Cold War Kids: The Unique Life of US Military BRATs (424)

26:23Tom Hapgood:Yeah, when we visited West Berlin in 89, we stood looking at the wall. We went to Checkpoint Charlie. We looked over the wall. We looked at the graffiti on the wall, various things. But we did get on one of those buses that would give you a little tour into East Berlin. And it was, I think it was a U.S. Army, all of drab green army bus that we drove through Checkpoint Charlie. And then they let us off at a few different predetermined locations to get some photos. And we do distinctly remember how different it was in the East compared to the West. And I don't think it's dramatic kind of retrospective, but the people didn't seem all that excited to be living.

27:07And we got ice cream at one point and it was ice with a dash of some sort of, you know, like it was shaved ice with a dash of some sort of flavor that didn't really have any flavor.

27:19Tom Hapgood:And we ate at a restaurant and it really is, it was one of those, almost like a Soviet cafeteria feel. and of course the cars were just those what was it skodas and ladas and trabis and and and and it was it was really out of the movies that experience of of getting to just fit in a trip into the east berlin situation before the wall came down and i remember sitting looking at it and i was i remember we were saying you know if this ever comes down people are going to come at this with pickaxes and And of course, that's what we saw shortly after. So it was an interesting experience to see West Berlin and East Berlin right before the wall came down.

28:04What month was that that you were there? I think it was May. I remember right. Okay. I was there May, June. We might have crossed paths somewhere along the wall. Yeah. I mean, it almost seems like another life at this point, you know. it was so long ago and the world has changed so much you know what i look back and i think oh what i wouldn't have given to have had a digital camera and just been able to take as many photos and i think i took two rolls of 36 which was you know but yeah incredible experience incredible now during the time that you're in carl's ruhr you know they're there's a sort of rise in terrorist incidents, particularly Red Army faction, the Badr-Meinhof group, were you given any specific warnings as to how to behave or to avoid certain situations?

29:05Tom Hapgood:Yeah, the Badr-Meinhof group, sometimes called the Badr-Meinhof gang, which I think is a more fun name, but they had assassinated a federal prosecutor in Karlsruhe in 77. We had, I think, the Supreme Court in Karlsruhe maybe still is there right next to the palace. And so a lot of tension there generally, but they had been bombing various places throughout Germany. They had bombed the Frankfurt airport months, I think, before we got there. My father never mentioned that to us, if he knew. But they had killed various people throughout Germany from 70. And I read up through it, actually, they were formed up through 1998, apparently.

29:48I didn't know this, but if the site I checked is true. So we had the tension of general Cold War tension. And then there was this kind of leftist Red Army faction that, honestly, I don't remember it too much. I remember a lot about the feeling that the Soviets were coming any minute, but this Red Army faction i don't know if we talked about it too much but it did inform probably the the advice we were given to just be careful generally as we went through the city they caught one of the members about a year and a half ago in berlin who had still been on the run and there's still two more that are out there they've been robbing banks in the netherlands or somewhere like that and there's still two oh interesting i'm like yeah i'm the the reason i i know this is i've been researching doing an episode about the red army faction and was sort of digging digging into it and yeah it's pretty incredible that there's still you know some of them on the run there now it's you know you you mentioned going on trips with your parents but you also had trips to various locations as part of the school, as part of the educational program or even the sports program.

31:12Can you tell me anything about those? Yeah. So each of our high schools had various sports teams and we would play the other Department of Defense schools. And there were many dozens of them, maybe. Were there something like 47 or 50 schools in Karlsruhe. We would play them. We would get on buses and or trains, go to those schools, maybe stay overnight, play tennis, basketball, soccer, football, of course. The one everyone talks about to this day, it's gone down in legend among brats is the trip to Berlin that you would take. And it was a night or two trip. And the Berlin Bears, Berlin American High School Bears, We saw them as this other level of awesome because they literally lived on an island in the east of the Warsaw Pact.

