Warriors of the Cold War

Ran across a story this morning, the day after Christmas, from Danbury, Connecticut. It's about a mysterious building, fairly large (270,000 sq ft) with no windows except in its cafeteria, where a large portion of the town's population worked. Everything that happened within was classified until very recently.

This building was where the KH-9 spy satellite's cameras, optics, and film handling systems were built. For many years during the Cold War, the KH-9 was one of America's premier spy satellites. Unlike later satellites, the KH-9s used film, and would load that film into special canisters that would then re-enter the Earth's atmosphere, and would be caught, dangling from a parachute, by a specially-equipped C-130 as it floated down in mid-air.

So finally all the former workers there could finally tell their families what it was they did, the reason for all the long hours over the years, the missed ball games or birthday parties. Their work was vital to the defense of the United States and our allies.

While it may take a completely different type of courage and dedication to serve a tour (or multiple tours) in Vietnam, Iraq, of Afghanistan, still these folks displayed their own type of courage and dedication. Yeah, they never got shot at. Yeah, they got to go home to their wives and kids at the end of the day, eat real food, take showers, sleep in a real bed. But to have the dedication and tenacity necessary to preserve national security takes more than what a lot of people are capable of. And make no mistake; the Soviets were our enemy. Where do you think all the ammo, rockets, missiles, and other ordinance fired at Americans in Vietnam came from? Time may dull the perception, but it was nevertheless the truth at the time. And regardless of what others may say, these men and women who worked here and kept the secrets here lived lives of true significance and service to our nation and free people everywhere.

But it's also interesting to note in the comments to the article the number of people insisting how the Cold War was all a big waste of money, that it was all useless, just a big propaganda ploy.

I suppose if one needed an example of how badly history education in our public schools has sank, here then is a perfect example.

I too was a cold warrior; I served in the Army in one of the 'border cavalry' units in Germany back in the olden days, patrolling the East German border. And I was there for the fall of the Berlin Wall; the most momentous historical event I have ever been a part of (admittedly a nearly infinitesimal part, but a part nonetheless). I have seen the other side; I have heard the stories firsthand of what things were like over there. And me and my fellow soldiers were prepared to use deadly force, under our rules of engagement, to protect West German citizens if the need ever arose (it didn't). But we still manned the observation posts, walked the border trails, called in our sitreps, and gave up time with our families in order to serve the greater good.

And what do you think would have happened if the United States had chosen not to 'fight' the Cold War? What if we just went back to our pre-WWII isolationism and abandoned Europe and East Asia to whatever fate would befall them, with an expansionist Soviet Union--led by Stalin no less!!--looking to gobble up still more land and subjects? England would still have ol' Winston Churchill there to glower at them and keep his people motivated; probably Great Britain would have withstood the Soviets. But all the rest of Europe probably would have fallen under Soviet domination. What if the United States had not led the United Nations in opposition to the invasion of South Korea? Japan, for its part, had been so devastated by American conventional and fire bombing--far outside the areas of Hiroshima and Nagasaki--that it could put up no real resistance to the Soviet T-34 tanks that would have been landed on Japanese beaches and rolling down from the north.

No one would have had the ability to deal with a minor distraction like the creation of a Jewish state . . . far too many major issues to allow something like that, in 1947. And even if it had been founded, how long would Israel have lasted without massive military assistance from Europe and America? Not much past 1956, that's for sure. And who thinks that the Arabs would have been merciful to the Israelis after they'd defeated them?

There would have been no France to even attempt to stop the Viet Minh; no Battle of Dien Bien Phu; the North Vietnamese would simply have been able to proceed with the invasion and take-over of Laos unimpeded. And so there would be no American involvement in Vietnam.

The nationalist Chinese would have had no hope. Even if they did make it to Taiwan, who would have been there to help defend them?

Soviet/communist expansion would have been unchecked in Africa and in Latin America as well.

And no one would have ever gone into space, much less to the moon.

True, we would have had LOTS OF MONEY!! Untold trillions that had been spent on defense and the CIA over those decades! And really, doesn't that really represent what America is all about? We're all about the MONEY! (Witness the bailouts of corporations 'too big to fail' while the ranks of the American homeless grows by leaps and bounds, and tens of millions of Americans fall into poverty--but it's all THEIR fault!! They just need to work harder--just listen to Herman Cain! But I digress.)

And we wouldn't have lost all those American lives in Korea and in Vietnam, and elsewhere throughout the rest of the Cold War. And there's nothing over there that's worth a single American life . . .

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal . . ."

This was once one of our highest ideals, our highest beliefs, that we are all created equal. Therefore, how can we, if we truly believe this to be true, value an American life more than, say, a Somali life? Or a French life, or a Japanese life? If we are all equal, then we all have equal value.

And then other truths kick in. "An injustice to one is an injustice to all", according to Martin Luther King. "Silence before an injustice is yet another injustice", according to Ghandi. If we are to be true to the ideals handed down to us from our ancestors, from the founders of this great nation, then these impose certain responsibilities upon us, certain duties that we must fulfill. And among those, in the words of yet another great American, is the duty to "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to ensure the survival and success of liberty."

Therefore we HAD to hold the line against the Soviets. We HAD to aid our allies, including our erstwhile enemies, West Germany and Japan. We HAD to stop the North Koreans and the Chinese in Korea. We HAD to try to hold back the North Vietnamese, even though we were ultimately unsuccessful (though we won every battle of the war, our politicians still lost the war, due in large part because our enemies understood something we did not, and attacked not just our forces in the field but the American political 'center of mass' here at home, and, to a sufficiently-large degree, twisted American public opinion against the war--but again I digress).

We HAD to have the Reagan-era military buildup, because there was a vulnerability with the Soviets. We engaged in the biggest peacetime military buildup, daring the Soviets to keep pace. But at home the Soviet people were weary of sacrificing everything for security; they wanted a little something for themselves, some sort of improvement in their lives. The Soviets tried to supply both, but could not, Eventually the 'whole rotten edifice' came crumbling down, not with a bang but with a whimper, in a nearly bloodless ending that no one could have conceived even 2 years before.

Which in turn meant an end to nearly 50 years of 'Mutually Assured Destruction', of the world merrily going about its business only 30 minutes away from the potential end of life on earth. That's how we lived, young 'uns. Didn't make a whole lot of sense, but that's how geopolitical conflicts between nations and ideologies intruded into all human life, even in a small town in east central Oklahoma on the shores of our biggest lake.

But that's all gone now. If the 'Greatest Generation', the generation who grew up in the Great Depression, and went on to win The War (WWII), and build America in to the world's biggest and truest superpower, then this is what my generation was able to do--remove the spectre of worldwide nuclear annihilation from all our lives, and also to bring freedom, not always clean and tidy, but frequently messy and sometimes painful, to untold millions around the world. And we did it in the same way as our forefathers did since The War--holding the line, guarding the Frontiers of Freedom, in the Cold War. And in our ranks I will most emphatically include those workers who built spy satellites in Danbury, Connecticut.