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Message: [QUOTE="Veteran, post: 4744632, member: 10535"] None, actually. I served in the Army in Augsburg, West Germany for a while right after the end of the Vietnam War. It was peacetime. But if there had been a war and the Warsaw Pact (Russia and their vassal states like East Germany, Romania, etc) forces had invaded Western Europe, I’m convinced that there’s a strong possibility that I would have been the very first American to die. I trained in battlefield communications but I was assigned to the communications center for an 8” artillery battalion. We were a nuclear unit with 8” artillery shells that were more powerful than the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. FYI, the nukes were actually stored in the basement of the building I lived in up until just before I arrived. Somebody had told his mom about that and she raised a huge stink with her congress person. The nukes were moved shortly afterwards. Imagine that. At that time the Warsaw Pact forces had a 4-1 advantage in tanks. Their armed forces were built for one reason and one reason only – invasion and conquest. And the entire purpose of nuke units like mine was to blunt the impact of a flood of tanks moving westward until the United States could bring in reinforcements from back home. So my unit and others like ours was a primary target for espionage and elimination if the invasion actually occurred. There’s no doubt that we were being watched 24/7 by Soviet and East German spies. There were 3 different American bases in Augsburg in the mid 70’s and at that time all communication was by radio. There were no computers or communication satellites or internet. It was basically the stone-age. And the main American communications center for the city was located on one of the other bases from where my battalion was positioned. We would get notified of alert messages at all hours of the day and night to test our readiness had there ever actually been a war. So every time an alert came in, it was my job to go up to the main communications center to get the message and then bring it back to whatever officer was in charge at that moment. You’d think that there would have been a jeep constantly on standby for just such an occasion but you’d be wrong. What I had to do was jump on my personal blue Peugeot bicycle and ride the couple of mile to go get the message. That kind of tells you how things were in the Army in Germany in the 70’s. Spies watching our battalion probably did not know exactly who I was, but they would have certainly known that the communications center was at the other location. And they would have also certainly taken note of the guy on the blue bicycle pedaling up there and back with a soft sided briefcase in the carrier on the back of his bike. And they were more than smart enough to put two and two together to get four. So, if there actually was going to be an invasion, they would have also known that taking out the guy on the blue bike might have caused as much as a two- or three-hour delay before their mortal enemies in a nuclear artillery battalion began preparations to move out to battle positions. And that’s why I think there’s a good chance that I would never have had the opportunity to become the huge UCONN WBB fan that I am today. [/QUOTE]

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