Chance Meeting

While stationed at Wiley barracks in Neu Ulm, Germany, in the US Army, in 1975, I and some friends were walking back late at night to the base. We were returning from a Beerfest celebration in town. We were quite inebriated. Other soldiers were also walking home. A fight ensued over some supposed indiscretion between we friends and some other soldiers. I tried to end the fight by threatening the other soldiers with a broken glass beer mug. End the fight it did, when one of those soldiers tried to disarm me from the menacing object. As the soldier nearly bled to death from ill-advised maneuver, I accordingly was arrested and charged with aggravated assault. Due process resulted in an acquittal of the charges by virtue of self-defense on my part. Further details would flesh out other coincidences involved in this story, but I will hold to the main thrust. The man that I cut was immediately released from the Army with a 70% disability. I had heard through the grapevine that he wanted to sue me in civilian court when I got out of the service. I had heard that the man was from the midwest United States, somewhere. I finished my tour of duty of 7.5 more months. Then I returned to my home in Whittier, California. In April of 1979 I moved north to Moses Lake, Washington. About the end of 1979, I was sitting in a bar drinking with a man I had met there in Moses Lake. I was telling him the story of the plight of my court marshall while in the army in Germany, 4 years prior. He said he had a friend that had a similar story as to what I was relating to him. He asked me the name of the man I nearly killed. I told him the name and with shock he told me I must be kidding. I assured him I was not. He then told me that he had taken me to his friend's house in Moses Lake some days earlier. He had left me at the friends house for a little while and his friend and I were drinking and having a great time together. Then he said, my friend is the man you nearly killed in Germany. Some four years after and nearly 8,000 miles away, me and the man that started the fight were brought together by fate. We didn't even realize who each other was.