My Cold War memories

I was listening to an NPR program called “The Changing World,” and there was a segment discussing the 50th anniversary of the Berlin Wall, and its legacy. Between 1961 and 1989, 136 people died as a result of its presence. I thought back upon the time I spent as a soldier in what was then West Germany. The Cold War was technically still on, and being in a combat unit, I was expected to study flash cards and slideshows in order to differentiate between friendly and foe aircraft and vehicles, just in case the Soviets decided to send in the 10,000 tanks they allegedly had poised at the border. Although there wasn’t much respect for the capabilities of Soviet equipment, there was (we were told) a lot more of it arrayed against our NATO forces. Of course, by the time Reagan became president, the economic capacity of the Soviet block to maintain such large forces was diminishing, although that didn’t stop Reagan from undertaking a massive military construction program that the Soviet Union couldn’t match, and within a decade would abandon the pretense of superpower status.

Before that happened, we still had to play the game. I recall on one occasion my platoon took a bus tour along the East German border, at a point where that constituted little more than a creek that ran through a little town. On the other side were some guard towers, where the border guards within looked on impassively, some no more than 20 yards away; some of us made odd gestures to draw some response, but they obviously had no sense of humor. On another occasion I was “donated” to a GSR unit to help conduct patrol duty somewhere on the Czechoslovakian border. The “border” was in the middle of a forest where the only indication of demarcation were stone markers every hundred feet or so. Every other evening for a month I had to sit in a jeep wearing headphones attached to a listening apparatus, while someone outside was peering through a night vision device. At first there was this James Bond allure, but when told that no one on this duty could remember ever experiencing an “incident,” I quit trying to hear things in the endlessly monotonous static. After a week I wasn’t the only person pining to return to civilization.

Back in civilization, however, there was a war of a sort we were warned to be mindful of. The pseudo-Marxist Red Army Faction (formerly the Baader-Meinhof Gang) was killing soldiers from the early 1970s into the mid 1980s. The most notorious incident was the 1985 murder of an American soldier, targeted by a female member of the gang and lured into a wooded area where he was shot in the head; his military identification badge was then used to drive a Volkswagen sedan packed with explosives onto the Rhine-Main Air Base. The subsequent blast killed two and wounded 20. The fact is that while Germans who came of age during the war years and its immediate aftermath were generally cordial to and appreciative toward American soldiers, younger Germans had no firsthand experience with the Nazi regime, and the defeat, death and destruction that followed it; nor did they have an appreciation of highly successful Marshall Plan which facilitated economic recovery and stability for democratic institutions. Many of these people were (and are) ambiguous toward if not outwardly hostile to individual soldiers. The Vietnam War certainly had a hand in it initially, but Reagan did us no favors either. As the NPR story pointed out, not all Germans were moved by his “Tear down this wall,” speech, let alone his Bitburg Cemetery blunder. Reagan was seen as warmonger and a threat to peace, with Germany right in the middle of it, threatened with destruction again. I remember a cover of a West German magazine (either Stern or Der Spiegel) which featured Reagan with an old Army steel pot on his head, peering over a foxhole armed with a rifle. Reagan was deliberately portrayed as a cartoonish character, but clearly a dangerous one.

It’s odd, but thinking back upon that time with all of Reagan’s Cold War puffery and the threats from local terrorists, on the ground most of us soldiers never really gave the Eastern “threat” much credence (or war gamers today; troop levels have been reduced to one-quarter of that when I was there) or considered our stay in Germany as anything other than a “job” that the sooner it was over the better. Germany was a nice place to visit, but the U.S. was always the “real” world.