An American in Germany.(Kaiserslautern, Germany and American war preparations)

The K in K-Town stands for Kaiserslautern. Though it lies in the heart of pacifist Germany, this town (surrounded by 7,000 acres of U.S. military bases) is an anthill of tense activity, with tens of thousands of American soldiers preparing for war.

I saw it in their faces the other day, listening to a senior officer briefing several hundred frowning men and women in camouflage. The screen behind him showed the face of a child, covered with smallpox pustules. "I got exactly the same shot you're about to get," he told them. "Was I scared I'd infect my wife? Yes. Was I worried about side effects? Yes. Did anything bad happen? No." Listen, he continued. "We don't know what that madman has. This is just the right thing to do." Visiting the chief mortuary-affairs NCO last week, I sat as he told me about the 6,000 coffin tags he purchased the other day. However many bodies arrive from the gulf, he was ready to hold a "fallen soldier" ceremony for each. At this, he took off his glasses and quietly wept.

At the headquarters of the 21st Theater Support Command, a logistics unit where I have spent much of my time waiting to ship out with American forces, hundreds of soldiers know they could at any moment be ordered to board a plane for some undisclosed location on the northern Iraqi border. All are clearly scared, as they pass the hours doing things like standing in line for chem-bio gear.

So it stopped me in my tracks the other day when I glanced upward, just outside 21st TSC headquarters, and noticed the chiseled stone head of a Nazi soldier just below the roofline. There was also the name Panzer Kaserne, or Tank Compound, in German, printed on signs throughout the base. Until then, I'd taken this slice of Americana for granted. I ate at the Burger King, watched American TV shows like "Friends" on Armed Forces Network, shared lasagna with Theresa from Arkansas and Brenda from Boston. The antiwar condemnations of German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder and French President Jacques Chirac scarcely registered.

Soon I began to notice other details of K-Town's forgotten past: carved stone faces of German soldiers in World War I uniforms, stern-faced Prussians in spiked helmets, even one of those Nazi eagles, wings spread wide, above an empty circle. (The swastika chiseled away?) Near the soccer field, a weather-beaten stone slab surrounded by iron crosses stands ...