America Sleeps Tonight Under a Just-Plain Moon

Greetings, internet friends and neighbors, and a big hidey-ho to all of you! Also, to any family members it amuses to visit here, hope the day finds you still able to touch your toes.

I wasn't planning a blog post today, BUT, after I made this long post over on The Old NFO's blog, I figured I'd add a couple of links, and post here. I really need to post more frequently, he said for the grillionth time.

Remembering the way it was, and why we did that:

If things I have read recently are accurate, the US was doing next-to-nothing with the missile tech and technicians looted from Nazi Germany. It took Wernher von Braun appearing on Walt Disney to get things moving.

No, we didn't do it THIS way, but we did it.

I was four years old in 1957, when Nikita Khrushchev boasted that America sleeps under a Soviet moon. Four-year-old boys are literal-minded, and I was terrified of the moon for a long time after that. I have dim, dim memories of my mother comforting me by pointing to the full moon and assuring me that it was just a big ball of rock. It was whistling through the graveyard, for me, though.

I remember seeing “Alas, Babylon” on TV, and having nightmares about commies coming down the hall to get my baby sister.

Rita Moreno plays with jewelry, just before discovering it's radioactive. 

"Alas, Babylon!" on Playhouse 90; April 3, 1960

I also remember riding through those unending military convoys through the southern states, during what I THINK was the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Lots of stuff that went bang and kaboom was stationed in Texas, and had to get to Florida. The troops lived in tent cities, while the politicians didn't. I looked for some images of these convoys, but they are not to be found using the Google-fu I possess. The 1919 convoys, yes; 1962, no.


And fallout shelters.I remember the duck and cover drills we did in elementary school, and the day we had an evacuation drill, and all walked home, accompanied by teachers, as a prep for a time when the buses couldn’t get us. At the moment, can't find a pic of the evacuation, but there are some available if you want to hut it down yourself.

If you could get under your desk, you should do that.

A lasting effect of that was the Army changing the readiness status reports on vehicles, to a “green/yellow/red” status that was in effect when I was in the Army 1972-75. Evidently, someone was disturbed by the number of vehicles that broke down by the side of the road. Two lanes, remember?

I don’t know how much of that was based on real threats, and how much of it was politicians and defense contractors using terror to gain budgets and buy influence. I DO know that when I was stationed in Stuttgart in 1973, the primary reason I was there was to clog up the treads of the Russian tanks when they rolled through the Fulda Gap, long enough for Reforger to get under way.

I was a medic, not a tanker. 

But I do recognize that these are tanks.

And they are just hanging out in the Fulda Gap.

So, yeah, I’m a huge fan of the Saturn V, along with late lamented SAC, and the Strategic Defense Initiative, and everything else (including the still relatively easy availability of small arms and ammo) that made it a Bad Idea for another nation-state to wipe us out or invade. And from that perspective, got to say it doesn’t appear to me that any of that money was wasted.

Because my grandkids ain’t sleeping tonight under a Soviet moon.

Peace be on your household.