32:00And so they would travel out of Berlin to play schools over in West Germany and we would travel over to see them. We would get on a train at night in Karlsruhe, go up through Frankfurt and head then over to the little town. and a lot of your visitors will know some of these names, but it was Helmstedt was the little city at the Iron Curtain, which was the famous by associated name, Checkpoint Alpha. And we would, we would pull in there on the train. They would then detach the locomotive and the crew, the West German and or military American military police would make a bunch of changes at that point.

32:44And they would pull a GDR East German locomotive and crew, to then pull the train over to West Berlin. We would make a quick stop in Marianborn, which is where the Soviet checkpoint was. That was always the most tense. They'd come on with the AKs and the, and the dogs. And we would be, we would have to swear that we would not interfere in any way by raising the shades, taking photographs. And so that took a while. The train trip took a long time. Although it wasn't even that far because of those two stops and the changing of locomotives. And of course, the shenanigans would happen on this train and blinds would be raised.

33:28Photographs would be taken with flash. And at that point, the train would lurch to a halt again and people would, the shouting would start. The Soviets, they took this all very seriously. I look at it with a bit of humor at this point, but it was really serious and scary at the time. they'd come on and they'd identify the poor kid who's quaking, who took the photo. Sometimes it was a boy scout or a, or a high schooler. And then the coaches are, you know, everyone's running around and trying to figure out how to punish this kid and probably his father. And ultimately, you know, we'd make it through after some point.

34:04We always heard the story of the British kids who threw eggs at the guards. And so that might've played into things too. I don't know if that's, if that's a real history or not, but okay. we'd travel through the night through East Germany. Of course, the whole time we're looking out the blinds. I mean, this would be like taking a trip through North Korea now. I mean, I'd want to see what it looks like out there. We'd then arrive at Checkpoint Bravo, which was at the sort of Southwest of Berlin. I forget the name of the little town. It was later Potsdam, I think, but Checkpoint Bravo, they'd switch again the locomotive back to a West German locomotive and team and take us into the station where we would get off the train, check into a hotel or barracks or whatever somewhere, play our very important sports, tennis, football, soccer.

34:57I believe we stayed overnight and maybe we went sightseeing a few times around West Berlin and then we would get back on the train and repeat the entire thing. And the shenanigans on the train during the night are legendary. I mean, they were these compartments where the seats would fold down into beds and we were, you know, quote, sleeping through the night on the trip and the heavy metal, the Doritos, the running around, the being crazy. It was everyone's biggest memory about these high school trips. The rest of them were a train trip that was still fun, but the Berlin duty train experience is beyond anything to kind of explain to people today what it was like.

35:40And I guess, again, if you took a train through North Korea, that might be a similar experience today where it's kind of a Hunger Games situation. I can imagine we'll probably have people contacting us via the Facebook group or elsewhere with their experiences, and they'd be very welcome to do that. We're always interested in hearing about people's experiences that link to episodes or don't even link to episodes. Did you smuggle any contraband alcohol onto these trains or not? Surely not. No, that never happened, I'm sure. I, weirdly, living in Germany was not a drinker, but a lot of my friends were.

36:20So I imagine, I remember a good Coke or something, but yeah, that must have been part of the experience. And those kids who lived in Berlin, those American kids, and a lot of us, but they had a go bag ready to go just in any case that they were ordered to evacuate, that they just kept it in the closet.

36:41Tom Hapgood:And I learned recently that this was not the case in my day, but kids throughout the sixties, maybe into the seventies, the children actually wore dog tags at all times. And they had these evacuation cards. Leslie Brown, who I reached out to on a Facebook group said that they wore these dog tags every day, had these evacuation cards, evacuation drills at the school. And I had those too. This was before ID cards. And these, these, these dog tags had typical things, but they had, so they had the student's name. They had the dad's name, his rank. It might've been mother, but often dad's name, rank, ID number, religion, blood type, and whether you were a son or daughter.

