Charlie Ray Holbrook

German Linguist
The eulogy below was written by Don Cooper.

A eulogy for Charlie

When Charlie Ray Holbrook arrived in Berlin in 1967, he was another "newk," a 20-year-old German linguist from Texas who in many ways was much like myself. At 21, I had been in Berlin for more than a year and fashioned myself one of the grizzled old veterans of the 54^th Army Security Agency Special Operations Command.

Charlie’s story did mirror mine, although he grew up in West Texas and I grew up in southwestern Arkansas.

During those days when the draft was like a sword of Damocles hanging over the heads of young men who were really ready to use college deferments to avoid going to Vietnam, Charlie and I both had enlisted, which gave us some options and other ways to keep from slogging through the jungles of Southeast Asia.

Or that’s what we told ourselves. In reality, we really joined the Army because – as Charlie said – to grow up and the Army, especially the Army Security Agency, seemed to offer both a chance to grow up and enjoy the glamor of being a "spy" in Berlin, the hottest spot of the Cold War.

When 20-year-old "Chuck" Holbrook arrived in Berlin, he recalled joining "a unit that made ‘M*A*S*H*’ look like serious drama."
"Being an Army misfit was already a badge of honor in such company. Legends had already grown from the exploits of what was basically a bunch of pretty smart drunks who had preceded me," he wrote years later.

So many of us were like Charlie, kids from small towns and cities around the United States who found Berlin to be a place where we grew up and out of our innocence.

In the late 1960s, Berlin was, as Charlie said, "an isolated microcosm of world events. The music was psychedelic and (we) were susceptible."
"Those years in the late Sixties were the most important years of the last century. Historians should throw those years around like lead weights," he later wrote. "They were heavy years. They have shaped our lives and the nation’s history ever since. That was the real revolution. And it hurts me to say it, but we lost.

"We came close when Nixon resigned, yet the power boys beat us (in 2000) when they put a man in the White House who was elected by nobody. The establishment won. The revolution died not with a whimper, but with a whine. We put the system on trial and the jury returned a no bill.

"But at least we fought and lost together, or some of us did. As Bob Dylan said, ‘I’m glad I fought, I only wish we’d won.’"

Charlie, who had been managing a food bank in Alpine for the past several years, waged his fight until the end, when he died peacefully Friday night in his mother’s home in Odessa.

Charlie Ray Holbrook was not someone that people in Hereford knew, at least I don’t think so. But Charlie was my friend, one of the links to my own past – and a reminder of my own mortality.