Replies

My husband retired after 21 years, and he gives a similar perspective.

When he was patrolling the Berlin Wall, he actually went into East Berlin. I don’t know if it was more than one occasion, or what the purpose was, but it was under orders with permission from East Berlin.

His mother asked him to look into visiting relatives that she had in East Berlin. He checked into it, and was told that technically it could be arranged, but it would cause them a world of trouble if he did.

When the wall came down, it was very personal for him.

He has no patience (and neither do I) for rainbow farting liberals who travel the world as civilians, and pretend to speak for the military they’ve never been near except to pose for misleading photos. They don’t have a clue.

Something that every resident anti-American critic should have seen were the fortifications along the East German border. Gurad towers, walls, fences, barbed wire, trenches, dog runs, etc. And all of it pointed inward to keep people in, not to keep NATO out.

If anyone ever saw that then had to think about how determined a government had to be to keep their own people in...and how bad a government had to be for people to risk their lives to escape!

I was a starry-eyed liberal college student who had the opportunity to study in Prague for a semester after the wall came down. I flew into Berlin, had to catch a train out of East Berlin to Prague. My eyes were opened then. The differences between East and West Berlin were startling. It was like stepping into a black and white movie from the 1940s - like time had stood still. They still had the same signage in the train station that you see in those old movies - nothing had been painted or updated since the war. Buildings were abandoned, windows broken. People whispered, watched us suspiciously. Tons of crap and garbage just thrown by the side of the train tracks; the fact that the toilets on the train were simply holes that opened onto the tracks. It was a slummy ghetto.

Prague was much nicer, but they never stopped their fight and accepted the Communists. I was very lucky in that I got to study with and talk to the artists and writers largely responsible for creating the propaganda against the Commie regime. They had some stories to tell.

Living that way affects people on a psychological level. It's like they're scarred or something. That whole experience really changed my life and my thinking about how lucky we have it here. I wish I could say the same for some of the students who were there with me. A lot of them voted for Obama. I guess what we experienced over there didn't have the same effect on them as it did on me.