In my recently released historical novel, Soldier in Germany, I show a small contingent of U.S. airmen, stationed in 1972 West Germany, who have been given the singular and most wonderful task of helping to prepare the Western allies for a nuclear war with the only other (at the time) world superpower, the Soviet Union. As the novel reveals, most of this ragtag bunch are recent Vietnam War refugees, all damaged in some body-or-mind manner, or as Sergeant Christopher Adams, the novel’s protagonist, observes: “Everyone had that burnt-around-the-edges look and what-else-can-you-do-to-me attitude.” The point of irony here is that they had just survived and somehow managed to escape that hot war of Asian hell, believing they could now chill in the snowy, fairytale land of spear-chucking barbarians, enjoying endless mugs of cellar-cooled German beer and enticing Fräuleins, only to suddenly find themselves set down in a Cold War of impending nuclear nightmares.
To even remotely try to understand their shared predicament and rabbled mindset you have to separate yourself from your distant (in both time and geography) and comforting zone of safety called Home Sweet Home and place yourself in their battered boots and wrinkled fatigues. They were all good soldiers. They had just fought (willingly or not) in a war that was very personal for them because each of them knew they were the target. They being themselves or any of those around them, sharing their fate. It was all so up close and personal. But this other thing they now shared, this Cold War, was not personal at all. As Chris was briefed his first day on the job: “Our mission is simple, Sergeant Adams: To support NATO and counter any Soviet offensive against the West. Therefore, should we come under attack—that is, should we go Condition Red—our job as a mobile unit is to immediately deploy to a secret, remote location, reestablish our operational capability, and take over command control of the ongoing offensive. Do you have any questions?”
He didn’t.
And it was during those mountain exercises they were all able to keep at least one eye on the “snuff-board”, the tall spacey-lit Plexiglass status-board standing front and center of the command center, that listed the cities, the countrysides, the entire regions where the barrage of nuclear missiles had landed and “which no longer existed, except as a wind-blown pile of charred dust, on Planet Earth.” Meanwhile, they also kept an ear pointed toward the casual conversations around them between the swaggering brass, the NATO officials, and the other so-called expert advisors calmly and assuredly discussing the various tactics and strategies they would next implement.
“What?” my ragtag bunch of young warriors shared betwixt themselves. “What are they saying? What are they doing? What in the name of God are they even thinking? Tactics and strategies? The entire fucking world is being blown apart, while they grin and wink at each other, playing their game of grab-ass chess?”
As for these young guns, it was like being in a twisted episode of The Twilight Zone. That is, there was no correlation to any notion of survivable civilization or even simple humanity. None at all. And nothing made any sense, except, perhaps, the shocking ending even a blind man could see a mile away. So, among themselves, in order to simply function and perform their duties, they were forced to make up their own game they referred to as…making movies: “Sitting there, Chris understood now what Rogers was saying, what they were being asked to do, and how could they process it in the end? They couldn’t, that was all. It was all beyond processing. And each day they got up and trudged up the frozen hill and pretended they were preparing for war. They were sharpening the sword, which, in a flash, was going to be vaporized inside a nuclear blast furnace. And, unlike the preoccupied, unheeding folks back home—who would then get to live out their last days inside a boiling, heaving cauldron of dystopic insanity, their Thirty Years War on exponential overdrive—they were surrounded by it and immersed into it most waking moments, and the sleeping ones as well. And he realized the only thinkable correlation to the unthinkable was a world of disbelief. Of fantasy. Of make-believe. They were just making movies—that was all. None of it was real, and anything else was beyond moot point. Action, cut, and fadeout.”
Anyway, that was then. And this is now. And, as their author, I would love to bring my gaggle of military misfits forward…to now. And what would they say? That is, how would they view the current world scene, the condition of humanity in general? Of course, they would be awestruck by all the advances made in every sphere of that humanity. In medicine. In technology. A few of them video-gamers, for sure. After all, their computers at the time were the size of rooms, where now you could hold all the knowledge that ever existed in the palm of your hand. But then, as they attuned themselves to our current situation, got themselves good and settled in, I’m also sure their natural survivors’ instincts would begin to kick in, as they took a further, deeper look around. At us. At now. When they would say…
“Wait a minute—you’re bringing back our old worn-out rag of a Cold War? And now everyone and their brothers are producing nukes—faster, bigger, and way more lethal than our little killer capsules, by the way—like an egg farmer produces eggs? Like that book we read, back in our time, and had fun arguing over, about Athens and the Greeks, where one moment those geniuses were at the apex of their civilization, and the next, floundering in self-induced annihilation? You mean like that? We’re sorry, but we gotta ask—what the hell are you doing? What are you even thinking? And don’t give us that tactics and strategies bullshit either. What’s that? You say you’re just making movies? And none of this is really real? That’s it? That’s all? Okay—got it. Just making movies. You go with your bad selves. Meanwhile, if it’s okay with you, we’re outta here. We’ve seen this movie before. Action, cut, and fadeout…”