At dinner last night, I talked with an Army veteran who started out as a gunner.
His unit was on the West German front line where any attack from the Soviet Union would come.
His Colonel told the troops their goal was to hold back any invasion…at all costs.
And, if they saw a bright light ahead to drive toward it, because they would not want to be alive after the detination of a tactical nuclear weapon.
This was during the time President Ronald Reagan was facing off with Mikhail Gorbachev.
Reagan had leaked that the United States had 1,000 of the new M1 Abrams tanks on the border.
There were really only one hundred, but they emulated the World War II deployment of decoy tanks, enough to make the one thousand figure belilveable.
Besides looking like tanks, they had heaters in back where Abrams tanks would have motors.
And, in winter, they were painted white.
The Veteran told me that Gorbachev “was scared shitless,” helpimg lead to the fall of the Soviet Union.
Because he was a college graduate and could type, his Captain had him doing administrative work.
When a new Captain arrived, he noticed that the Veteran had never served guard duty.
“That was because I made the assignments,” he told me.
He ended up on guard duty.
One time during the early part of a seven-day snow storm in which drifts were twelve feet tall, their jeep got separated from the tanks by about fifteen miles (it turned out).
They stopped at a farm house and were told they were 300 meters (less than 1,000 feet) from the Czechoslovakian border.
It was just marked with stakes.
The men were allowed to sleep on straw in the farm family’s barn, plus being fed by them.
He received a minor medal as a result.
He was able to communicate because he learned German at night school while over there.