37:26And I didn't know about that, But that was interesting. So through the years, you would literally have identification on you at all times in the form of the dog tag. That is interesting. I mean, what were you told about what was going to happen should the Soviet hordes pour across the inner German border? We were a little bit lucky in that we lived about as far from the east as possible. Karlsruhe was down in the southwest of Germany. There were a few further down south, but we had maybe a little more time. And we had these non-combatant evacuation orders, these NEO drills of a sort. We would go to the high school gymnasium and kind of pretend that the balloon had gone up and the Soviets were on the way.

38:12And what do we do? And the idea was that we were going to go across the street. We had a dirt airfield. It was mostly a helicopter base. but we would apparently C-130s or whatever would swoop down in and we'd all climb in the back, kids and parents and mothers and pets, and be lifted out of there and head west. But, you know, we come to found out later that those C-130s would have been doing some other really important tasks. And maybe it was just to kind of help us be calm in the idea that something was coming. More likely we'd get in our cars and head for the bridge that went over into France and just keep going.

38:52So that was a drill we would do kind of frequently. And the one, the one other trip I'll mention real quickly is we would play sports against Fulda American high school. Fulda was the Fulda Falcons. And that was the, the home of the 11th armored cavalry regiment, the black horse regiment. And so we would go, our little bus would pass into the main gate and we would see the tanks lined up and we thought the black horse logo on the shield was really cool and as we would play our tennis match the rest of us would be sitting on the bleachers and i remember this one match it was eternal it was endless these two girls hitting the ball moon ball back and forth with each other it went on for hours it was this kind of stalemate and there we sat on the bleachers and behind the courts we could see the folded gap, the famous folded gap where the Soviets were going to come through.

39:46It had been used in the past by various armies. And it was a funny moment. I remember somebody saying, what do we do if they come through right now? And we grab our rackets and just start running West. And, you know, there were, there were nuclear landmines over there and some guy attached to a wire was going to push a button. And so, I mean, it would have been wild that we were sitting there playing tennis and then having that happen. I mean, it literally could have happened at any moment. So that's one we all remember too. I think Shaquille O 'Neal actually went to that high school when he was over there a few years before me, the basketball player here.

40:21Did you play any matches against some of the other NATO brats? So I'm looking for a classic football match, US against the British. Did you ever have anything like that?

40:34Tom Hapgood:I was on a soccer team and we had our American style of playing just speed and strength and pushing hard. And it was so different. We would play the local German teams and they would absolutely destroy us because of their precision and they'd grown up with it. Meanwhile, we're playing with rackets and footballs also. And so it's what I blame our lack of soccer prowess on is just other sports getting in the way. So we would play them. It was hard. We would go up to V spot and there was a all Europe tennis tournament there. And there were a lot of kids there, mostly American kids, but we also had a lot of NATO kids that would come.

41:16Tom Hapgood:And I mean, we had shape up in Belgium, Supreme headquarters, allied powers, Europe, AFSENT. I think that was in the Netherlands where there were a lot of kids from other countries that would show up at these, at these events. And so I think it was mostly we'd play other American high schools, but at various times we'd have some other nationalities there with us. Yeah, but no football match against the British. No, sadly. That is a shame. Maybe it happened and I wasn't there, but if we could go back. Opportunity missed, I think. Massive opportunity missed. did you play any tennis there were you playing tennis as well as football my main sport was tennis and it was a different crowd than the american football crowd um and i remember that the interesting thing was that the varying court surfaces we would plan we'd go down to munich and play munich american high school in tennis and the the courts were some sort of lego plastic material it was very strange then another place you know whether it was or berlin i think Berlin had a bubble over their clay courts.

