“Aufmerksamkeit passagiere, Flug siebenundsiebzig ist zum verschalen bereit.” When I heard this foreign message I knew that I encountered a language and a culture I knew little about. When all of the German-speaking passengers stood up and started boarding the plane, I knew the familiarity of America would soon be experienced only in my memories. As I boarded my one-way flight from Dallas to Frankfurt, Germany, I sadly said goodbye to American soil for an unknown amount of time. Certainly the length of time will be measured in years, not days or even weeks. Stepping off of the 17-hour time warp in Frankfurt would bring many unknowns like the language and culture. There were also many questions: where I will live, when I will be picked up, and how will I locate the person picking me up since I don’t know what he looks like? I suddenly realized I was at a point in life that many people never encounter. When I arrived I had the name of the person the Army had sent to pick me up, but in an airport the size of Frankfurt, meeting a stranger can be a daunting task. Finally I found some other soldiers who were arriving in the country, and I went to a military checkpoint to register my arrival. After waiting for an hour, off in the distance I heard someone call my name. There is hardly a greater relief than to hear something as personal as your own name in such a distant place, even if it is spoken by a stranger. A fellow resident dentist in my advanced general dentistry program welcomed me at the airport with enthusiasm that took away the anxiety of all of the unknowns that were racing through my mind. The drive from the Frankfurt airport to the Kaiserslautern area where I would call home for the next couple of years sped by when my colleague and I chatted as if we were old friends. The trip to Kaiserslautern from the Frankfurt airport may also have seemed fast because we were traveling on the Autobahn. The Autobahn is comparable to the freeway system in America. The major difference is that in most places on the Autobahn there is no speed limit; however, there is a recommended speed of 130 kilometers per hour, which is equivalent to about 80 mph. If you travel faster than the “recommended speed” you would not get a speeding ticket, but if you get into an accident your insurance company is not required to pay for the damages. A little background on how I found myself in this situation. I graduated from Kimball Area High School (KAHS) in 1995, St. John’s University in 1999, and the University of Minnesota School of Dentistry in 2003. While I was at St. John’s University, the Army paid for a significant amount of my tuition through a program called the Reserve Officers’ Training Program. Because they paid for school, I agreed to pay them back by serving on active duty as an officer in the Army for at least four years. Each of the schools prepared me well for my dentistry endeavors. However, the 21 semesters of school after KAHS did not fulfill my thirst to learn, so I signed up for two more semesters of school in Germany. For the next year, I will be a resident dentist in the Army’s advanced general dentistry program at Pulaski Barracks, Germany. This small military installation is about 90 miles southwest of Frankfurt. At the conclusion of the one-year program in October 2004, I will most likely be deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq. Cpt. Kersten plans to write about his service once a month.
