laststandonzombieisland

Some 60 years ago this week. A well-traveled paratrooper with good reason to wonder why.

Official caption: “14 August 1966. SP4 Ruediger Richter (Columbus, Georgia), 4th Bn., 503 Inf., 173 Abn Bde (Separate), lifts his battle-weary eyes to the heavens, as if to ask why? SGT. Daniel E. Spencer (Bend, Oregon) stares down at their fallen comrade. The day’s battle ended, they silently await the helicopter which will evacuate their comrade from the jungle-covered hills in Long Khanh Province.”

Richter, 25 years old at the time, had a long and winding history before the above image was captured. One that had included surviving Allied bombers in WWII as a youth, running away to the sea at age 14, then accepting a “join or go to prison” stint in the French Foreign Legion under a new name, before heading to America.

From a 2014 article, by which time he was a 73-year-old grandpa in Georgia, finally in a quiet time.

Born in Berlin in February 1941, when Hitler’s Nazi troops already had been marauding across Europe for years, Richter’s earliest memories are of bodies outside bombed-out bunkers and bright flares dropped by Allied bombers.

“We called them Christmas trees. They were beautiful,” he said. “You could hear the sirens going off all over Berlin.”

Richter said when the war ended in 1945 and the Allies sliced the city into sectors, he was fortunate enough to live in the American district, where GIs were a soft touch for a young German boy begging for food. With few options in Berlin, Richter said, he joined the German merchant marine at age 14. That three-year stint ended when his ship docked in Calais, France, where he and other sailors were arrested after a bar fight.

“They put us in a dungeon with water dropping down, just like in a movie. There was just a little window with bars,” he said.

After three days in lockup, a judge gave the penniless Richter a choice: Stay in prison or join the French Foreign Legion, which was battling rebels in French-controlled North Africa. He was too young to join legally at age 17, Richter said, so he was given a new name — Horst Timm — and allowed to enlist.

Richter does not know how many men he killed with the Legion, or how many night-long marches he made through Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria. But after five years, he left the Legion and regained his true name. An aunt and uncle living in Columbus suggested he come to America to restart his life, so he did in 1964.

Richter grew bored with his job constructing helicopter landing pads, so he enlisted in the Army in 1965.