East County veteran remembers his 'career in the air'

He was 18 then, and he remembered that his heart seemed to be beating in his ears.

Dieter Zoellner, now a father of five and grandfather of eight, agreed to talk about his time in the Army with Veterans Day being celebrated on Nov. 11. For 22 years he has owned Dieter Sod, located on S.R. 64, but his memory went back to the 1960s and the first time he jumped from an airplane.

He stood that day alongside 74 other terrified troopers-in-training with the 101st Airborne Division and he recalled beads of sweat forming on his forehead.

"Some guys were so scared they peed their pants," Zoellner said. "But if you didn't jump, you had a nice, long push from the guy behind you."

The plane hovered near the training station in Fort Campbell, Ky., and Zoellner forced himself to step out. An adrenaline rush kicked in, and everything was silent except for the sound of the wind hitting his parachute.

Within four minutes, he was on the ground, smiling.

"There's no other feeling on Earth like it," Zoellner said. "Seeing the world from up there, it's a great feeling. After jumping a few times, it begins to relax you. You start looking around and enjoying it."

Zoellner jumped 54 times by the end of his military career. His peers averaged 20 to 25 jumps.

The intense feeling of that experience is only rivaled by his first jump out of a helicopter.

Typically, paratroopers were trained to jump out of planes. But they received bonus "points"  toward earning merit stars, based on the number of jumps they completed.  

"We jumped on the weekends," Zoellner said. "You don't have a heck of a lot of do. You're stuck on base on constant standby with no passes or leaves to go home. What do you do to entertain yourself? Go see a movie you've already seen 100 times?"

The more jumps a soldier had meant he was trying to become a better, braver one, Zoellner said.

"It was '65 and we were trying to get extra jumps," Zoellner said. "The first time I jumped from a helicopter scared the (heck) out of me. When you're in airplane, a device opens the 'chute. But in a helicopter, the only thing that opens the chute is body weight, and it takes a lot longer for your 'chute to open."

After he jumped, he started to panic. He had a reserve parachute, but pulling it too early could cause the two parachutes to get tangled and make it difficult for the jumper to land smoothly. 

"You would hit the ground pretty hard," Zoellner said, laughing. "It would sound like a cannon firing."

He counted to eight and whispered a prayer, as the ground drew closer.

"I could see guys around me getting tangled, but you're so worried about yourself at that time that you have to collect your own thoughts," Zoellner said. "Once the 'chute opens, you relax a little bit and watch what's happening around you."

That year, his entire company was deployed to Vietnam.

His duffle bag was packed and he didn't have time to think about what going to war meant.

Because he wasn't a U.S. citizen, though, one of his sergeants told him he couldn't be deployed. He had to stay behind while his friends went off to fight.

"It felt pretty crappy," Zoellner said. "So two weeks later, I took the test and became a U.S. citizen."

Zoellner enlisted in the military in 1963, at a time when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated and the Vietnam War dragged on. After 16 weeks of training in Kentucky, Louisiana and Georgia, he became a paratrooper, with his new job description meant jumping from plane cruising at 900 feet at 120 mph, then participating in ground combat once he landed.

"It was extra money — $50 a month, which was a lot in the '60s," Zoellner said. "I was only making $70 or $80 a month at that time. I thought, what the heck."

Zoellner, now 71 and a member of VFW Post No. 12055, recalled that his platoon always was on high alert. 

The second oldest of four children, and the oldest boy among his siblings, Zoellner was born in 1944 in Germany, shortly before World War II came to an end.

Even so, he called himself "twice a veteran," of war.

His family of six ate, slept and lived in a one-room efficiency, a result of having previous homes destroyed by bombings and other conditions of war.

His childhood is stained with images of war, the smells of rotting and burning human flesh and the thud of soldiers' boots against the pavement outside of his home.

The soldiers brought monthly shipments of 200 to 300 coats, on which Germans had to sew buttons. If they didn't, they wouldn't receive their food ration for that month.

"That was our childhood," Zoellner said. "When I was 2 years old, a plane crashed not far from where we were living. Everyone rushed over to steal. My mom brought back a raggedy burned blanket and a guy's boots. When she brought the boots home to try on, the guy's foot was still in one of the boots. That leaves a mark on a child."

Because of the frequent bombings by the United States, France and England, stores in which Zoellner's family would have purchased food, were turned to ash, he said.

"I was raised on black coffee," Zoellner said. 

Even after the war ended, food was scarce.

Zoellner, his sister, Inge, and his mother, Martha, waited for night to sneak to nearby farms to steal a few days' worth of food, mostly potatoes, kohlrabi — a vegetable comparable to rutabaga — and other vegetables that didn't easily spoil.

"I brought a bucket to carry food back," Zoellner said. "But, I couldn't carry too much. You had to be fast, too, or you could get shot real easy. Everyone had a gun and was protecting their own stuff. If you're hungry, you'll do anything."

America bound

When he was 11, Zoellner's family took a ship across the Atlantic Ocean to the United States.

His father, Christian, had spent three years in America working and smuggling money back to his family in Germany, so they could afford to take a boat to the United States.

Their trip to the United States took 11 days.

They arrived at Ellis Island in April 1954, and they were one of the last families to leave there before the facility closed. They lived there for two months, while they received medical exams and other steps of "being processed" before they were able to leave.

He and his family slept on concrete floors alongside 200 to 300 other families.

There were few showers.

"It was musty, like in a men's or lady's locker room after a game," Zoellner said. "People died on the floor next to you. Those are the things you remember."

A mushy blend of rice and potatoes was the only meal served once a day.

Although his childhood and adult life are stamped with hardships resulting from two different wars, Zoellner remains patriotic and grateful to his parents for bringing him to America.

Moving to the United States changed his life.

"It was like moving from the slums, crime and poverty to living in a mansion," Zoellner said. "That move makes you very patriotic."

Now he feels that he is living the "American dream."

"You have freedom and opportunity here," Zoellner said. "America could give you that, a better life. And it did."

Contact Amanda Sebastiano at [email protected].