Thoughts on the Ukraine invasion (and Apollo-Soyuz) from an old Cold War soldier...

When I heard about the Russian invasion of Ukraine this morning and started seeing photos of tanks and personnel carriers, it took me back more than three decades.

When I arrived in West Germany in 1988, my first task as a tank platoon leader was to learn our role in the NATO General Defense Plan. Our cavalry squadron was to defend the Hof Corridor, a potential avenue of approach for a Soviet-led invasion from the east. In a carefully-orchestrated defense in depth, to be fought in a series of engagement areas between the border and a final squadron engagement area 35 miles southwest, on the edge of the escarpment near our home station north of Bayreuth, we were to delay Warsaw Pact forces long enough for our tank divisions to prepare a counterattack.

That fall, we participated in Reforger (“Return of Forces to Germany”), a massive recurrent exercise designed to practice — and advertise — our ability and intent to support NATO against attack. This was the first time I was a part of a large armored formation maneuvering across extensive areas of countryside. For a 23-year-old soldier, it was a buzz — impressive and exciting. But it was also incredibly sobering to think of what it represented, the violent potential of it.

The threat was real, the enemy was strong, and we took it very seriously.

I’m not suggesting that this is that. It was a different time and place, and though closely related, a different enemy.

But that’s what I thought about this morning.

I thought about what a mass formations of tanks looks and feels like as it moves across European terrain, thought about one particular movement we did during that Reforger exercise, an entire cavalry troop on-line, assaulting at full speed across an open field, an irresistible force.

I thought about what tanking and soldiering during European winter can be like (it’s not pleasant, and I’m sure it’s a lot less pleasant when it’s an open-ended live conflict).

And I thought about more recent experiences. I remembered Ukrainian students in classes I was teaching many years later at the NATO school in Germany, about the bright young officers and the bright future they anticipated as they embraced the west, and I’m wondering if they are still in the Ukrainian army and what role they might be playing in this conflict.

And that song (Peter Gabriel’s “Games Without Frontiers”)… I’m not certain why it came to me, but it did, and I looked it up and played it and watched the video, and even though it’s cryptic and the references are obscure, it felt right, it captured my mood and gave me a title for this entry. Jeux Sans Frontières… “games without frontiers, war without tears”. (The Wikipedia entry has some interesting background information.)

I was going to end with that, but I realized that the Cold War duck-and-cover drills in the video tied to something else I’m working on. A friend recently sent me a post he wrote as an answer to a question about formative early memories (read it here: “What If? in El Cuervo Viejo). His formative memory was from the Cuban missile crisis, when he was ten, of being told when they left school that day that there might not be school the next day because “the world we knew may be no more”.

In searching for my own equivalent formative memory I realized that by the time I was the age he was for his memory, the Cold War had cooled down a bit. We were no longer doing the duck-and-cover drills, and my first memory of the Soviet Union is Apollo-Soyuz, the first crewed international space mission. It’s a symbolically bright memory that I suppose was probably formative for me in some important ways.

I’m not sure exactly how that relates to the events of today, and I don’t know what any of this means. I guess it might be that this is all confusing and frustrating and maddening and disappointing, and there will be violence and death and hardship for some people, merely angst for others, and the world will go on with it’s predictable mix of darkness and light.

And maybe we’re all just playing at games without frontiers.

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