Memoirs of a Cold Warrior, Part 2

By the time I got to high school, the war in Vietnam was in full swing. We were fighting the evil Commies there so we didn't have to fight them somewhere else...or here. (That sound vaguely familiar?) The MIC had a field day by pushing us into believing in the Domino Theory. Remember that? If we lose Vietnam, then we'll lose Thailand, then Burma, then Malaya, etc. Kind of the opposite of the winning strategy in Risk when you start with the Australian area and expand from there...oh never mind.

By this time I had settled in my own mind that following college I was going to be an Air Force aviator. The only question I had was whether I would earn a commission through the Air Force Academy or ROTC. One of my classmates was interested in the Naval Academy and we figured he had a better chance of getting in and staying in (that old mathematics thing and me) so I opted to not try and go the ROTC route instead.

I have mentioned before that my opposition to the Vietnam war had little in common with the anti-war movement. I opposed the war because I understood that we were not there to win it. Men were dying and being imprisoned as POWs for a flawed strategy and an uncertain political theory. As we continue to discover, it's almost impossible to defeat an insurgency in its own country. B-52s continued dropping tons upon tons of bombs on jungle with no ability to figure out if we were doing anything other than blowing up empty jungle. I even recall the poster that one of the math teachers had in the back of his classroom. It was a big bright flower with the legend, "War is not healthy for children and other living things." Really? Honest? No sh*t Sherlock! I had rapidly lost patience with the anti-war movement when it took on a decidedly pro-North Vietnam aspect. I didn't like the war but I still deeply believed in the necessity of opposing client states of the Soviet Union.

The Tet Offensive begat Johnson's choice of not running for re-election. That begat Nixon as President. President Nixon begat Vietnamization. Vietnamization begat the secret bombing of Cambodia which begat the invasion of Cambodia which begat making the Vietnamese fight their own war which begat the 1972 invasion of South Vietnam which begat the Linebacker bombing campaign and more bombing which begat some progress on negotiations which begat South Vietnam's disagreement which begat North Vietnam balking which begat Linebacker II and B-52s being shot down over Hanoi and Haiphong which finally begat an end to American involvement in Vietnam.

While all this begetting was going on, the arch anti-Communist, Richard Milhouse Nixon went to China. No, not Taiwan/Republic of China, but the big bad People's Republic of China in February 1972. WTF? Nixon and Kissinger going to China to open relations? Well, Stalin and Hitler signed a non-aggression pact in August 1939. (Oh, wait...how did that work out?)

Once I tumbled to the fact that college math precluded any dream I might have had for becoming an aerospace engineer, I discovered that Syracuse University had a very good International Relations and a superb Soviet Studies program. And, joy of joys (no, this was actually before THAT Joy) there was a dual concentration in International Relations and Soviet Studies. How great a major was that for the Air Force?

While I was at Syracuse, the Yom Kippur War a/k/a the October War a/k/a the Ramadan War resulted in the U.S. and Soviet Union going eyeball to eyeball over the possibility of a Soviet intervention. The Strategic Air Command generated its B-52s to a ready state but cooler heads prevailed yet again.

By the time I had figured out that my eyes would prevent me from being a pilot, my heart was set on becoming a navigator. And what was the navigator's airplane? Why the B-52. From the day I started navigator training, all I wanted was to get into B-52s. The good news was that the majority of my classmates considered a desire to be in the Strategic Air Command to be a serious mental disorder. Nope. Not me. I had been preparing for that for years. Me and Jimmy Stewart ("Strategic Air Command"), Karl Malden ("Bombers B-52") and Rock Hudson ("A Gathering of Eagles").

In 1975, North Vietnam launched the final invasion of the south. And all those lives that had been wasted and destroyed to save South Vietnam from the evil Commie aggressors? Oh well, sorry. The scenes of the helicopters evacuating civilians from the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) are seared in the memories of many of us who lived through it.

Eventually I was assigned to the 416th Bomb Wing, 668th Bomb Squadron at Griffiss AFB, NY. I was so proud when my wife sewed on my bomb squadron patch with a goat butting with its head in front of a big bomb. And I was even prouder when I certified for my Emergency War Order mission, part of the Single Integrated Operations Plan (SIOP). The SIOP was the master plan of the United States for blowing up the world by dropping many, many nuclear warheads on the Soviet Union, Warsaw Pact nations and, depending on the scenario, our new pals, the Red Chinese. The Deputy Commander for Operations was the officer who certified me and his comment was that he had never heard anyone who could pronounce the names of the Russian towns as well as I did. And I didn't even bother taking Russian!

At that time, each SAC base kept four bomber and four tanker aircraft on alert. The crews were restricted to the base and would walk around in their flight suits. When the klaxon went off, they would run out to the aircraft, start engines and be ready to take off within 15 minutes of the klaxon. A message would be broadcast and until it was decoded, we had no idea whether it was a practice, the real thing...or a boo-boo a/k/a an inadvertent klaxon. That happened the first time I was ever on alert. It resulted in the alert crews being restricted to the alert facility. My wife and my (then) baby daughter watched the 1976 Bicentennial celebrations on the TV at the alert facility's family center.

