Conscripted to a West German Nuclear Missile Unit (457)

29:05They were the radio signal guys and it all came together. And Diddy and I shared our little tent where it's not really a tent. Every soldier was given half a tent as a cloth that you buttoned up. And then with a couple of sticks, you built a tent from this. And we spent three nights together, feet sticking out the one way face the other one in this very tiny space. And you must know that Diddy was a little bit more of a corpulent guy. So he filled out the tent a little bit better than I did. But we had a ton of fun together and making, of course, lots of fun about our trainers, you know, the NCO, I think you call them NCOs, I think, in British.

29:51Kris:Yeah, it was lots of fun. at the end of 11 weeks you're sent to your first operational unit so tell me about that so the way this worked is that one day you were going to be told where to go and everybody gets called into the staff room where the officers of the unit and basically you're just given you're going here and they just tell you the abbreviations i didn't know what fkg was so they tell you third fkg one i'm like okay whatever but you're curious and then you ask your your trainer and he says hey what is this i understand it's landsberg i'm late he says oh you're going to the pershing missile boys all right oh my god okay whatever and i was not the only one so there were a couple ones and you carpool i was i had a car at that time available we built little car uppool communities.

30:50And I drove down the one day that we were released into our home units,

30:56Kris:as we call them, together from Rott down to Landsberg am Lecht towards FKG1. And I had no idea what to expect. It's all you've never been there before, right? We took it slow. We drove together, stopped on various occasions to have coffee or a good meal. And finally, at some point, we had to report, right? And yeah, so you drive up to the gate. Here I am. You show your troop ID and they tell you where to go. And yeah, I guess I did a mistake. I drove with my car right in front of the building, parking pretty much in front of the staff major's parking spot to unload our crap. got all sorts of shit for that, unloaded my stuff and moved the car quickly away.

31:49And here I was. I became part of the Pershing story of the Bundeswehr. In those early days, there's obviously more experienced troops there, potentially professional troops there. How did they treat these new conscripts?

32:06Kris:I guess the professional ones, they were professional. The other conscripts, it was all about your time still to be served. In my case, I was the rookie, so to speak, the greenhorn, the Füchse, as we call them in German. and of course everybody whenever they saw someone that had just arrived they were all yelling folks which means fox basically you're worth nothing right so you got that treatment very nicely constantly in the first weeks after time it slowed down a bit but initially it was always you're you were put in your space i would say so was it just verbal it was verbal i don't know about I don't know about other platoons.

32:56In my case, all the communications, it was purely verbal. Nothing bad. Nothing happened to me or anything like that. I was not mistreated. I was not obliged to stupid things. It was just a verbal thing. And you learn how to deal with it. You ignore it, ultimately. So being the Greenhorns, the newbies in the unit, I'm presuming that you're made to do some of the roles that are less popular, such as guard duty? Well, guard duty was up to everybody. So the way this worked, Ian, is that I spoke about QRA before, right, the quick reaction alert.

33:31Kris:So the missile wings, both one and two, had four operational squadrons, one, two, three, four. And the modus operandi up until 1986, November, December, I forget, was that one squadron One was in the high alert QRA site, as we called it. And the other three were basically on a different level of alert. There were in total three levels of alert. One was QRA, so you were out in that QRA for a full week. Fully weaponed, you couldn't get out, you were there. Pretty much like Scott, I think it was, serving with Pershing 2. Chris is talking about episode 122, which featured Scott, who was 23 years old and commanding a Pershing-2 nuclear missile.

34:23There'll be a link in the episode information if you'd like to listen to that.

34:28Kris:The Americans went there for three months, which was quite different. We were there for a week before that. and then after that one week where you were basically 24 7 on alert on a site not able to leave you were put on release which meant you were home you were at home for four weeks not doing anything you were at home no alarm duty whatsoever and then you had basically two weeks of it was called bereitschaft which was a 12-hour alert which meant ultimately that within four hours you had to be in garrison which meant back then no one had a mobile phone you had to leave phone numbers if you were going somewhere that kind of thing that changed when i was there the qra alert week i will say was a week of guard duty and of course the younger ones were given the shitty days so my first guard duty was on Easter Friday, where the garrison was empty.

35:33So depending on where you were in this level, you were given the weekend guards, the shitty guards, the holiday guards, that kind of thing. And as you progress through time, you were given the better guards that had to be served. So one staffel always had to do the guard duty.

