Tuesday, November 12, 2013

"The Soldier" - Alien in the Delta Series

    

When Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, I was at a basketball game on the base, and the game was interrupted. We were told to go back to the barracks. The entire base was put on stand-by alert after the announcement, waiting for more news about the president. Later on we found out that he had been assassinated. You can imagine the kind of things that went through our minds. We had just gone through the Cuban Missile Crisis in October of 1962 with the USSR. Our natural suspicion was to think that the Russians had something to do with the assassination.
We didn’t know if we were going war. “This is it,” I thought. “The end of my life, and I am so far away from home.” Germany was the United States’ first line of defense. We were in imminent danger with Russia being so close to Germany. Do you know what it feels like to be frightened for a few minutes? Now try to imagine what that must feel like for a month. No one could leave the base until it was clear that we were not going to war with the Russians. It took at least six months before we began to feel like the world was not coming to an end.