenager at the time, but being the only kid in my school deprived of cable, I had just four channels to choose from; the brand new phenomenon called MTV was not among them, and the injustice of it all was echoed by the rock anthems that blared from my cheesy alarm clock radio: We’re not gonna take it…You gotta fight for your right...

My Legos and other toys suddenly seemed juvenile, and Saturday morning cartoons had somehow become uncool in my newly self-conscious mind; unfortunately, though, my only alternatives on our old Zenith TV were golf, bowling, and a PBS telethon. With nothing of interest on TV and no way to escape the rural outskirts of Blandville, Michigan, I just sat there simmering while my head banged to the beat of the music. “What do you wanna do with your life?” Dee Snider was asked over the airwaves. While his answer, “I wanna rock,” echoed over and over again in the background, I started penciling my own list of things to do before I die.

I had grown up in the Bavarian Alps, where my father – wanting to top his gig as a military brat – had taken a temporary work assignment making airplane gadgets in a small factory. Trying to make the most of our time on this Sound of Music set, my parents had decided to rent a vacation apartment on a picturesque dairy farm rather than cramming us into a townhouse in the city. The Bichlhof, or Hilltop Farm, as it was fittingly called on the maps, became my childhood home, but I had grown up in this idyllic setting without much appreciation for it at the time. As a further unappreciated bonus, every time a business trip came up for my father, we’d pack up our VW camper van and tag along; in that manner I had seen every corner of Europe by the time I turned twelve.

Now, freshly returned from a place where the third, vertical dimension was an inherent part of life, I found myself trapped in the two-dimensional flatlands of the industrial American Midwest, spinning circles in Governor Romney’s political playground. Hoping I might at least be able to see over to the next town, right after we moved into our new home I had found the tallest tree around and climbed to the very top – where I had hammered in some planks and started constructing a precarious perch. As it turned out, though, I couldn’t see the next house or anything else beyond even the next tree.

It would take more than a tree house to get me off the ground; I turned back to the globe and spun it around again, wishing I could fly somewhere else. I grabbed some string and decided to tape it down anywhere my finger landed. With hair-metal glam-rockers crackling through my radio, I began to fine-tune my ‘round the world trip by moving the string to different destinations.

Having already been all over Europe, I skipped that part completely and instead hit some of the amazing places I had only read about. I knew that the coolest bands and movies came from Australia, for example, so I’d have to start in Sydney. From there my string went to Bangkok, Bombay, Cairo, Johannesburg, Rio, and every destination I could squeeze in between. It was just a string for the time being, so why not hit Patagonia, pull it over Antarctica, and go heli-skiing in New Zealand on the way back?

With my orbit complete, I transcribed the itinerary onto my new bucket list, added a nuclear clause, and vowed to visit each stop. The nuclear clause, of course, exempted me from completing my trip if Reagan and Gorbachev couldn’t work out their differences and I ended up with radiation poisoning. Barring that, however, I fully intended to circle the world before leaving it behind.

I blew a whole weekend with these dreams and went back to my humdrum school the next Monday morning. These were the days when break-dancers in parachute pants – carrying oversized ghetto blasters up on one shoulder and huge pieces of cardboard under the other arm – roamed my junior high’s hallways. At lunchtime, we would all stand around and watch while the b-boys laid out the cardboard and practiced moves designed to attract the largest crowd: backspins, butt-spins, and plenty of failed attempts at head spins. I stood there watching as well, but my own head was still spinning with my globe back home.

Before I knew it, someone threw me a wave. Back in the day, you couldn’t turn down a wave thrown in your direction; you caught it, busted some moves, and threw it back to the sender once you had put him to shame. That was the game. But a dancer I most definitely was not; the wave flopped and sputtered out.

“That’s it?” the b-boy said.

I shrugged my shoulders.

“Come on!” he taunted.

I just stared across the lunch room. Some of the girls snickered, but the lunch tables gave me an idea. Though I couldn’t break dance, my mother – who had been a diving champion during her own glory days – had taught me how to do a back flip off a diving board over the summer. The lunch table was about the same height as a one-meter diving board…

By the time I got up the courage to try my potentially humiliating and permanently debilitating move, the circle had closed back around the cardboard dance floor; I had lost my shot in the meantime. Next time, I told myself, I’d catch that wave and rather than laughing, everyone would gasp at the feat while I launched myself off the table and completed my back flip.