35:50Kris:Normally, it was the QRA weeks before you were in QRA but now it was the guard week and yeah everybody had to do guard duty regularly and as I said in the beginning it was always the weekend guards it was all the holiday guards that kind of thing and you were having to guard I think it's three sites that FKG-1 correct so so Landsberg was at the time a very military heavy city there was the Flugkörper one but also two army garrisons fkg operated a total of three sides there was the sabor caserne which was the garrison itself where we were all basically at home and all our equipment meaning vehicles what have you were basically stationed this place has now become a residential area by the way so this was one the other one was this lager which means this was where the missile stages were stored in bunkers this was south of landsberg in a little area called donstetten this was a luxury guard because there were two watchtowers that had to be manned and the third site that had to be guarded was the quick reaction alert site which was the site Ochsenhof nearby Kempten very much in the south of Germany and there this was the real winner guard, luxury guard par excellence I will say where one of the main watchtower had to be manned and only very senior recruits were given that type of guard.

37:33The benefit of that one was actually that the soldiers that drove out there in a little VW bus, the catering was in a gasthouse. So you went down to Görisried, which was the nearest village. And in that gasthouse, you were given your lunch and your dinner. Very nice. Very nice. And I think with Dornstedt and you actually had heating in the guard towers. Yeah, there was a little electric heater on this guard tower. So you walked up the guard tower and there were two lamps that allowed you at night to survey a little bit the field in front of this site and in winter you could operate a little heater so you're not freezing your butts off while walking not having to walk you were up there i shouldn't probably say this i had a walk man with me when i was on the on that guard tower and i was listening to my favorite records and some radio while i was doing that you shouldn't have been caught with that but evidently there There were ways to sneak that up there.

38:31You had a telephone to report if you saw anything. On one occasion, actually, while I was in Dornstetten on the watchtower, a car stopped on the Bundesstraße that was in front of that and started looking at us. And I said, huh, this is kind of suspicious. So I called the guard, the officer or NCO having a duty guard. I told him, there's this car here, and he's looking at us. And he said, okay, just keep observing. After a while, he drove off, so nothing worried.

39:01Kris:But we were up there and taking a good look at what was happening. What were you guarding against? What were the threats that you were expecting during that period? Well, like I said, we were told RAF wanting to steal weapons. That could have been one. So you're talking Red Army Faction, not the Royal Air Force? No, no, not the Royal Air Force. Yes, thank you for reminding me of that. Royal Red Army Fraction, Badermeinhof, the latest generation. As a matter of fact, just before I joined the Bundeswehr, I think about half a year before, one of the Bundeswehrkassianers was attacked by them. They stole weapons.

39:37Kris:So this was one. I guess it was also more the topic around Pershing being such a controversial word and weapon system in German society with activism, opponents of rearmament with the double track decision of NATO, those kind of things. But again, for Dornstetten and QRA was not a problem. This was more concern around Sabor Caserne, really downtown in Landsberg, because the gate was very much in a street that was a bit condensed. We had two gates, one on the side and the main gate. But the main gate, you could very easily have blocked, let's say, with an action. And luckily, I never experienced one.

40:25My first guard was actually a gate guard, which after I experienced that one, I said, I don't want to do again. I prefer to meander around the caserna with a buddy. The gate guard, I did not enjoy because particularly when it was a quiet holiday, nothing happened. You were just sitting there and standing there. And at night, you would walk up to the gate because, again, at night, we closed the gate. And as you walk up, you don't know who's there and what the intentions are. So I did not feel too comfortable about that one.

40:55Kris:I prefer to meander around the caserne when I had guard duty. What were your rules of engagement on those guard duties? Pretty much, it's very simple. When you are assigned guard duty, there's a process called vergatterung, which means you're changing your disciplinary lines. fence you become part of the guard team and and your purpose really is to stop anybody from going over the fence and that's as simple as that meaning you first of course you threat meaning stop don't move as a wache you are entitled to control people relative to identify yourself you can hold people stop don't move and then you have to call more senior people evidently But yeah, you're walking around along the fence line at 2 in the morning, 2.30 in the morning, and you hear noises.

41:52Kris:You can be a little bit concerned, let's say, here and there.

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42:59Kris:Yeah, ultimately, it's not like you're supposed to kill someone. No, that's not the case. You're supposed to stop something from happening. And that starts with levels of escalation. first address the person and if need be to make use of the weapon not to kill but to stop someone from doing something and when you're not on guard duty what were your other duties well in communications we were basically taking a lot of care of our equipment being so tactical we were out in the field pretty much every quarter i would say three times three to four times on different trainings these were levels of wing training where the whole wing basically dispersed into the woods or just at our staffel our squadron level we even had communications trainings so every quarter we were out in the woods in the mud regularly which means training setting up but then bringing the equipment back in.