42:29Tom Hapgood:And we had, I think we had grass courts somewhere. And of course, the hard court surfaces everywhere. So that was interesting alone. I think if you played tennis here and traveled to other schools, it's going to be entirely hard court. So even just the surfaces of the courts were very different depending on where we ended up. I'm interested to know because I do play tennis a couple of times a week and I was intrigued to hear your experiences of a European clay court because it's such a different pace and way of playing on there you're sliding into shots and it's so different I love getting dirty playing tennis and I love the sliding into the shot and by far that was our favorite our favorite surface grass was too fast and and the lego was just some of the I don't even know what that was called yeah I've never even heard of that wow gonna research the lego yeah there's probably no results because i'm i don't know what to call it yeah yeah or it'll come up with loads of lego sets of tennis players and things like that so you know when you look back at your time as a a brat in germany what what would you say was your best time there what's what was the thing that you know really sticks with you as being really memorable and really good for you?

43:51And you can guess what the next question is going to be after this. I want to say everything because we had such a great time. I had jobs.

44:00Tom Hapgood:I had a job on Gerzuski barracks. Karlsruhe had five or six caserns or installations. And I had a job working on tanks and armored personnel carriers and self-propelled, self-propelled Canon M109, self-propelled big tracked vehicles, pulling tracks off, greasing wheels. It was terrible work in the summer, but it was so fun. I got to ride in an M1 Abrams and that stance, I was a bunch of high school kids yucking it up and working hard and making relatively good money on an army base right near the Rhine river. That was a great summer. That was my final summer there. Wow. That beats washing cars, I guess.

44:41It really does. Greasing bearings and axles of large armored equipment was, I mean, I still think back at how interesting and fun that was compared to the delivering chicken wings on a bicycle or whatever people are doing here. Yeah, it sounds like you'd be a lot of use at some of these military museums in terms of maintaining some of their collection, if you've got that sort of expertise. I thought about it. My claim to contributing to the war cause, because I never joined up, I kind of wish I had, but the vehicles we worked on in that summer job, then within months, I think August 2nd or whatever, when we started sending everything down to Desert Storm in 1990,

45:22Tom Hapgood:my vehicles that I greased the bearings for went to fight in the Gulf War. That's my contribution as a 19-year-old. So what was your worst experience, Tom, of being there? Or something that happened to you that was, I don't know, not great for you, made you sad?

45:51Tom Hapgood:I'm going to go ahead and list this and let's see if this works for the answer. In April of 1986, we had sent some fighter bombers down to Libya to bomb Libya as a response to some terroristic bombings they had done in various places, including a discotheque in Germany. And at the conclusion of that little incident of the bombing, we were not allowed to meet in groups of more than 10 at school or church, weren't allowed to wear, and this was the hardest part, I say this jokingly, but we weren't allowed to wear our letter jackets, our Nikes, or our Levi's into the city because we would easily be identified as Americans.

46:33Tom Hapgood:And I think the mullets, well, Germans wore a lot of mullets then too, but there were a lot of ways to tell that we were American kids, but it was really tense. A lot of new kind of hardened or barriers had gone up in front of all the installations. Everyone was tense. A lot of parents were kind of ready to deploy or, and not being able to meet. It was a little bit like a tiny, tiny experience of COVID maybe where all of a sudden we had to be really isolated for a couple weeks and not meet and see other people. Pre-internet, we were really isolated. That was maybe the scariest time that I remember.

47:10And anyway, yeah. So you're there when the wall comes down as well? We were.

47:17Tom Hapgood:My father then was there when it went up and came down. It was interesting. So I sadly didn't then get to Berlin again. Everybody I knew was getting on piling in cars and going and chopping pieces off the wall. And I have a lot of pictures of my friends there. But for whatever reason, I was heading off to college and I couldn't make it.

47:50Details.com.

48:20slow and network is busy. See terms. Can you remember how you heard that the Berlin Wall had opened?

