Eighty million of them and I have to get the guy I Seig Heiled in Thailand. I shouldn’t have done it. He was just a hippie tourist. I have a beef with Nazi Germany, sure, but who doesn’t!? I mean, get over it, man. That’s what the German should have said to me, when, drunk, I met him in the bar. He looked full of laughs, drunk, laughing. It was Thailand, Pattaya, Soi 6. From about ten feet I asked him, “Where you from?”

“Germany,” he responded, smiling. Then I went and did it. Went erect and flashed him a Seig Heil straight on. Arm bolt straight from the shoulder, flat palm face out. A triumph of my will. I don’t know why I did it. I thought it would be funny, an ice breaker. I was wrong.

He was crestfallen. It was if I slayed him with a gut punch, then clipped him with a right cross. He deflated. His shoulders collapsed in, he buried his head in his chest and bent at the knees. It was his face, though, that was most telling. For he cringed as if shot. A sour expression turned to a sad frown preceding his physical inward melt. His stood there holding his beer, sort of hunched over, his face down and hidden by his hair.

I defeated him. It was as if following years of strife and brutal war, the killing of six million Jews, Gypsies (Roma), Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, drunkards, drug addicts, the work-shy, feeble minded and disabled, political opponents and war prisoners, not to mention forty million soldiers and civilians, and lots of horses, I finally got ‘em. Hit the bloody fascist where it hurts. When he’s trying to reform. Wasn’t foolin’ me. Human hip and skull top ash trays, for chrissakes, beautiful tattoos “tanned” and saved, as lampshades, or curio works of art, for Nazi ladies! Ungodly medical experiments, on children! Children! Starvation! Disease! Murder! Perpetrated by Nazi doctors! To cull the herd!

I justified. A common blame-shifting device used by the guilty. He was guilty. Dripping with it in hippie counter cultural guise. “Good thing I set him straight,” I told myself, walking away. “Imagine, him walking around, all German, among the innocent,” I thought. “A chameleon in wolf’s clothes.” Then, to top it all off, I suddenly remembered a nonexistent uncle. Stormed the beaches at Omaha, he did (little sand lake near Omaha, Nebraska). And I knew I had saluted the spy hippie, final solution-er properly.

I smiled and nodded, then headed for the Thai German restaurant, my favorite. Sauerbraten, with homemade spaetzle, red cabbage, and beer, sweet, pure, German beer. Love my homeland.