Perhaps a little practice wouldn’t hurt first, I figured; so when I got home, I set my sister’s gymnastics mat against the wall and backed away. I took a deep breath, ran toward the wall, and tried to kick off. Unfortunately the style of the day dictated that high-tops remain untied. Needless to say, my foot slipped out of my shoe, and I landed straight on my head.

Too dazed to try it again, I went back to my room and lay on the bed, wanting to escape the pull of gravity. I pulled out my bucket list and somewhere in between the Ironman in Hawaii and BASE jumping off the Sydney Harbour Bridge, I scribbled in Do a standing back flip. I stared at the globe again and spun it around a few more times. I just wanted to fly away somewhere; it didn’t really matter where.

A slow set of knocks on my bedroom door interrupted my thoughts; I had no idea that my wish was about to be granted – albeit in a way I hadn’t imagined.

“Bad news,” my father told me, having just hung up the phone after a lengthy, long-distance call, “Herr Geissinger died yesterday.”

My adopted grandfather – the old farmer who had served as a surrogate for my own grandfather during our stay in Germany – had suffered a fatal mishap. Memories rushed through my mind. I couldn’t believe he was gone; he seemed as fit as men half his age and had, in fact, still been working the farm in his old age. I thought of his family and realized that on top of the emotional loss, his wife would now be left shorthanded for the upcoming harvest season.

“They could use some help,” my father said with a discernible hint in his voice.

I could see where this was going; he had already volunteered my free labor and was just letting me know why. I looked over at my globe; Germany was already checked off, and with so many other destinations awaiting my arrival, I wasn’t necessarily crazy about the idea of going back there until I had knocked off the rest of my list first. I sighed and nodded. Though I wouldn’t be following my string to Australia, I resolved that this summer stint would at least get me away for a while.

My sister and I promptly shipped off to Germany, where I shed my Nikes for rubber farm boots. As kids, we had taken in all the benefits of farm life with none of the accompanying work; now it was time for that debt to come around full circle. After a few early mornings of Stallarbeit – which among other tasks included moving a whole lot of manure in all its forms – I was quickly tiring of the work. When the sun came up, we’d move from the stalls out to the fields, where some of the neighbors and relatives from around the area joined in the effort. I complained about my blisters, and the other farmhands just laughed when they looked at my smooth hands.

“Like a baby’s butt!” one of them said, and they all had a good laugh at my expense. Getting a spoiled American teenager to do a full day’s worth of farm work certainly was a challenge; they felt that I needed some more words of encouragement.

“Like our fellow Alpenjodler Arnold says, ‘What doesn’t kill you…’”

“I know, I know,” I mumbled, having heard the quote one too many times, “…makes you stronger.”

“You realize this is a picnic, don’t you?” one of the older fellows asked me as we sat down to Brotzeit – a morning break for a snack. He then proceeded to rattle off a set of war stories that, indeed, made shoveling manure feel like the most scrumptious picnic imaginable.

The tough-as-leather farmhand told me that he still had sobbing nightmares about the bombs that fell all around him during his middle school years in Munich. He could whistle quite loudly – having perfected the art to corral his cattle – and he proceeded to imitate the sound of falling bombs, starting with a high-pitched whine that got lower and louder until he made the sound of an explosion. He told of the shrill air raid sirens, the panicked race into a possible tomb, the excruciatingly claustrophobic wait for the drone of the bombers, and the asphyxiating sense of doom as the whistling bombs got ever louder. The piercing sound of each approaching bomb was like hearing the painfully slow click of a trigger in a game of Russian roulette. Night after night he sat huddled against a concrete wall, knowing that any one of the thousands of whistles might end not just with the sound of an explosion, but by blowing him to pieces, burning or burying him alive.

I could draw absolutely no comparisons to my own cushy existence. I wanted my MTV, my break-dancing stank, and my tree house was inadequately low; that was the extent of my junior high trauma. With nothing of substance to complain about, I kept my mouth shut, and the days began to pass a bit less painfully.

