HARKER HEIGHTS — Growing up with German missionary parents working in Africa, retired U.S. Army Maj. Pete Laessig spent a significant portion of his early childhood in a British internment camp during World War II before immigrating with his family to the U.S.
Laessig, a Harker Heights resident who turns 83 later this month, was a year old when his family was arrested and interned in a British camp, first in Cameroon, Africa, and then in Jamaica.
“My sister and I were born in Cameroon (next to Nigeria), which used to be a German colony,” he said. “The German Baptists sent teams that had a theologian, a guy who knew how to build and a linguist.
“My dad was a linguist. He loved languages. He could speak, read and write fluently in the 12 modern languages (the 12 most spoken languages in the world are English, Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, Arabic, French, Bengali, Russian, Portuguese, Indonesian, Urdu and German) and then he had knowledge of 40 other languages, or dialects. He started learning languages when he was in high school. Just amazing.
“After World War I, Cameroon became a British protectorate, and was administered by Nigeria. Then when World War II broke out, the British took all Italians and all Germans in their British colonies and arrested them, as enemy aliens. So, we were interned for seven years — two years after the war was over.
“At first, it was in Nigeria, and then they moved us to Jamaica. They built camps in Nigeria, in Jamaica, in Kenya … probably the same thing happened in New Zealand and Australia, I suspect. It’s a story a lot of people aren’t aware of at all.”
There were 400 people living in barracks at the camp in Jamaica, where Laessig attended a makeshift school for first, second and third grades. He does not recall any mistreatment of prisoners, but living conditions were not entirely comfortable, either.
“They had barbed wire … I remember three types of fences. Guard houses at each corner; changing of the guards. I remember the British with their shorts and knee socks and pith helmets.
“We weren’t mistreated. The food wasn’t any good — that wasn’t a priority for the British to feed people in a camp in a remote area.
“After the war was over in ’45, you had to find your own way. Nobody had any money. You couldn’t go back to Germany unless you had a sponsor … a lot of people immigrated to Canada and Australia.
‘We were one of the first ones to leave the camp, nearly three years after the war was over. My dad knew a professor from Oklahoma University, and he sent us money and we flew from Kingston, Jamaica, to Havana, Cuba, and from there to Miami. The night we arrived, my dad spoke at the First Baptist Church of Miami, and they took up a collection that bought us train tickets to Oklahoma City.
“We got to Norman, Oklahoma, and my dad immediately started teaching in the language department at Oklahoma University.”
The family later moved to Shawnee, Okla., where his father took a job teaching at Oklahoma Baptist University, and that is where Laessig met his wife of 63 years, Marilyn. That was 1959, and both were students at OBU.
They were married for two years when Laessig got a letter in the mail notifying him to report for military duty.
“I wasn’t too bright,” Laessig said, laughing. “I was working full-time at a Safeway grocery store and taking 10 semester hours of classes. Well, I think you had to take 12 or more semester hours to be considered a full-time student (and qualify for a deferment from the draft).
“So, I got my draft notice. I didn’t open it. I just went down and joined the Army, thinking I could get my preference of jobs. But you soon learn that the recruiter promises a lot of things that they don’t deliver on.
“It was a combined recruiting station, and I intended to join the Air Force, but the Air Force recruiter was gone. So the Army recruiter the next desk over said, ‘Hell, we’ve got airplanes and helicopters. You can learn how to fly.’
“What he didn’t say was that most aviators are college graduates.”
After he signed on the dotted line, the Army quickly whisked him away and nobody heard from Laessig again for a week. Not even Marilyn knew where he was.
“As I said, I wasn’t too bright. I went down and they immediately inducted me and sent me to Oklahoma City. Gave me a physical that day and put me on an airplane that night to Fort Carson (for basic training). They wouldn’t do anything like that today.
“You couldn’t call anybody or correspond with anybody. They put your civilian clothes in a box and sent ‘em home, so you wouldn’t have any civvies to wear.
“I didn’t get paid for six months. I believe I got my first paycheck after we got to Fort Bragg. I think it was $90 a month. If you were married, your spouse got $120, or something like that.”
After basic and AIT (advanced individual training), Laessig was assigned to a combat engineer unit at Fort Bragg, N.C., and later went to Officer Candidate School at Fort Sill, Okla., in 1963.
He served two tours in Vietnam and retired as a major in 1981 with 20 years’ service.
“I had cancer in ’65, got that taken care of, had my profile changed, and volunteered for Vietnam because I thought it was my duty to go. Then I got a second tour and put in another 10 months, and they thought I had a recurrence of cancer, so they medivaced me back to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio. They operated, but it was a false alarm.
“The first tour, I was assigned to Headquarters U.S. Army Vietnam, in Tent City B, outside of Saigon. All the electronic messages that came in, I had to read them and get them to the right staff section, for action. It was 12-hour shifts; seven days a week. Pretty interesting, from the standpoint of being able to read all of the message traffic — operations, logistics, tactics — and determine what needed to go where.
“My second tour, I was with an engineer group that had battalions all the way from the north border down to below Da Nang. We were stationed with a Marine battalion, just north of Da Nang. We built airfields, worked on highways and bridges. I was a captain at that time, and I provided them with all their personnel support — maintaining records, promotions, returns, things like that.”
When he hung up his uniform in 1981, Laessig started his own small construction company, then went to work on Fort Hood in human resources for what was then called TCATA (Training and Doctrine Command Combined Arms Test Activity). A stint in logistics at the Veterans Administration followed, and then he went to work in civil service human resources/personnel, organizing ACAP (Army Career and Alumni Program) to help soldiers leaving the Army learn job-hunting skills like writing resumes and interviewing.
He finished his career in 2001 working as what is now called director of human resources and spent the next six years with his brother as owner/operators of the golf driving range along U.S. 14 in Nolanville.
Now days, the father of three, grandfather of 10 and great-grandfather of six plays golf twice a week, does lots of yard work, keeps his cars detailed and walks regularly for exercise. He once served on the Harker Heights City Council, enjoys RV camping, has traveled to Mexico to fish for largemouth bass and taken three trips to South America to go peacock bass fishing in the Amazon.
For his 80th birthday, he decided to celebrate by climbing Guadalupe Peak in the Guadalupe Mountains National Park near El Paso, the highest natural spot in Texas at 8,751 feet above sea level.
“It was in the summer — August, my birthday — and I think I was the only person in the whole park,” Laessig said. “They’ve got kind of a trail where you can find your way up to the peak. For somebody my age, I should have taken a backpack, a tent, and cut it into two days.
“I got up fairly close to the top, but believe it or not, altitude sickness can kick in at about 7,000 feet. I didn’t know this, and I was getting a little woozy. I was by myself, and the trail does become a little precipitous. There are places you could slide down and be forgotten, so I turned around and came back.
“But I did enjoy it. There are tremendous views even at the elevation I got.”
He believes in staying active — “You sit down too long; you’ll never get up.” — and says despite a few bumps in the road along the way, life has turned out better than he could have ever expected.
“My parents were staunch Christians, and they would say that God had a plan for my life and that’s why it has come out the way it has,” he said. “I have a wife who has put up with me for a long time. I had cancer a couple of times and beat it. I’ve been very blessed.
“We’re comfortable; we do things we enjoy; we don’t want for anything financially. I tell you what, if I had tried to plan a better life — with the exception of a few things, of course — I don’t think it could have turned out any better.”
Two-time Vietnam vet born in Africa; spent years in a WWII British internment camp
