Thing you did as a kid that got you in the most trouble

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

21. When I was about 6 years old in about 1956

we were living on the giant U.S. Air Force Base at Bitburg, Germany. It was like a town in itself, with row after row of four story apartment buildings for the families of soldiers stationed there. Our section of buildings was right at the edge of the complex, with the cemetery where SS Nazi officers were buried (the one that Ronald Reagan visited) at the far end and the French military Caserne after that and bordering vast fields cultivated by German farmers. I remember seeing French troops doing exercises in the uncultivated parts of those fields, getting ready to go to the bloody Algerian war. Also there were low bluffs covered by foliage in which you could find German army foxholes, with rusted helmets and old boots dating back to WWII and tunnels hacked out of the thick foliage going up the sides of the bluffs.

Some of us kids found two heavy duty German army machine guns, with tripods, wrapped in canvas and covered with grease in one of the tunnel complexes. Then we found boxes of machine gun bullet belts. The kids were always playing soldier games and we used the machine guns to play and tried to feed the ammo into them but didn't know how. One of the kids must have told our parents because I remember getting chewed out, especially when our parents saw how real the guns and ammo were. Back in those days, American families on the base were often being awakened at 3:00 in the morning by air raid sirens and told to go into the large building basement to practice for a possible Russian invasion. It was just a few years after the tensions of the Berlin airlift and we American kids wanted to be ready in case any Russians showed up. I know we were nuts.