The Squad

Gustav - Call me Gus - Meister was born in Brooklyn N.Y. in 1910, to Bavarian parents who had left the “Old Country” after the Franco Prussian war. German was spoken in the home more often than English, and when Gus’ words are rushed, or when angered he will slip into a very Germanic Brooklyn accent. More than a few times Gus has had to repeat himself because of his combined accents.

A robust young man with a love of his parents food (Sausage, Sauerkraut, and Beer), Gus found work easy but schooling hard. He looks on ‘book smart’ people with an equal combination of reverence and disdain. The former is evidenced by his constant use of “Big” words that he hears, even if their meaning is lost to him; but if anyone better educated than Gus gets to ‘uppity’ that persons nickname will soon be “College Boy, Genius, or even Einstein.”

Gus discovered an aptitude for all things mechanical, and eventually found his way into a New York Transit authority office, where they put him to work driving buses. His fascination with these instruments of conveyance caused him to elbow the mechanics aside, “Yoo don’t know nutin’ about nutin’.” Gus can ‘figure’ out how the mechanics of how it works, and how it goes together, but why an engine runs has only one answer for Gus: “Because it jus does.”

On an April morning in 1942 while driving his regular bus route, Gus overheard several passengers talking about the war going on in Europe. The more complex issues behind all of this are irrelevant to Gus; to him its “da English, against da Nazi’s.” When the bus passengers implied in their conversations that all Germans were Nazi’s the offending passenger soon found himself hurled out of the bus onto the curb. The several bus passengers (who turned out to be Czech refugees) who came to the defense of the ejected passenger only overcame Gus and his anger about this subject through sheer weight of numbers.

Though Gus was angry about loosing his job, that was tempered by not ‘losing;’ the fight. Gus was surprised to find a letter from the U.S. Selective Service local board in his mail that afternoon. It was from “Da President”, ‘GREETING’ it said, you have now been selected for training and service in the ARMY.

Gus found new mechanical things to learn, and soon after being inducted at Camp Upton, it was off to Fort Dix for basic training. The mechanics of Automatic weapons are more fun than Gus could have imagined. His mechanical sense and size led his training officers to quickly conclude this guy was a Automatic Weapons specialist, the B.A.R. because Gus’ newest mechanical wonder, which again he quickly figured out how, but not why it works.

Even his years of bus driving helped, as his idea of “go where the traffic ain’t” became “go where the enemy ain’t” - that earned him Corporal’s stripes. Gus was heard to tell one Lt. as the Lt. explained how they were going to ‘frontally assault’ the enemy position, “Right behind you John Wayne.”