Periodic respites came from the frequent Catholic holidays that break up a Bavarian summer with their ornamental richness. As we waited and watched the various processions wind their way through town, I began to ask more questions and found that each of the farming families in the area had faced their own tragic wartime losses. Among these I discovered that Herr Geissinger’s cousin from a neighboring farm, who had incidentally served alongside Hitler as a courier during the First World War, had been one of the many local fatalities. In the cemeteries of the sparse mountain villages that dotted the horizon, hundreds of enduring grave markers attested to further losses. The serene church bells and cow bells set a constrasting tone to the former violence, but the reminders of the war’s outcome became all too clear each time a U.S. Air Force fighter jet on a training run trumped the peaceful ringing with a sonic boom.

In the evenings, Frau Geissinger would play her accordion in the Stube and relate stories about pre-war life in mystical Silesia. She told us of her subsequent flight as a refugee, including her feat of riding a bike all the way across Czechoslovakia. I didn’t necessarily grasp the magnitude of the difficulties she and others like her had faced, but the imagined injustice in my own life certainly seemed embarrassingly trivial in comparison. I still missed the morning call for Stallarbeit more than once, but armed with these tales, I didn’t feel quite so sorry for myself anymore while I sloshed around in the manure pile.

When my parents came for a mid-summer visit, they offered a welcome hiatus, and we all took a trip to East Germany to see some family friends. After crossing the heavily armed border, we made our way to Freiberg, where enthusiastic crowds were gathered around the new temple. There were only a few thousand East German Latter-day Saints; yet we were told that over 100,000 visitors – virtually all of them non-Mormons – had attended the temple open house.

Interspersed with the crowd, twenty full-time Stasi agents also reportedly stood guard, sparking fears among the believers that the East German secret police had bugged the temple. Having tapped into the nearby Trans-Siberian pipeline – strongly opposed by Reagan and even sabotaged by the CIA – to draw fuel for the temple complex, the Church had drawn fire from critics on both sides of the Iron Curtain for negotiating with the East German government in the first place. Rumors that the Church had paid off the regime for the construction permits were being circulated among dissenters, a few of whom had gathered outside the gates.

Despite all the controversies, however, President Hinckley, President Monson, and the others involved in the negotiations had somehow managed to walk a fine line; there – miraculously – stood the almost unbelievable result: a temple in the communist bloc.

Swarms of cars – each with a rattling lawnmower engine and wide-eyed passengers glued to the windows – arrived from every direction. Some of the passengers were looking at the temple, but as we approached the grounds, I noticed others pointing at us. Our family certainly made for a conspicuous bunch, arriving in our Wessie car and matching apparel. I knew that anyone from the west was assumed to have deep pockets, so I wondered whether they just wanted some of our D-Marks – the coveted hard western currency.

A group of teenagers surrounded me near the entrance gate, and one of them tapped me on the shoulder.

“100 marks!” he said.

I didn’t have 100 marks on me. I shook my head and pulled out a 10-mark bill; it was all I had. He laughed.

“For your jacket,” he explained, tugging my collar between his fingers. I had completely misunderstood; he actually wanted to pay me for my Levi’s jacket! 100 marks amounted to more than triple what I had paid for it myself. I nervously straightened my collar. Paranoid that the border guards might lock me up for having traded on the black market, I shook my head and politely declined.

Besides, we had a government mandate to spend money, not earn money. As prescribed in the conditions of our entry visa, after registering with the police in every city we entered, we had to squander a set amount of D-Marks – converted to East German marks at an exchange rate five times less than we would have netted on the black market. As an amusing twist, there didn’t seem to be anything worth buying, not even in the Intershops that the government had set up especially for tourists. The items we did end up buying were then confiscated by the border guards with their snarling guard dogs when we crossed back into West Germany; they were running quite a racket!

It certainly was an intriguing time in all respects. After we left Freiberg, we stayed with family friends in nearby Dresden; jealous that we could leave while they were trapped, some had spoken of escaping; in weighing out the risks, though, they wondered whether the Wall might collapse on its own in the near future. In any case, they had to speak softly; their neighbors – suspicious of their motives in entertaining westerners – spied on them and recorded every creak of the stairs, flush of the toilet, and other mundane facets of life for the Stasi in endless notebooks. This widespread surveillance system, while low-tech, was enormous and thus quite effective in promoting paranoia among the populace.