44:04You have to take care of it, clean it. In our case, look after the wires, splice them back up again. Our telephones, our field telephones, they had batteries, make sure they're working. They were not treated very nicely by people. So you had to select the ones that had to go back to service. And in my case, we had our equipment in the basement and that allowed us to catch up on sleep occasionally when needed because we were out in the basement taking care of these things but okay every once in a while doing siesta but yeah it was a mix between

44:39Kris:taking care of our stuff looking after our equipment and training there was a lot of training going out into the woods and what was it like working with the americans it was in my case speaking english i actually talked a lot to these guys every time we went out there was a process so we would pack up our gear go to assembly areas where we would get the wing the squadron together in a line who's following the convoy we would go in convoys in different paths. And that's where you would basically get a lot of contact with these guys. Being communications, one of my tasks was always to give them a phone and make sure they had a means of communication wired.

45:28And that just brought contact with these guys. I remember that in one of the trainings where we were out on the QRA, I really appreciated our American friends doing a barbecue and putting hamburgers on the grill for their german friends so that was nice in a way i envied them a little bit because i thought that their equipment was so much better than ours relative to the unit the gear that you wear in winter they had over boots plastic boots so your boots wouldn't get soaked up in water and that kind of stuff they had the nice cortex jackets the military gear of the german bundeswehr back then in the 80s was not the best once wet you wouldn't get it dry again and these guys had much more modern stuff

46:17Kris:i think also their rifle the m16 was a lot lighter than our g3 but you start talking to these guys it was a good exchange i enjoyed it yeah yeah and i'm grateful for you sending me the Pershing II firing battery manual. Yeah, I thought that would be interesting because, again, there's evidently procedures in a lot of... I think that one doesn't tell the 1A procedures in full because it's so much more developed. Pershing II was so much more modern compared to 1A. Yeah, total differences. It was interesting because it gave you like the order of the convoys, the local area defense set up when you were out in the field and things like that.

47:03It was interesting. And very 1980s, the graphics on it, you can tell what decade that's from. I remember talking about these lines and that kind of thing. We always, so maybe I should talk a little bit about how a squadron was set up. I don't think we have talked about that. So you had evidently the staff taking care of meals that you get your pay that kind of thing your vacation slips and that kind

47:29Kris:of thing which were very important there was communications that was me a very small team ours was actually led by a hauptfeldwebel so not even an officer an nco you call it in britain then you had the missile platoon which was operating the missiles very technical guys and there was conscripts in that one as well this was amazing this is where i think the bundeswehr is a bit special in this space because i think 50 of every missile wing was composed of conscripts like me that was serving their 15 months and you had guys 15 months conscripts being right next to the missile which was a no-go area i was always told keep a distance of one meter that's your rule don't go to it don't touch it and then you had the biggest platoon i will say or team which was i guess the best way to describe it is infantry these guys are the ones that are going to protect you and we're talking about more than 100 guys that were in this team whereas communications we were maybe 20 a lot of the soldiers in each squadron were really troops that were protecting us and their main equipment was barbed wire i mean they would literally set up rings around the missiles with barbed wire that marked and you were not allowed to go close anywhere in the air or in my case i was very always very close to the the pcc so the platoon control center where ultimately the commander was with the shooting box also there a very restricted area yeah that's how we were set up and again we would move into spaces in the forest and then simulate our shootings and then go elsewhere that was survivability of pushing always be on the move it must have been quite difficult because every 15 months you're going to get another load of people through absolutely you've then got a train and start it all again it's a very inefficient way it was but somehow i don't know how it worked ultimately somehow it worked i guess in the bundesphere we were different to the u.s guys like scott right this guy that you interviewed these were professionals they were they had signed up for a period of time four years six years ten years whatever you had a lot of constant movement in here somehow it worked this was i think this is an amazing part of all of this that just normal recruits during their 15 months were assigned to this type of an organization or team or in your notes you talk about the tack evals the tactical evaluation exercises can you just take me through how those worked and the role of the comms teams and what you got up to yeah so both of the missile wings of bundeswehr were also basically on the direct assignment of nato shape and saccure fourth allied tactical air force in my case with fkg1 and basically we had to provide proof on a yearly basis to NATO that we were up to speed and sharp, I would say.

