Cold War Terrors

When my father was transferred from an Air Force base in Waco, Texas, to Tyndall Air Force Base in Panama City, Florida, the four of us moved temporarily into a trailer just on the beach on the Gulf of Mexico. I didn't know how to swim yet,  but I loved living there. School hadn't started yet and one afternoon I heard my mom yell. I could see Kevin's head out on the water. He was walking away from the shore. My mom was yelling for Kevin to come back in. He was calm and not worried, so we both just walked back to the shore. I loved living on the Panhandle the three years my father was stationed there. Due to the hurricanes in that part of the country over the last few years, not only is there not much Tyndal Air Force Base left, there's hardly any Panama City. I was reminded of living there when I saw the movie Matinee .The film is about a teenage boy with a younger brother who live on a Navy base in Florida during the Cuban Missile Crisis . I was barely aw...

My birth coincided with the birth of the Cold War. I was born at an Air Force base hospital in Wiesbaden, Germany, in 1953. My parents were both serving in the military when they met and got married, but by the time I was born, my mom was a civilian again. When the Cold War finally ended, like many baby boomers who grew up in the sixties my life had been affected in many ways by the mid-century power struggle between the United States and the USSR. By 1991, when the hammer and sickle flag was taken down from the Kremlin for the last time, I had been in the Air Force myself, assigned to Tempelhof Central Airport—which had been the main American airport during the 1948 Berlin Airlift. I used to walk by the Memorial to airmen who died supplying Berlin whenever I walked to the bus stop to go to the Ku'damm. One thing that has surprised me in the years since I lived in Berlin is how many people, places, and things in America were connected to the Cold War, in ways ...