Armed with our foreign passports, we were able to cross no-man’s-land out of East Germany – passing with relative ease through a wall that most of its own native citizens couldn’t penetrate. There was, however, a noticeable difference at the border this time around. When we had crossed the same border in the late 1970’s – while the Strelzyk and Wetzel families were frantically sewing quilts into a hot air balloon for their life-threatening Night Crossing over the border – very few vehicles approached the tight border. By this time in 1985, though, a steady stream of both East and West German cars were lined up on both sides of the border, armed with visas granted by a regime that was steadily relaxing restrictions and loosening the grip on its people.

We finished our labors on the West German farm and at the end of the summer crossed back over the Atlantic to resume our lives in America’s heartland. The next year, strong winds blew Chernobyl’s fallout right over the Bichlhof’s crops. As the hay and fodder went to waste, the Bavarian farmers joined the activists who recognized that the price of competing in the Cold War’s contest had left an unsustainable regime poised for collapse. With this added momentum, a revolutionary movement began to approach critical mass.

An irreversible path had been laid, and within a few short years – in contrast to so many previous revolutions – a spark was ignited not with Molotov cocktails but in candlelit processions; the emerging flames were then quickly fanned by the winds of change sweeping over Europe. Undeterred by news of the violent retribution of Tianaman Square – that could very well have served as an alternate ending to the European saga – the people of Eastern Europe took to the streets. Unopposed, the peaceful processions ultimately led to the famous freedom trains and then, finally, Mr. Gorbachev tore down that wall. Though Reagan had issued the challenge, even Einstein himself had predicted that the world’s next conflict would mark the end of civilization, leaving people to fight future battles with sticks and stones. Little did anyone imagine that the Cold War would be frozen into the past rather than having erupted into a nuclear holocaust; it was nothing short of miraculous.

