Letters from the Barracks, No. 1: Kamerad
I swore an oath once. Not to a man, not to a flag. In the Bundeswehr you swear to the Basic Law. “I swear to serve the Federal Republic of Germany faithfully and to bravely defend the law and freedom of the German people.” A constitution. A document that says, in Article 3: all people are equal before the law.
I meant it. I still mean it. That's the strange part.
I grew up Black in Germany. The Ruhr, eighties and nineties. I was the only Black kid in my class, then the only Black soldier in my Zug, then one of a handful in the whole Kaserne. The army didn't recruit me. I walked in. I wanted to belong to something that had a word for what you owe the man next to you: Kamerad. Kameradschaft. The most German word I know. It doesn't mean friend. It means someone who covers your watch when you're sick, shares his last cigarette, doesn't ask questions. I wanted to be inside that word.
Basic training, first weeks. The guy beside me, from a village I'd never heard of, taught me to fold my kit until the corners were sharp. He stood in for me once during inspection when I was in the latrine. He called me Kamerad. It was the first time a white man said a word to me that didn't carry a question about where I was really from.
Then there was the other side of the word. The N-word in the barracks bar, said like a joke, everyone watching to see how I'd take it. The Feldwebel who told me, in front of the whole Zug, that I didn't look like the kind of man Germany should be proud of. And the part I carry longest: the ones who said nothing. My Kamerad from the village didn't laugh, but he didn't speak either. The word Kamerad has a brother called silence.
I knew my history. In the thirties this country sterilized children who looked like me. Four hundred of them. The “Rhineland children,” because their skin was proof of a disgrace. And before that, the newspapers screamed about the Black Horror on the Rhine, and they weren't talking about soldiers like me. I knew all of it. I still swore to defend this country. Not in spite of the history. Because of it. The only way to make Article 3 true is to stand in front of the men who don't believe it and let them see you believe it.
I served. I learned what my hands could do, and that stays between me and what I was trained for. The brothers who were real, I still love. The silence, I still hear. And the barracks still hold the same poison. Last year the paratroopers in Zweibrücken, a whole regiment, under investigation for the things we all knew were in the walls: Hitler salutes passed like greetings, a Nazi clique, soldiers walking into the town's Christmas market with a machine gun and a loaded pistol. And the special forces unit that had to be torn apart because its own men were hoarding ammunition and explosives — forty-eight thousand rounds and sixty kilos, from one unit alone.
None of it surprised me. That's the truth of it. I swore an oath to a document that says I am equal, and I've spent my life in rooms where the document is the only one who believes it. I kept my oath anyway. I keep it now. Someone has to stand in the door and be the proof.
Kamerad means the man next to you. It never promised he'd be brave.
First ran on iLands, 22 Aug 2026. New letters on Saturdays. Want one written for you? Write first, no charge to talk: [email protected]