48:28Tom Hapgood:I think in my memory, it took a lot of people by surprise, even though if you look back, there were a lot of things leading up to it down in some of the other countries people were already driving across and whatever. But I remember I had just arrived at college and it was on the news and I sat around in a dorm with a bunch of people watching. And I think I'd been, I'd left Germany maybe five days earlier. And I remember it wasn't talked about. It was a little bit of a surprise, but I mean, I was, I was, I think weeping at one point, it was shocking the footage of the people on top of that. I had just been there a few months before to see the people coming through the wall and the little, the Trabis and the Skodas and the little cars coming through the wall and everybody hugging and it, you know, being this, you couldn't have imagined the wall coming down in the mid late 80s it was something that wasn't going to ever happen in our minds the shock was off the charts crying it was it was something in my mind is one of the biggest events i think of my life that i've ever seen is just the footage of that that day that that it opened up and the east german guard standing there just sort of like yeah you know whatever we'll just we don't know what to do go ahead you know and people chopping at it and climbing on it and And I, you know, I do wonder if the Scorpions as influenced by the CIA going over and influencing in the Soviet Union and planting the seeds of freedom of heavy metal really contributed to bringing the wall down.

50:03There's that story that the CIA asked the Scorpions, they deny it, but the wind of change years, that was, those were just interesting, fun years. yeah i always thought it was david hasselhoff who brought it down the half maybe yeah yeah yeah but you're right immensely powerful uh scenes i i remember clearly watching the news that night and thinking this is real history that's happening in my time you know something that is going to be remembered for many, many years to come as a monumental moment. And even then, we didn't really expect the Soviet Union was going to fall apart. And then within two years, that had disappeared.

50:53I teach at the University of Arkansas. I had a student in here. She's helping me with my second book. I released my first one called Lost Letters some months ago about the time over there in Germany. And I asked her, so I mentioned Checkpoint Charlie and she, she is one of the generation. She's a smart person, but she hadn't heard of Checkpoint Charlie. And so I kind of went through, well, so the cold war was, was this and that. And so it's hard to describe to, to younger people today. It would be like visiting Korea today. And there's no, no sense that that, the DMZ, is that they're ever going to pull those fences down and join those two countries again?

51:34There's no sense that would ever happen. It's like that today, tomorrow hearing, oh, well, they're going to, you know, North is opening up and North and South are going to reunite. It was that sense back then that would never happen. So you mentioned there your book, Lost Letters. Can you just tell me a bit about what that is? And does that reflect your own experiences in there? In 2020, I was on a sabbatical from the university. And then the sad thing is really everybody was on a sabbatical. So my sabbatical wasn't as interesting as it could have been because everyone was at home off of work because of COVID.

52:12But I, during that time, started thinking. I had a moment to think. I started to write a memoir. And as I got a little way into it, I thought, you know, there's enough here to make an interesting novel about my life and the life of all these brat kids living over in Germany. and I researched a lot.

52:32Tom Hapgood:My acknowledgments page is a full page of people. I talk to historians, medieval historians, U.S. Army historical historians, Germans, Americans, Brats. So all the history that happens in it is accurate, but I've woven a novel throughout it. And we had a very prominent former German military officer living in Karlsruhe from 54 to 61, and he had been tasked by the U.S. Army to write the history of the war, especially in the East. As the United States was about to potentially get into a third world war in the East with the Soviets, we really wanted to know how to fight them. And so we hired Germans who had done that.

53:16They knew where the rail lines were, where the factories were, where the fighting styles and what had worked and what hadn't worked during the Second World War. so they hired this former officer and he hired a team of hundreds and hundreds of people and they created hundreds and hundreds of documents they were very nice to themselves and it's where we get a lot of the idea of we were just following orders and these kind of things so he was living in carlsru at the time and so a friend of mine had lived in that apartment years later and they'd get

53:47Tom Hapgood:mail for him at the apartment. And he had been the chief of the army high command under Hitler during the second world war. And so there was this interesting connection to history is that my friend is getting mail for this former officer who, by the way, not my friend, the officer was the only person in history to receive the highest civilian award from both Adolf Hitler and John F. Kennedy, which is a fun little tidbit. And so that was happening right there. and in the city where I lived. And so I wove all that. I teach typography and graphic design, and so I wove in some medieval typography in monasteries and World War II and post-war history and brats living in Karlsruhe and some things that did happen to me personally and other things that didn't.

