(This is a lengthy but true story, hopefully a worthy read.)
A year earlier than your trip, a group of four of us GIs caught the train down to Munich from Shwabach. Three of us were friends but the fourth, a newbie Private named Riley, was what we considered to be a pain in the ass. You see he was a Pentecostal and out to 'save' everyone in our barracks.
A day or so prior to our adventure while planning our trip Riley came to our room and began telling us how we were all planning a trip to hell. I do not recall who spoke up but one of us offered up a challenge to Riley
The challenge to Riley was this: You join us on our trip to hell, you do everything we do, drink lotsa beer smoke some hash, carouse with the women and just enjoy the hell out of one of Germany's most grandest events. If you do this we will spend a day at your church and do everything you deem churchworthy.
We figured Riley would say no and wander off to pester someone else but imagine our surprise when he agreed!
So the day came and off we went, Riley in tow. We were mean to him right off the bat making him try a little hash for his first time as we walked down to Shwabach train station. No we were not THAT mean, he hit the pipe once just to prove his willingness to go along with the agreement, we being fully amazed at seeing Riley actually smoking hash for the first time went easy on him not wanting to kill the guy before hardly getting started.
By the time we arrived Riley had become a full on part of our group. We knew where he was from, stuff about his family and even let him tell us a little about how he became a Pentecostal. We still intended to totally immerse him in our adventure but by this point we were feeling a little bit protective of the guy, after all he was a our 'homey' a fellow American from our base, from our very unit.
Riley was all wide eyed as we arrived at the Oktoberfest. There were many many large beer tents, (think circus tent), each tent holding its own traditional band center stage, pretzels and bratwurst venders on the perimeter and more than a thousand people happily drinking away or dancing around the stage.
German lasses in traditional wear shuttle the beer around the tent on large silver platters, the better endowed ones using their breasts as an extra pair of hands to balance those beer laden platters. (This too is traditional).
This balancing 'trick' did not go unnoticed by Riley who I suspect used it as an excuse to stare without shame at our server's chest when she came to our table. Well nobody wanted Riley embarrassing us so someone nudged him and handed him a beer. After that he fit right in.
We decided to moderate ourselves, one beer per beer tent. Each tent was sponsored by a different brewer, so we got to sample a great deal of Germany's finest!
There is this song that gets played every now and then by the band in each tent. It is called the 'Prost' song. As it is played, the crowd stands and sings along with the short song, waving their beer steins to the music. As the song ends they toast each other and drink up. By the time we had reached our sixth or seventh tent Riley could sing that song just as well as a native German and he had no problem draining his beer stein!
Truth be told Riley was getting plastered and we decided that he needed a little of our shepherding so we figured to call it an evening and head back. Riley was having none of that, he was having the grandest time of his life! Another server came by, Riley made sure we each had another beer, tipped the server and sent her on her way by smacking her on her rear end, right on cue the Prost song started up!
When the song ended, Riley draining yet another stein of beer, bumped into a lady standing next to him. The lady turned, noticed us and then said, "Hey, you boys are Americans aren't you?" This lady looked VERY familiar but at that point I could not pin down where I had seen that face before. "Yes ma'am" said Riley, "How 'bout a dance." This was not posed as a question by Riley as he swooped her off to join in with the folks merrily twirling away around the stage.
We feared that we would loose Riley in the mass of partiers, it was impossible to keep an eye on the two but not too long after they disappeared the familiar looking lady brought Riley back to us. She asked each of us where we were from back in the states, she shook our hands then took her leave. It was only later that I concluded that Private Riley had danced that dance with Carroll Burnett, yes THAT Carroll Burnett!
Well that was enough for us, German beer is famously stronger than that swill we shamefully used to call beer here in the states back then. In other words we were all happily hammered!
We hired a taxi to take us back to the train station and got on the first train heading north that would run through Shwabach. The three of us agreed, Riley had kept his end of the challenge and did so way better than any of us could have imagined. Riley would have agreed too but he was passed out. We left him that way, he earned it.
Eventually our train arrived in Shwabach, we were tired the three of us had added more hash to our 'buzz' and we were more than ready to see our bunks. It was as the train was leaving, still heading north that we noticed we were a man short! Yep, Riley was awol from our little group because none of us had the presence of mind to have wakened him up when we arrived...oops!
Well there wasn't much we could do about it now, so we headed back to the barracks hoping Riley would figure it out eventally and find his way back on his own. (Most Germans speak some English, Riley had money in his pocket and he knew that we were stationed in Shwabach).
Riley did reappear 48 hours later, apparently a conductor woke him up when the train made it to Bremerhaven, a town on Germany's northern coast. Sadly other than waking up in Bremerhaven, Riley had no memory of his GRAND ADVENTURES, he swore that he had not done any of the things we told him he did.
The entire barracks OTOH heard about our trip, the tale being too cool to keep secret. Riley being fully embarrassed (not sure why) chose to not hold us up to our part of the challenge. He even stopped with his prosteletizing around our barracks. By now, Riley was my chum, so I went with him to his Pentecostal service, but that is another story, far less interesting than our trip to the Munich Oktoberfest and back.
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