50:50This is what was called the tactical evaluation. In my case, again, times have changed. We were no longer on this constant alert QRA status, what have you. But still, we had to provide that we were following procedures, that we were sharp, that we were a unit that was up to the level, I will say. Takavel, in my case, in 87, started with pre-alarm. So I remember that at one time someone, I think it was in October, in the middle of the night, the alarm went off and everybody get going. Pack up all your stuff as if you're leaving the barracks. We had to take everything with us. Which meant really, this was like, we're going to war, I will say.

51:40My closet was empty after this.

51:44Kris:And it took that level of preparation, loaded your gear into the vehicles, and up until the point where we went to the assembly area. And that's where the drill ended for that moment. So this was around the end of the day of that day and to be continued. And there were these guys with little marks on their arm here, observer, what have you. taking all sorts of notes, how this was all happening, what was happening, how we were dealing with things. They were just observing and taking notes. And this all went into the evaluation of how the alarming went and how we followed procedures and all that kind of thing.

52:32And then it ended, there was pause and now the drill is over. So we're going back, you unpack everything back again and everything's fine. So that was tackable first part. And then we were told that, again, in December of 87, and this is the ironic part, we were to show up to barracks on Sunday, the 13th of December of 87 for the continuation of Tacheville, which was now basically from where we had left in the assembly area to go on now into the field and, you know, play the script, I would say.

53:10Kris:ironically on december 8th of 87 the inf treaty was signed by mr reagan and mr govachev and the fact that we rolled out the whole fkg1 rolled out of landsberg on that sunday caused all sorts of stirrups with the green parties and how can this be they're playing war again after the inf treaty was signed that kind of thing regardless it was not internet times we are not as connected we didn't realize this it was snowing it was a cold winter and here we are again rolling out with our missiles with the whole gear into the forests as the other colleague from pershing too said we always headed west not east going into pre-surveyed areas in german forests around landsberg in this case we patched a very long line from there were these telephone posts with deutsche bundespost boxes which we were allowed to open and hook up our cables so that we would have telephony network and we laid a cable that was at least, I guess, two kilometers into our site for telephony and telefax.

54:28Yeah. And then basically went through levels of escalation, simulated launches, pack up again, go to another site. And yeah, that was techaval. And then on the end of the week, we went back to barracks. I commend my major because he was always the one that said, no one leaves the barracks until everybody's back home. And we, the wire guys, were the ones that had to collect all the wires that we had laid. We were the last ones in. And that's when we had weekend then after that. And again, always with observers, people from NATO taking notes. Evidently, I never saw any results. We were told it was all good.

55:07We had passed. We were sharp. We were proving the expected.

55:13Kris:And that was Takavel. And did you see any Warsaw Pact observers? Because at that point, I think there was agreement for some Warsaw Pact troops to observe and likewise NATO troops. I did not. At that time, I did not. There may have been. I think the treaty had just been signed. It was not yet ratified. That may explain that. We know that the Russians and the British and the Americans had these observers that were patrolling and going into the different sectors, as it was called. I never saw one of them, to be honest. We had one case where we were in a field. This was about half a year before TACOVAL, where all of a sudden a young guy and another guy on a motorcycle entered our side driving through the forest.

56:05And this caused a lot of tension. But in the end, I think it was just two boys having fun. But yes, it did cause a lot of tension when someone with a motocross bicycle was driving around the forest and into our side. That created a lot of tension.

56:23Kris:But I never saw anyone from the Soviet military mission that was observing or that kind of thing. No. Hi, this is Rhonda in Virginia. And I support Cold War conversations because I think the work that Ian is doing is critically important. I think it's vital to record the firsthand accounts of people who lived and experienced the Cold War because it illustrates history in a way that a book never can. So thank you so much for the podcast. It's my favorite podcast and I look forward to it every week. To be like Rhonda and help to preserve these incredible stories of the Cold War. as a monthly or annual supporter.

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57:29And I think on a couple of these exercises, is you got into trouble making calls that you shouldn't have been making yeah so as i said we were patching lines on telephony with the deutsche bundespost running telephony network at the time it was all very formal back then in germany no no vodafone nothing like that and we were given numbers to try the lines which were basically we were calling into the wing operating center in Landsberg and Lech. And of course, we did that. But I also happened to call my mother just to say, hello, I'm doing fine. Everything's great. Here I am again. I'm calling you from the middle of freaking nowhere in the German Bavarian forest.