54:37And it's called Lost Letters, and I released it a few months ago.

54:41Tom Hapgood:A lot of the brats are really liking it because it takes them back. It's a bit of time travel. And it's been interesting and fun and therapeutic for me to work through what all that meant and to relive it again. And it's for sale wherever you can buy books, e-book and printed book. And there will be links in the episode information as to where you can buy the book as well. So do check that out. Now, behind you, Tom, that looks like a German registration plate on the wall. Is there any significance about that? This is the license plate of Karlsruhe. As many listeners may know, in Germany and other countries, the first two letters.

55:22So the license plate on my wall is K-A-M and then some numbers. So the Karlsruhe license plate. Now, we didn't have those license plates. We had U.S. forces license plates were the little rectangular ones that mimicked the United States license plates. So that's just a fun memory. It's hanging right below the Royal Air Force's 1944 map of Karlsruhe that they used to plan the bombings of Karlsruhe. So that's just an interesting, it's a poster-sized map of the RAF's map of Karlsruhe. Yeah, the license plate is, and then it's surrounded by some old heavy metal festival posters, Monsters of Rock, mid-late 80s posters.

56:04And my students come in and are a bit shocked at the range of bizarre artifacts on the walls in here. It's brilliant. It's brilliant. It's interesting that the US military had different license plates because the British discontinued that policy after the IRA started attacking their troops in West Germany. because I mean your license plates mind you if you're driving an American big American car in Germany it's going to be pretty apparent that you're probably U.S. forces but I guess if you have a regular German civilian car and you've got one of those plates on it still identifies you as U.S. forces yeah and not only that that we would have these American very obvious American had a usa on the license plate different size different shape different color usa on it we also had a lot of you know had that oval sticker that we would put also on the back of the car that said usa on it so and you'd see the d for germany various other countries i don't know if that was a trend or tradition or whatever but so as if it wasn't clear enough that we were american from the license plate we also had the usa and the gigantic chevys and these these station wagons and suvs that the americans so the military would allow you to bring your car from the states and so they'd ship these cars over and so there were a lot of indicators that that you're an american driving around and yeah i did often wonder about that should we not just try to blend in more but yeah i guess you were lucky your you know your dad was posted somewhere that drove on the right rather than the uk because it was obviously the same thing you could bring your own car to the uk if you were serving in the u.s air force for example and our roads a lot of our roads aren't well aren't designed for vehicles of that sort of width right now with the end of the cold war a lot of these bases were closed, which would have had significant effect on the locals and the local economies.

58:18Tom Hapgood:So we have footage available from the day that the U.S. Army pulled out of Karlsruhe, Germany, 1995, I think in maybe the spring or summer. It was a suitably rainy overcast day with the ceremony with the flags and the music and the band. And it was in the main plots, the main square down in Karlsruhe, ringed by hundreds and hundreds of German people watching. And it was a moment of history where this entire community that lived in the middle of Karlsruhe, I mean, at its peak, it was 12 ,000 to 15 ,000 Americans living there in the center of this town, along with all the other installations throughout Germany that were closed and repositioned in mid-late 90s.

59:08Let's say Karlsruhe closed in 95. And it was a suitably moody day because generally the Americans and Germans in Karlsruhe had a good relationship. And I interviewed the final community commander of Karlsruhe some years later when I was researching for a film. And interesting, he says, to one day pick up a town and move it out of the center of another town. And the housing, people left their cars, people left their pets, people left all their furniture, all their belongings. It was a massive cleanup effort to try to bring in the different services that would be needed to deal with all of this.

59:51And when the base closed, there were a lot of what we call the local nationals, whether Germans or Turks or French people who worked on the bases would suddenly be unemployed. I think maybe they had been allowed to try to transfer to a different city or something. But the marriages, the intermarriages of the officers and soldiers and civilian Americans who had married French and German partners and the hit of the economy of the city was certainly kind of big because especially when the exchange rates were good. I mean, the Americans had relatively a lot of money sometimes to go down and drink and shop and visit.

