The other day on Wedgewood Avenue, just west of I-65, I found myself behind this car, bearing an Army decal. I’d never seen the “Cold War” sub-note, and it got me to thinking of my own service, 1970-1998.

When, around 1990, I updated my official Army photo, I had only a single ribbon to affix to my chest, one representing the National Defense Service Medal. Since the draft was in place and the Vietnam War was raging during my college days, the question was not so much whether we would serve, but how and where. I decided to go with Army ROTC on campus, and I joined the program in the fall of 1968. The next summer, I headed off to Fort Sill in Oklahoma for “boot camp,” and I was commissioned a second lieutenant at graduation. (Yes, the draft lottery was instituted in 1969, but it made no difference—I’d already signed on the dotted line, and, besides, my number was low enough that I would have been eligible any way; and also besides, I was pleased to serve, as my father and two uncles had in WWII.)

I did pretty well at boot camp, so I got my pick of branches. I went with Military Intelligence, thinking it sounded cool and might even be less dangerous. (The watchword in the day was to avoid combat arms, especially Infantry (“ground pounders”/”grunts”) if possible. But, silly me, I ended up in the Infantry anyway. Turns out, all MI officers went first to Infantry School at Fort Benning (now named Fort Moore) before heading to MI training at Fort Huachuca (Arizona) or Fort Holabird (Maryland). And when I got to Benning in the summer of 1971, they told us that they didn’t need quite as many new Infantry officers as before. The Vietnam War was starting to wind down, and they were offering us a deal—that, if we’d give them a total commitment of eight years instead of six, we could pass directly from Infantry Basic to a National Guard or Reserve unit. Since I was on a full-ride in philosophy grad school at Vanderbilt and very much wanting to stay on track with the program, I took it. That way, I could return to my studies in the fall, and, sure enough, I found a slot as a mechanized platoon leader in Company B, 3/117th Infantry, at the armory in Smithville, Tennessee.

Our battalion, headquartered in Cookeville, was a “round-out” unit of the 2nd Armored Division at Fort Hood. We’d head down to Texas each summer and run joint exercises alongside tanks up and down the plains and plateaus, with nicknames for the high ground (e.g., “Rocky Top”) and colorful map labels to call out over the radio (e.g., “Cowhouse Creek”). This was essentially training for European warfare—force-versus-force against Warsaw Pact armies. And it was the same orientation when I moved to northern Illinois to teach at Wheaton. There, I landed in the 2/129th Infantry Battalion, part of the 33rd Infantry Brigade, whose yellow-cross-on-black-background patch can be seen on the shoulders of guardsmen trying to bring order to the streets during the 1968 Democrat national convention. We were a “leg” unit, but essentially focused on conventional warfare in Europe. When we ran CPX’s (Command Post Exercises) up at Fort Sheridan, we used maps of the Fulda Gap on the North German Plain, the corridor the bad guys would most likely take to hit NATO forces.

Though our attention fell upon that region, my training at Sill and Benning also included exposure to challenges in the Southeast Asia theater. They walked us through “Vietnam Villages,” with spider holes, trip wires, and booby-trapped food baskets. And in our “leadership reaction courses,” we’d meet “Viet Cong” dressed in black pajamas and big straw hats. Once again, it was the Communists, but, in this case, the foes were a long way from Europe.

My Illinois service had me shuttling food, fuel, and ammunition to units in the field (as S-4, the battalion logistics staff officer) and (as Combat Support Company Commander) supervising guys manning mortars, surface-to-air missiles, ground-surveillance radar sets, “rat patrol” jeeps sporting mounted machine guns, and, anti-tank weapons, also jeep-mounted.

Even later in my twenty-eight years (into which my original eight-year commitment turned), I found myself doing two-week stints with units at Forts Knox, Campbell, Hood, and Irwin. The last of these landed me in the Mojave Desert at the National Training Center, a sandbox roughly the size of Rhode Island, where mechanized and armored units would play laser tag with “vismod” (visually modified) equipment simulating Soviet materiel. So, we prepped for new enemies in the Middle East, who were armed with Russian gear.

Then I did a bunch of tours in the Pentagon, first in OCAR (Office of Chief of Army Reserve) and OCPA (Office of Chief of Public Affairs). (See the photo in the “About” portion of this site, where I’m standing in front of the Pentagon briefing placard in a room just down the hall from our offices.) No, I didn’t deliver statements for the press at this rostrum. (Just a photo op.) But I did field questions at my desk, from publications such as the Anniston Star, Washington Post, and Rock and Ice. R&I wanted a photo of a 106 mm recoilless rifle, the weapon used at some ski resorts to provoke avalanches before they could hurt people; an EOD (“Explosive Ordnance Demolition”) team of the California National Guard had the job of dealing with dud rounds that didn’t go off.  

My busiest tour coincided with the explosion of TWA Flight 800 off Long Island in July of 1996. I was on the weapons-info desk, and we were flooded with calls asking the maximum effective range of our surface-to-air missiles, and whether any of them were missing from the inventory. (Former White House press secretary, Pierre Salinger, who served under JFK, was pushing this scenario.) In the end, the NTSB said it an electrical short circuit set off the fuel vapor in a nearly empty tank, but that week of the crash, all possibilities were on the table.

What you’re seeing in all this is my total separation from the combat zone. I did see two helicopters collide in a fireball at Fort Hood and came upon a flipped track in which, hours earlier, the commander standing up in the hatch was crushed. People get hurt and killed in training. But I “never saw the elephant” of armed conflict. All around me in the Pentagon were guys wearing the CIB (“Combat Infantryman’s Badge”), but not I. Just a “weekend warrior” or a two-weeks-a-year-plus-correspondence-courses member of the IRR (“Individual Ready Reserve”) and the IMA (“Individual Mobilization Augmentee”). Kind of embarrassing. But I’m grateful the Lord spared me the horrors of the battlefield.

I tell people that I wasn’t a threat to any of our enemies. But maybe we reservists and guardsmen in aggregate helped make the bad guys think twice before taking on Uncle Sam. And that encourages me to think it’s okay to say that those of us who stayed stateside were Cold War vets, troops who had the pleasure of seeing the Berlin Wall taken down in 1989 and the Soviet Union disbanded in 1991.

As we say in the Army, “Hooah!”