OPINION: What November 9 Means to Me
A nuclear-capable, 155mm howitzer, near Bad Kissingen, West Germany, November 1979.
By STAN FENDLEY
Falls Church Times Staff
Ok, so this story has nothing to do with Falls Church, per se. But then again, it has everything to do with Falls Church, and every other place in America.
November 9 is particularly important date for me. Thirty years ago on this date, I arrived in then-West Germany as a new army 2nd Lieutenant. Ten years later to the day, the Berlin Wall fell. It was unbelievable and exhilarating, and hard to fathom that such an incredible change had occurred in that short time. In ten years, the situation had gone from having a huge number of conventional and nuclear weapons pointed East and West, to a time of total capitulation by one side, without a single shot being fired.
When I arrived in Germany in 1979, I was a young field artillery officer who had never before seen Europe. I was immediately struck by the incredible beauty of southern Germany, with its rolling hills, story-book towns of white houses under steep red-tiled roofs, narrow streets winding between them, often alongside small streams. The place still gives me chills when I go back. My duty station was a small town in Northern Bavaria called Bad Kissingen, where U.S. forces had taken over and maintained a small post Hitler had built in the 1930s for a Wehrmacht motorcycle corps. Our army had renamed it Daley Barracks, but you could still see engraved on a concrete column in the middle of the post “Manteuffel Kaserne” (Manteuffel Barracks), the name Hitler had given the place in honor of a famous Prussian general.
But by this time the Nazis were defeated, and our guns were aimed at the Russians, East Germans and Czechs. My unit was stationed around 20 miles from the East German border and had the mission of deploying eastward if “the balloon went up” in order to blunt a Soviet advance across the West German border. Just knowing that was terrifying. And my first meeting with my battalion commander made it even more so.
“So Lieutenant, you’re a Political Science major, huh? Well, when you talk to your politician buddies at home, you tell them not to even think of taking away my tactical nuclear weapons. I’m going to need those nukes. The Russians have hordes of people on the other side of that border.”
The author, on the left, with fellow army field artillery officers at Firing Point 742, Grafenwoehr, West Germany, Spring 1980.
So there it was. I was assigned to a unit with nuclear weapons. And I had a battalion commander who actually wanted to use them. I remember saying a couple “Yes, sirs” and walking out of the meeting thinking I was in way, way over my head.
That was the start of my education about the military’s attitude toward nuclear weapons. “Tactical” nukes were an absolute article of faith with frontline troops. Even though we told ourselves that we were better soldiers than the Russians, we knew there were so many of them that conventional weapons would only allow us to hold them off for a few days or even hours. Somehow we would have to delay them until our State-side units could get to Europe and take up the fight. “Nuke ‘em til they glow” became the phrase of the day. “Crispy critters” were what the Soviets would be when we finished with them.
Yeah, I told myself, and us, too. What amazed me then, and still does now, is the notion of a limited nuclear war. It was common knowledge that both sides had a policy of massive retaliation for the use of nuclear weapons. The idea that we would nuke the Russians and they would choose not to reciprocate was beyond belief. And indeed, beyond the thinking of our top strategists, who ultimately relied on the threat of mutually assured destruction to keep the barrel covers on even conventional weapons.
And so we practiced with conventional rounds, but kept the nukes close. When President Reagan decided to deploy new Pershing missiles to Europe to offset Soviet SS-20s, the tension ratcheted even higher. We GIs felt it in the form of vocal criticism from young Europeans, contrasted by support from older generations who were terrified of Russians. The possibility of nuclear war was very, very real to us. Once a month or more we would go on alert, race to our positions, and wait to see if it was the real thing. Thank God it never was, but there was not a single night I went to sleep without thinking what I was supposed to do if World War III started the next day.
I did that for four years, left the army, went to business school, and then law school. In 1989, between torts and civil procedure, I watched the percolating resistance to communism, but never imagined it could amount to much. The Hungarians and Czechs had tried that before, and there was no way the Russians would let East Germany get out of hand. Imagine my astonishment on November 9, 1989 – ten years after I had arrived in Germany – people began taking sledge hammers to the Berlin Wall. I remember watching on TV and wondering when the machine guns would start firing. The thought that an incredibly repressive East German regime, which constantly looked over its shoulder toward Moscow, would let that happen without resistance was beyond me. It took me days to realize that Wall really was coming down – and not going back up. It was hard to concentrate on legal studies.
