Cold War Era Veterans

Kanewpadle

Kanewpadle

US Veteran
Silver Supporter
Joined
Nov 8, 2009
Messages
10,543
Reaction score
18,156
Location
Wrong side of Washington
What did you think when the Cold War came to an end?

Did you give it much thought? Or was it just another day?

I remember I was working on an aircraft and I looked up and saw the last nuke laden B-52 taxi off the alert pad. The pilot was waving an American flag out the window. I asked another guy what was going on. He said the Cold War was over. I said "Oh" and went back to work. :rolleyes:
 
Register to hide this ad
It ended on December 25, 1991, when the USSR finally went belly up and the Hammer and Sickle was lowered from the Kremlin for the last time.
 
it ended for me while in Turkey in the spring of 90 when I saw a picture of a McDonald's grand opening in Moscow. this was on the front page of the Stars and Stripes. next day I went down and filled out my retirement application. lee
 
The Berlin Wall came down on my 52nd birthday--a nice present, I thought. Then the USSR broke down, and people rejoiced.

Now we have that evil thug Putin to deal with, still KGB to the core and devoid of any scruple whatever while wielding tremendous power. I for one am not prepared to say that the Cold War is entirely over, despite the reduced risk of nuclear combat.
 
When our money printing presses beat there's. President Reagan set the wheels in motion with huge increases in the military budget and I got to see the reaction in West Germany. We brought in the Pershing rockets and Moscow reacted and found that it could not keep up.

It took brave men on both sides of the wall to allow a peaceful transition. Sadly, I still believe the "Cold War" is ongoing. Yet, I find hope working and eating alongside our former foes here in Afghanistan!!

The WP countries have shared a lot of the risk in bringing peace to Iraq and Afghanistan and our shared experiences and exposure to each other will maybe make tommorow's military leader think twice before jumping off the cliff!!
 
still worry about the nukes

my first thoughts were about all the nukes and who controlled them now that the old soviet system was gone.
and today I still wonder if Ivan and his buddies hid one or two away for a rainy day.
 
Bkreutz said:
For me it was when the wall came down in Berlin. Never thought I'd live to see the day.
Click to expand...

Me too. I was assigned to Berlin Brigade, detached to Allied Checkpoint Alpha in Helmstedt '85-'86. Seeing the East and West Germans pounding away with hammers on top of The Wall on television was a really big deal for me. Figured I'd never live to see it either.
 
yaktamer said:
Me too. I was assigned to Berlin Brigade, detached to Allied Checkpoint Alpha in Helmstedt '85-'86. Seeing the East and West Germans pounding away with hammers on top of The Wall on television was a really big deal for me. Figured I'd never live to see it either.
Click to expand...

Berlin was my first overseas assignment - the things I got into..:rolleyes:
 
The Cuban missile crisis scared the **** out of me as a teenager. I was thrilled to see things warm up.
 
I remember being caught completely by surprise by the fall of the Wall and the quick disintegration thereafter of the Soviet Union (back) into individual countries. I just didn't think it would happen seemingly that easily, but I was glad to see it.

It was a relief, but who would have guessed that Russia would turn out so corrupt, or that terrorism and Muslim extremism would become the top threat to us. Looking back, the era of mutually assured destruction seems to have been a state of equilibrium and predictability that we're not likely to see again for a long time.
 
I know there are many on here that remember the school drills where we crouched under our desks. Once while visiting my grandparents in Pittsburgh there was a civil defense drill that shut down all traffic and we were on our way to the zoo and had to pull over to the side of the highway. The traffic was stopped for miles. Don't remember the date exactly, but had to be '48,'49 or '50. By the time the Cuban missile crisis came along I was "drilled out" and didn't believe there would be a nuclear war. It was just too stupid a concept. So the official end of the Cold War was a non-event for me. Today I believe we are facing a far more dangerous scenario with Middle Eastern extremism and it's heavenly rewards for martyrdom. Being prepared to die for your country and comrades in arms is one thing, but wanting to die in battle because it is a greater reward than life itself is quite another. I fear the Cold War will turn out to be little more than a historical footnote compared with what is to come.
 

We used to cross our fingers every time the klaxon horn went off that our birds wouldn't actually launch. If they did we knew we had about 15 minutes to live.
 
For me, it was hard to believe that the Great Terror the Soviet Union had become had simply collapsed like a cardboard facade. All of our mission plans seemed to have changed overnight and the next thing I knew, our attention shifted completely to another part of the world. We switched from an enemy that had some decent sense not to have the desire to completely destroy the world to one that was insane and vicious enough not to care what, who and how they destroyed. In other words, I think we went from the frying pan into the fire.
 
When they stopped alerts and we no longer exercised the GDP. That ended everything--your TOE, METL, basic loads, qualifications-etc. Fortunately Desert Storm allowed the old war horses to make massive armored moves-and our Cold War air power ruled the skys. By 1993 we had lost an entire Corps-(+ a few Brigades)-so we went into the next war with about half of what we had.
 
I don't know when the Cold War ended, but I do remember vividly when it heated up to the boiling point. I was on active duty, involved in atomic weapons training, logistics and security when the Cuban Missile Crisis developed. I thought for sure I was either going to Cuba (I actually got my required yellow fever shot and had my bugout bag packed) or was going to be vaporized instantly. That was white knuckle time. Everything after that was a cool-down period.

John
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Latest posts

Back
Top