1:00:35So it's something that we don't really maybe think about as just an entire town packing up and moving. And all those people, of course, got repositioned to bases in the States, other bases in Germany. And then now it's just bizarre to think that a lot of people are being positioned forward over in Romania and Poland. I mean, we couldn't have imagined that back then. But. Listen to the heartbeat. Chevy is called the heartbeat of America for a reason. With SUVs made to move with your rhythm. The versatile Equinox tackles your entire day. The spacious Traverse fits your crew and your whole weekend.

1:01:17And tracks bring style with value you can count on. All infused with tech that has your back. So your drive always hits the right chord. Chevrolet. Together let's drive. So it was a big change for Carl's. In the years right after the Cold War ending, we had these base realignment and closures, these bracts where the government here, the people in Congress kind of took a look at the budget and where we need people. Do we need all these forces in these forward places still when the Soviet Union fell apart? And the reduction in forces in the presence in Europe and other countries is just massive.

1:02:00in those late 90s, mid-late 90s years after the end of the war. We felt that quite a lot in the UK, particularly with the US Air Force bases out in the east of England, places like Upper Hayford, Greenham Common, those sort of places. Because, you know, there's a load of people in these bases with a lot of money who want to spend it. And yeah, big effect on the local economy.

1:02:28Tom Hapgood:Let me throw in two one-minute snippets. We remember strongly when the Chernobyl incident happened, and you can see that on the maps, on the news, they would show the cloud coming. And we apparently had been in that reception of the cloud after Chernobyl blew up. And I had a couple people on Facebook. Jason Lady said that he remembers the Chernobyl disaster happening. And there was a girl on the school bus saying that they were all going to die of radiation poisoning. And then he remembers people in white suits with Geiger counters coming into the front yard. And apparently the Geiger counters were off the charts.

1:03:08And, you know, people like him and others also can't donate blood to this day because we also had the mad cow situation happening around the same time. And, you know, even today, I tried recently to donate blood. And apparently since we lived in the 80s in Europe, we can't donate blood. So a lot of the brass remember the Chernobyl years, and then the mad cow comes up all the time if you try to donate blood. Wow. Wow, that's incredible. God, we'd forgotten about mad cow disease. That's really ancient history. But obviously in the U.S., you still hold that against us. Okay. I know.

1:03:56Tom Hapgood:And Chad Elmore lived in Korea. He provided the story where his school bus had chicken wire on the window so that no one could toss grenades into the school bus. Wow. What year was that? Did he say what year that was? He didn't. He also lived in Germany near a Nike missile site. And then Lisa Ng provided me the story of that Berlin trip where she was on the train. the platform was lined with Soviet soldiers, very rigid, very stern, tense situation. And as the train began to pull out of the station, she and her friends were waving to the Soviet soldiers. And they were of course, very, um, unresponsive until one at the very end, slightly raised his hand to, to, to wave at them with a little half smile.

1:04:51And she thinks of that day to this day that, At the end of the day, we are all just people living on various sides of these issues. But given the chance, we can all get along. So I thought that was a nice little tidbit that she provided. But a very unique experience living as a brat overseas. That's a lovely story from Lisa. I'm glad you shared that with us. And it's been incredible speaking with you and understanding more of this sort of, I guess it's quite a forgotten story. an unknown story of the Cold War and I do like an unknown story to share with our listeners. It's not all spies and nuclear near misses.

1:05:36Regular life goes on and a lot of particularly US and British troops did bring their dependents to their stations overseas. The episode extras such as videos, photos and other content are available via a link in the episode information. The podcast wouldn't exist without the generous efforts of our financial supporters and I'd like to thank one and all of them for keeping the podcast on the road. The Cold War conversation continues in our Facebook discussion group. Just search for Cold War Conversations in Facebook. Thanks very much for listening and look forward to seeing you next week. Thank you.