I’ve been asked to speak at our university’s annual Veteran’s Day Commemoration next Friday. General theme will be the Cold War (I suggested it after struggling to come up with something I could talk about), but if you can think of anything you’d want to hear someone say on Veteran’s Day, I’d be interested to hear about it.
Comment away!
Do you play poker, David? It’s become a bit of a national obsession lately, judging freom the number of TV shows. There’s a term from the game which perfectly describes Reagan’s strategy against the Soviet Union during the 80′s. It’s called “buying the pot”.
There, that’s my idea and I’m sticking to it.
The Berlin Airlift (if it’s not part of the Cold War, it’s an immediate precursor to it). I never learned about it in school, and it’s one of my favorite bits of that era’s history. What’s interesting is that the gentleman who first mentioned it to me said it like it was common knowledge (it was, for his generation). Makes you wonder how much else we think is common knowledge, but really isn’t, outside of select circles.
Mention Thresher and Scorpion. Mention the other boats of the fast attack fleet that hunted Soviet submarines and collected intelligence on them for 40+ years.
Mention the boomer (FBM) fleet that stayed out there all those years. The strategic mission was grand, to deter nuclear or conventional aggression by the Soviets, but the tactical mission was pure horror show; to be a real deterrant, we had to be relied on to launch Polaris, or Poseidon, or Trident missiles and kill tens of millions.
The forces we deployed, at sea, in the air and land based, broke the Soviet system because they had to keep up and could not. After 75 years of promising the worker’s paradise, the Kremlin finally had to deliver.
The other thing to mention is that the Russians are beginning to look back on the Soviet nuclear age with nostalgia, because they were feared then and great actors on the world stage. That Russian need, to be feared and to be great, predates the Bolsheviks and transcends any other ideology. We’ll be hearing from them again, I guess.
The Cold War has not ended, will not end. Ohio class boomers still patrol. The Chinese and the India have ability, capability, and ambition. Eternal vigilance still applies.
Remember that it wasn’t a truly “Cold” war, and that lots of our friends gave their lives on the ramparts.
Yes, places like Korea and Cuba, but more importantly every servicemember that died in training, patrol, recon and just doing maintenance on a track during that time gave their lives for our freedom. It was an enduring sacrafice that gathered interest and paid for our other sins of ommission and neglect.
We often forget our fallen comrades from “peacetime” but since most of us never heard the sound of an artillery barrage except in training, that didn’t make it any less a real war with real casualties.
Joe
Well stated Joe.
And the flight deck of an aircraft carrier on deployment is “just about” as dangerous in peacetime as it is during a shooting war. I say “just about” only because the ratio of live to dummy ordinance is lower. The danger from jet blast, spinning propellers, and fast-moving aircraft in a confined space is exactly the same. The memorials to fallen shipmates in each of my cruise books is testament to that.
Those of us who served haven’t forgotten our fallen comrades from “peacetime”. It’s just that the media doesn’t give a rats-a** about the military until it can be used as convenient subject to bash the President.
P.S. I was shocked to find out that in the eyes of my home state I was not even considered a “veteran” becasue the period of time during which I served did not fall within specific dates (WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, GWI). To their credit they recently changed that to recognize cold war era service.
I would talk of the Vietnam war and how it contributed to the fall of the wall. How the Russians struggled to keep up with western technology finally brought it to its knees. Pouring money and skills into North Vietnam and trying to keep up with advances like the Helicopter, Electronic Warfare, AEGIS, Telecommunications just to name a few. How advances in the U.S. war machines capabilitys far outstriped what the USSR could even hope to approach. That the Vietnam war was not fought in vain but helped bring down a militaristic country with a bloated system that didn’t work and hastened its failure.
How about compare and contrast the Cold War and the Global War on Terror? Just a thought.
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