58:13And for some reason, my mom had this crazy idea of, I have a phone number here. I'm going to see how my son is doing three days later. And so she dialed the number and asked if she could talk to me. And then basically, all of a sudden, I was on an off guard. I was just relaxing. And someone comes, hey, Gamage, you come here and go and report to the major. And then I was told, hey, your mother just called here. How can this be? And I said, oh, yeah, I called my mom. And she probably did a mistake. And she was thinking she doesn't realize what we're doing here. She has no clue. Anyway, so I was told, do not ever do this again.

58:56It was not a problem for me in any way or form. I was not punished or whatever. I was just told, don't do this again. This is a little bit secretive what we do here. Don't share these numbers with your family. They shouldn't be calling us in the middle of a Pershing alarm here in operation. So yeah, that was one of them. But nevertheless, I still use one after Tegelwell when we were packing up our lines. I did call my girlfriend on one occasion from the forest as well, just to say hello. Yeah, but she happened to be in Mexico, not Germany. Yeah, okay. That's my background. So she was at the time in Mexico, and I dialed the country code 0052 for Mexico.

59:41My NCO, my sergeant, he was cool with it. He said, yeah, just go ahead, do it. Don't do it too long, whatever. Don't worry about it. Go ahead.

59:50Kris:Say hello to your girlfriend. but don't make it an excessive long call. Brilliant, brilliant. You talk quite fondly in your notes about some of the officers that you were working with and it sounds like you had good relationships there in terms of it was quite relaxed but they obviously expected you to perform your duty accurately. Correct, correct. We were expected to do our best and just not drag around, I would say. And I said to myself, let's make the best out of this. The Hauptfeldwebel of the communication teams, he was a very caretaking guy, I would say, in a way, right? He looked after his team, let's put it this way.

1:00:39And that's why I really appreciated him for that. Well, this was not just here, the recruits and they have to bash them and what have you. No, this was a, you asked him, can I have a vacation on this period because this is happening? And he would say, he would give you a look. Yeah, maybe I'll think about it. But then in the end, he said, yeah, go ahead. And he took care of his people in the comms team.

1:01:01Kris:We had a good spirit, if I may call it this way. There was good morale. And you have to build it. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You've got to have respect going both ways to make that work. what was your nuclear biological chemical kit like it was a bit of a joke i think it was a mask and then we had this poncho which was a how to describe it it was a plastic not plastic this typical tent waterproof material that keeps water come from coming in but it keeps sweat going out the other way. That's the best way to describe it. And again, you wore it over your head with a cap and you wore it over your body and there was no arms or sleeves or anything like that.

1:01:49You just had buttons in the end. That was your kit, the mask plus this thing. The mask, I can understand, okay, you prevent from breathing stuff. How this would have served nuclear, I don't know. radiation goes through that right it's not a it's not a lead suit or anything like that it was a bit

1:02:09Kris:of a joke and you carry this in a bag that you had to put around your shoulder and buckle to your waist i hated the mask by the way it was not a comfortable thing and plus it was the german one with the filter on the front where you look like a bit of a maniac again coming back to our american friends, their kit was better. Their filter was on the side. The mask was bigger eyepieces, that kind of thing. The mask reminded me of a little bit the Luftschutzmaske that my grandmother and my grandfather showed me from times of the Second World War. Because I think at one point you were caught without the bag.

1:02:49Correct. I was, again, this was one of the many trainings of the Staffel and I was hanging around our communications unimog where we camped out and slept in and what have you and i was walking around this unimog and our staff leader major oland caught me walking around without my gear and i was given a personal abc alarm so basically he said for you abc alarm time's ticking and of course i didn't have my gear so i had to run around the truck to the back get my gear, put my pontral on the mask and the whole thing. And by the time I had just bought the flatbed of the Unimog, he said, time's up, you're dead.

1:03:34And I was given the speech, don't you ever walk around here without your gear, regardless of what's happening. You always have to wear this. And I think it was okay. It was fair. Again, again, this could have been Tacheval. This could have been not Tacheval. This would have been flagged out as soldier XYZ didn't have his gear on and that kind of thing. So they looked after these things.

1:03:58Kris:It was important to have your kit with you. So at the end of March 1988 you leave the Bundeswehr but I presume you're still on the reserve. So how long would you be on the reserve? So normally it would have been up until I think the age of 40 or 46 even. In my case I was not put into reserve. It was becoming obvious INF had been signed in December of 87. Things were cooling down further and further. And I was not put on reserved. I was allowed to take my underwear with me. Every other piece of kit I had to give back. Contrary to my buddy Diddy that I had been in basic training with, he was put into reserve.

