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The USA has a long history of citizen soldiers; the threads of Athens and Sparta run through our national fabric. Countless stories of sacrifice and valor dot the national landscape and flavor the national character. Many of us actually endured the agony of combat, with sometimes inter-generational scars. Some of us served but were fortunate to have seen no direct combat, such as those of us who occupied various perilous outposts during a long, bitter, expensive 'Cold' War.
During the Cold War, millions of troops from several dozen nations were deployed along a border that divided Europe, the Europe of countless wars, Europe now devastated by two generation-killing 'world' wars that ended its primacy. The border dividing the two heavily armed camps was known as the "Iron Curtain", from Churchill's prescient phrasing.
Within East Germany, the Soviet client state that had been created as a mirror entity of its prosperous West German counterpart, an odd enclave existed: the city of Berlin. Berlin was capital of the Thousand Year Reich of Hitler; the wartime Allies jointly occupied it following end of hostilities.
Berlin itself was divided by the Iron Curtain , only this time the border stretched within its city boundaries, through neighborhoods, slicing public transport systems, locking once national treasures such as museums and universities away from one half or the other of the troubled city's occupants. West and East Berlin echoed and served as microcosm of the shared occupation of the past; whereas the occupation of the country proper had ended, and West Germany was a fully sovereign state and key member of NATO, West Berlin was still divided into four zones, for the British, French, US and Soviet victors of World War II.
Passage between the three NATO allies' zones was easy, but there was an obvious border, late to be supplanted by the famous Berlin Wall. Western troops were entitled to cross over to other zones, for purposes of inspection, and an awkward form of heavily constrained tourism was permitted for US troops. I crossed paths with Gordon MacPherson on Twitter and it was our interaction over the Berlin Orientation Tours, as they were called, that inspired this interview.
He served as a United States Air Force air traffic controller in a unit that was in support of Strategic Air Command during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and was stationed at Tempelhof Air Base in West Berlin from March 1963 to June 1965. His detail-rich 2009 article commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall is a historian's dream, and conjured up some memories on the part of yours truly. |
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Photos from Gordon
Here is a photo of JFK visiting Berlin; Gordon is to the right of the flag.
Here he is seen on a visit a few years back with the man who was his sergeant in Berlin, Jack Gaver, who died recently and was buried at Arlington:
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