So November 9 has special meaning for me. We still live in a tense time, but it’s a different kind of tension. The bad things that might happen do not include two large military forces shooting massive numbers of nuclear rounds at each other. I go back to Germany occasionally to visit old friends, and when I return to my old post in Bad Kissingen, I get tears in my eyes. For the first time since 1937, the place is no longer used as a military post, but rather is full of community offices and even a department store. And in Berlin, walking the path where the Wall once stood is an unbelievable experience. To think how it used to be and how it is now, tramping the Eastern side of the Wall path, and seeing people going about their lives with complete freedom, is one of the most satisfying feelings I could ever imagine.
And I see it here at home, too. We in Falls Church, Washington DC, and the rest of the country no longer have to worry about turning to dust in a nuclear war. We don’t spend much time contemplating that any more, but it’s a great improvement over the situation we faced for decades.
I see it in smaller ways, as well. I have become a big ice hockey fan in recent years and love watching the Caps. But it amazes me when I consider that the team is led by Russians. I tell my kids that once upon a time my job in life was to prepare to kill those guys, and now I’m cheering my butt off for them.
That’s a good thing. I like the cheering a lot better.
By Stan Fendley, Falls Church City
November 9, 2009
Thanks for an engaging and powerful linking of autobiography to the effective end of the Berlin Wall.
I do worry about the use of a nuclear weapon, and an out of control nuclear escalation that might well follow.
For example, a nuclear weapon explosion could occur because of accident — our own handling of and security for nuclear weapons has had gaps. Others may have greater deficiencies and gaps. When nuclear weapons are on “hair triggers,” the time to investigate carefully and reach a proper conclusion might not be available. Escalation to an all-out launch of nuclear weapons around the earth is certainly possible.
A nuclear weapon or weapons could be put to use because control of the weapon(s) and the delivery system had come into the control of a person or group that wanted to use the weapons. I wonder, how would we react if we detected a launch toward us of a Russian multi-nuclear armed ICBM, and the Russian government flashed us the assertion that the laumch had been initiated by a rogue group that had seized control of the missle site. How would we respond to nuclear hits on a half-dozen or more cities and important sites in the Homeland with hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of dead and injured, enormous physical destruction, and radioactive fallout spewing out from the devastated blast sites.
Then there is the possibility of a national government deliberately choosing to use nuclear weapons. Say North Korea launched nuclear armed missiles against South Korea and/or Japan. Would we then annihilate the 25 million North Koreans who have no say in what their leader and/or his military command decides to do, and add horrendously to the radioactive fall-out and the effects of nuclear blasts on climate? If we did launch nuclear strikes on North Korea, how might other nuclear powers (China and Russia) react?
I suppose that since the Falls Church Times focuses on local concerns it is not surprising that reading about something that relates to national or international events is rare. However, I thought it was interesting to read about your experiences preparing for World War III in Germany. It reminded me of my experience a few years ago in Korea when we would have unannounced monthly alerts at 3:00 AM to prepare for war with North Korea. Since I was working at the division headquarters I usually knew about them in advance, but still I would sometimes get questions from my soldiers as to whether we would really deploy during an alert.
As we remember the fall of the Berlin Wall, there is debate in the U.S. and Europe as to what ultimately led to the fall of the Soviet Empire. Whether it was the pressure that Reagan applied on the Soviets (and less commonly acknowledged, Carter’s pressure on human rights), or whether it was the German policy of Ostpolitik, is unclear, and something that historians will no doubt continue to study and debate.
What is clear is that the Soviet Empire collapsed in large part because of economic problems rather than a military defeat. As we look back at 1979, I think there is another important event to think about that is relevant to the U.S. today. That was the same year when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. A decade later they withdrew their troops, accepted defeat, and watched as their empire collapsed.
In October 2001, the U.S. began its own war with Afghanistan. A war which continues to this day, and that our new president is planning to ask Congress for yet another “supplemental” appropriation for, this time for $50 billion. Our new president is also planning to further increase the number of U.S. troops deployed in Afghanistan, beyond the 68,000 that are already there or en route.
While this may appear to have nothing to do with the City of Falls Church, in fact it does. The U.S. economy continues to struggle, we have the highest unemployment rate in decades, state and local governments are cutting social services and spending on education. Yet the spending on war continues unabated as the federal government runs record deficits with no concern for the future financial health of our country.
The Soviet empire and Soviet economy collapsed after a decade of war in Afghanistan. The U.S. has been fighting in Afghanistan for eight years now; what will our country be like when our war reaches the ten year mark? More importantly, what can we do now to try to avoid the same fate as the Soviet empire?
Excellent pieces about the ramifications of the fall of the German wall. Many in Falls Church have been and continue to be interested, and some heavily involved in, international affairs agencies. Ours continues to be a city in which many have had direct experience in such matters and others read and are well informed.