1:04:52So you get a sleeve and basically you become part of the reserve, which means you have duties, you have to tell the country when you leave the country for longer periods of time, that kind of thing. Nothing for me. I think it was becoming obvious that the future of FKGs was coming to an end. Originally, the plan had been that these FKGs, the Flughafagishwara, would have received a version of the Pershing-2 missile, the Pershing-1B, it would have been called, which would have been a single-stage version of the Pershing II.

1:05:22Kris:The missiles were becoming old, right? The plan was that renewal was due by 92 anyway. Again, I did not join the reserve. I was released. I went home with my underwear. Brilliant. Do you still have the underwear? No, I don't. And I wouldn't fit into it anymore. Chris, could you remember hearing about the opening of the Berlin Wall? I do. So after military service, again, April 1st, I was a free man, so to speak. I went on to do my college studies and all that kind of thing. 1989, I was in Munich. I was doing an internship with BMW at the time. And on November 9th, I was serving my internship in the finance department on the 19th floor of the beautiful building of BMW downtown Munich there on Petro Ring.

1:06:19I never got higher than that. I went back home that evening a little bit later.

1:06:25Kris:We had still lots of work to do. and I had been assigned a parking lot on the other side of what is the street there that divides where now BMW World is in the headquarter at that time. And I walked off to my car and I turned on the car and the radio comes on and I start hearing these messages that something's happening in Berlin. And I sat there on that parking lot for about half an hour. listening to the radio that, and I couldn't believe what was happening. I think many Germans from that time will be able to tell you where they were on that day. And here I am as an ex-Pershing guy whose missiles were oriented towards, not so much the GDR at the time, I was more into Czechoslovakia, I believe.

1:07:21But history was being written.

1:07:23Kris:and the ironic thing is i was in the gdr in 88 of october so just about a little bit of a year before and i still experienced that state was like what it was like to enter the state as a german citizen having to pass the border and showing your documents having to pay your 24 Deutschmarks, 24 East Deutschmarks back, which was worth nothing ultimately. This was with the studies we went through there. I saw the Berlin Wall. I experienced going through Friedrichstraße, the border there. I had been in Moscow early that year in 88 before, still living a little bit that state and that Warsaw Pact type thing, the enemy as it was called for me at the time when I was serving it was quite a quite an event and i couldn't believe it and as a matter of fact i was living together with a buddy of mine from studies and we we went to berlin the weekend after to experience this wow wow and what was that like it was crazy it was unbelievable it was unbelievable i've never seen so much how could i say it was a sense of peace that you would never have experienced before.

1:08:46Kris:People were falling into each other's arms and something really changed. It was history in the making. Incredible. Incredible. When you look back at your service in the Bundeswehr, how do you feel about that? I enjoy every moment of it at the time, to be very honest. Many people at the time looked that it has wasted time um that's how i felt initially here you're gonna have to go through this the biggest the most important thing was your calendar you're counting down days you know how far there's a whole process around that with the little meter bundt where as of 150 day you start ripping every day off from this little tape but that's you're counting the days backwards i still have my the last nine days become a whole becomes a whole theatrical thing with these little signs these yellow signs that you attach to trucks from nine to one and little cords that you were on the uniform showing to others you're about to get out of here in retrospect to be honest i think it was worth being there.

1:10:02Kris:It was a lesson in many ways that has served me also later in professional life. Having to deal with people that probably in your life never before you wouldn't have wanted to meet, nor have to deal with. Avoiding conflicts, those type of things. Being able to, I will say, well, adapt. I think that's the best word to describe it. It was a lesson in in how to adapt to an environment, to rules, to things that maybe you didn't like. I still fold my shirts when I go on a trip the Bundeswehr way. I taught my dad, who never was in the military, how to fold the shirts this way, and he loved it. So there's always good and bad.

1:10:48Sure, there were times where I hated it, and I saw it as a waste of time. But in retrospect, I look at it back as it wasn't that bad. Yeah, and if you hadn't have done it, you wouldn't have ended up on Cold War Conversations. Absolutely. So there's that added bonus as well. You bet. Don't miss the episode extras such as videos, photos and other content. Just look for the 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. if you'd like to help go to coldwarconversations.com slash donate the cold war conversation continues in our facebook discussion group just search for cold war conversations on facebook thanks very much for listening and see you next week

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