On November 9, 1989 Berlin hosted the world’s biggest party – held atop a teetering wall by triumphant, ad-hoc crowds; fortunately for humanity, the only shots fired were celebratory. The Day After never came; fallout shelters, nuclear drills, and ICBMs began to sink into the past as relics of a bygone era. A heavy load that had been accumulating for forty years, weighing down the shoulders of society, suddenly lightened and ultimately fell to the ground; the contagious euphoria ushered out the end of the eighties.

~~~~~~~~

“Please make your way to the break room for a special celebration,” crackled the announcement. The production lines halted before the sound had even finished echoing around the huge warehouse.

“Not another birthday,” I thought – though they had never actually halted production for the mundane cake-and-song routines that seemed to be turning into a lunch room staple of late. The recess was welcome, though, and I’d surely forfeit my piece of cake if I reacted slowly. I had just picked a heavy box off the line, so I quickly placed it onto the palette and followed the crowd into the break room.

“Must be the CEO’s birthday,” I joked to a coworker as we waited to squeeze our way through the break room door.

“Retirement’s more like it,” he replied with a laugh.

I nodded in agreement. “Van Andel or DeVos?” I asked, “What’s your bet?” Amway’s chairman and president had each long since passed retirement age, but the geriatric billionaire cofounders were still holding the reigns of the company.

“My bet’s on a two-for-one,” he answered. The seats at the tables were long gone by the time we entered the room, so we resigned to standing in the back.

After having pulled double shifts for a few days straight, I was feeling like a permanent fixture in the factory; but it was just a temporary job to earn some mission funds. I had been relieved to get a mission call to Germany, since I already spoke the language to some degree; and as an added benefit, the Dresden Mission was one of the cheaper missions in the Church – still less than $200 per month. With just a few more weeks on the line I’d be able to pay my whole way. The job hadn’t left much time for mission preparations, though, so I was beginning to feel a bit ill-prepared for my looming departure. I hoped to be able to quit in time to devote a whole week to full-time preparations – and to catching up on World Cup replays for all the soccer games I had missed while on the job.

Surrounded by line workers, the marketing director at the front of the room looked quite out of place in her designer office attire. We waited for the big news, whatever it might be. Frankly, I didn’t really care; my eyes were on the cake.

“As a company, we stand on the verge of reaching $2 billion in annual sales this year.” She cleared her throat, trying to get the crowd’s attention; but the numbers bore no meaning to me or to anyone else in the room. “We have now finalized the arrangements to implement a plan that is certain to push us over this milestone for the first time ever,” she continued. I looked around the room, trying to calculate whether there might be enough cake for everyone.

“As you know, the Berlin Wall’s collapse has changed the maps of Europe,” she said.

Suddenly she had my attention.

“We have been working hard to make the necessary logistical and legal arrangements to officially open this exciting new market for Amway.”

I listened intently.

“Just yesterday, we received the official government approval of our strategic plan; in keeping with this plan, we now intend to fill 5,000 distributor positions in East Germany. New distributors recruited from the local labor force will certainly need training, so we’ll be looking for volunteers to assist in these historic efforts. We expect many similar announcements to follow as other exciting, new markets open. With barriers falling around the world, Amway will lead the charge to bring our business to the people!”

Her announcement was met with subdued cheers, but I was too dumbfounded to even clap. 5,000 distributors? The number seemed staggeringly huge in comparison to the measly LDS missionary force. I knew that a handful of missionaries had been transferred to East Germany from surrounding missions over the previous months; others had had their mission calls changed in order to reroute them to Dresden. From what I had heard, though, my batch of six new missionaries – the first to be called straight to East Germany – represented one of the largest groups yet to be sent to Dresden. We would be followed by another group of eight a month later. But at a rate of less than ten bodies per month, how could our efforts even make the slightest impact when other forces were sending in 5,000 representatives at a time? Amway was about to show the East Germans what America was all about. I, for one, place about as little credence on pyramid marketing as I do on Soviet-style cooperatives, and I cringed at the thought.

Germany was in the news that night when I got home, not on account of Amway’s announcement but for topping Argentina in the World Cup finals. The announcer hinted at the political uncertainty and how the future might affect the soccer team – if Germany reunited under a new nation, for example, the reigning World Cup Champions would be from a country that didn’t exist anymore – an unprecedented prospect. And how might the East German team be absorbed into the mix?

The questions going through my mind that night raced from one track to another. Having been duped by Hitler and then Stalin, would the East Germans roll over for the new capitalists? How might we be received as missionaries and how might the other mobilizing forces affect our reception? Where would religion fit into the picture? With the celebratory break-room scene still fresh in my mind, it truly seemed that a starting gun had sounded. I wondered how many East Germans, blinded by euphoria, had even the slightest inclination at the time that intense races for their hearts, their minds, and their money were well underway.

A few weeks later, I entered the Provo Missionary Training Center with five other newcomers; each of us wore a conspicuous “dork dot” on our collar, marking our lot as greenies to the more seasoned MTC soldiers. Given the stories coming from the front lines, we longed to join the troops shipping out to the battlefront. Trapped in Basic Training, we felt we were missing out on the action. On the second day of October – midway through our curriculum – my companion and I lowered the East German flag at the MTC, just as we had done every other day. The hammer and compass in its center distinguished it from the West German flag. We dutifully folded it and returned it to the store room. But the following day – on October 3, 1990 – East Germany ceased to exist, Germany was reunified, and history was made; the East German flag was permanently packed away and never flew again.

Generally, Church members are pleased to see another flag raised at the MTC when the doors of a new country are opened for missionary work. This day, however, the number of nations in which the Church was operating decreased by one, and the news was met with delight. The German Democratic Republic retired completely out of existence, and it was missed by few.

I’d like to think that Hamp in some small way contributed toward opening these doors. The Freedom Bell that he had been given was neatly stowed away in a dark closet at Grandma’s house, but if he had lived to see a temple constructed under the communist regime – not to mention the 100,000 residents who toured the temple with full governmental endorsement – along with the creation of stakes, the opening of a mission, and the complete collapse of the wall that he hated, he probably would have rung it himself in commemoration. To me, the chain of events constituted a bona fide miracle.

Soon enough, we caught our plane bound for Dresden to join the infantry on the ground. On that same plane with us were salesmen, marketing representatives, and opportunists of every caliber. When we landed in Dresden, the plane’s doors opened like the hatch on a landing craft storming the beach; our battle was about to begin.