Those bombers at Griffiss were armed with four gravity bombs in the forward bomb-bay (B-61 with variable yields from 0.3 kiloton to 340 kiloton) and in the aft bomb-bay a rotary launcher with six to eight AGM-69A Short Range Attack Missiles (SRAM) with a warhead variable yield warhead from 170 kiloton to 200 kiloton. So you do the math and you can imagine the destructive capability of just one wing. Multiply that by all the squadrons in SAC plus the ICBMs plus the submarine launched missiles and you begin to get some idea why we used to giggle over the fact that they actually gave us a Post-Strike Base. Yes. We were going to take off with nukes raining down all over the U.S., refuel from a tanker, fly across the ocean, descend to the lowest possible altitude, fly a precisely timed and mapped route with nukes going off all around us and still have enough fuel to make it to a base that would probably be a large smoking hole in the ground ANYWAY! And that's to say nothing of the amount of radiation we would have absorbed. Honestly. In training, they showed a movie where they told us that flying through a post-detonation cloud would be safe enough for us to not be concerned. Come on. We might have been be crazy. We weren't stupid.

About the time I got out of the Air Force, cruise missiles were starting to become a part of the inventory. This enabled the B-52 to be able to stand off even farther from their targets and sling nuclear-tipped missiles. Cruise missiles would become one of the most contentious weapons in Europe during the 1980s. And, by the way, when the James Bond movie "Never Say Never Again" was released (essentially the same plot as "Thunderball") it was two air launched cruise missiles that were stolen.

Détente seemed to be the word as Soviet and U.S. relations seemed to indicate a thaw in the Cold War. That lasted until the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Then even Jimmy Carter, the president who canceled the B-1 bomber project, sat up and took notice. The evil Commies were at it again, invading a nation that had done nothing to them. (Hmmm. Where have I heard that more recently?) Carter was followed by that arch Cold Warrior Ronald Reagan.

Since this is about the Cold War and not about economics I'll avoid the temptation of going on about redistribution of wealth under Ronnie's two terms. But a lot of that redistributed wealth got shoveled in the direction of the Military-Industrial Complex. For one thing, he reactivated the B-1 bomber program. Then he came up with his genius Star Wars program.

Europe had become a stockpile of cruise missiles and intermediate range missiles. There were protests in the U.K. and Germany against our basing these weapons on their soil. In 1983, during a NATO exercise code-named Able Archer 83, a dedicated Soviet intelligence group was of the opinion that it was a pretext for a first-strike against the USSR and Soviet forces were generated to a near-ready state. This was based, in no small part, on Reagan's inflammatory 1950s-style Cold War rhetoric. This was yet another case of the world being on the brink of catastrophe before cooler heads prevailed.

Ultimately, Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, for their own reasons, began engaging in a dialogue which resulted in meaningful cuts in the number of warheads poised to go flying. This was a truly positive development for the world because the latest, and last, iteration of strategic nuclear deterrence was known as Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). The essence of it is this: You don't dare launch on me because if you do, I'll have time to retaliate and we will just wind up destroying each other...oh, yeah, and the world, too. (There is a 1959 Cold War novel by Mordecai Roshwald named "Level 7" in which it comes out that the two sides destroyed the world and themselves by accident and misinterpretation. And Nevil Shute's 1957 novel "On the Beach" demonstrated how a nuclear war in the northern hemisphere would, ultimately, kill life on Earth. It all makes for fascinating reading, certainly scarier than anything Stephen King or Dean Koontz ever came up with.)

Reagan is remembered for his "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this Wall speech" and while it may have given some succor and encouragement to the anti-totalitarian sentiment that was permeating Eastern Europe, greater political and economic factors were at work. (I heartily recommend Michael Meyer's book "The Year That Changed the World", reviewed here http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/04/AR2009090401751.html, for a penetrating, honest and extremely readable look at the events that heralded the end of the Cold War.) And in that dark, depressed time of my life when I had to work in retail sales to earn some money, one thing I bought was a piece of the Berlin Wall. I still have it.

December 26, 1991 was the day the Soviet Union dissolved itself. As so many things in the history of the world, it came with a whimper, not a bang. On May 31, 1992, the Strategic Air Command was reorganized out of existence. (And the body of Curtis LeMay has been spinning in its grave ever since.) Within a three year period, the basis of the bi-partite world had ceased to be. We had won. But what had we won?

MAD may have been the classic example of two scorpions in a bottle, knowing that killing the other would result in its own death. Despite the unthinkably huge number of megatons poised to be slung, there was one thing of which could be relatively sure. The Soviets knew where those warheads were and who had them under control. Their scientists and nuclear engineers were under their control. Once the USSR dissolved into separate states all of which suffered their own economic woes, much was sold to the highest bidder.

We live in a post-Cold War world. Are we any safer? There's probably less risk of an apocalyptic world-ending nuclear exchange than there was in the Cold War. But the most serious attack on what the Neocons like to call the Homeland (and if that doesn't smack of Fascist overtones, nothing does) came in the post-Cold War era. We are engaged in two wars, one of which shows little sign of ending. More men and women are being lost in combat than at any time since the Vietnam war. And the hemorrhage of money to the MIC only seems to be accelerating. Safer? Maybe in one sense, but not really. Poorer? Morally and economically.

Personally, I look back on the Cold War era with a degree of nostalgia. If you ask many Russians who lived through the Great Terror of the 1930s they will look back with nostalgia on Stalin. I seem to have a similar feeling about the world in which I grew up. It was a dangerous world. From the day we detonated the Trinity device in July 1945 mankind had the means to end its tenuous existence on Earth. That we succeeded in avoiding that fate may be more to happenstance than planning. I look back at my service in the Air Force with pride. At the same time, I find it frightening that I was prepared to participate in an apocalyptic spasm of destruction that would have destroyed everyone and everything I know and hold dear. That I have become anti-war sometimes surprises me...but not all that much and not all that often. But I think back on that poster from my high school math teacher's room and recognize the wisdom of it, that war really is NOT healthy for children and other living things.