Posted on 08/18/2014 6:18:43 AM PDT by rktman
The Berlin Wall is something I grew up talking about.
It's a little bit different for my sons. In fact, our 3rd son, now serving in the US Army, was born the year after the Wall came down in the fall of 1989.
The Berlin Wall was built in 1961 and the first casualty came 52 years ago today:
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
I hear many on the left compare a border fence with Mexico to the Berlin Wall, which means they clearly don’t understand history. The important difference, of course, was that the Berlin Wall kept people in, not out.
I was stationed in Germany when the wall came down and the communists were being swept from eastern Europe and Russia. It was a great time to be over there!!
living through the Cold War was really strange and I am not sure we have done a good job explaining it to our kids
Same here! I was assigned at HQ USEUCOM in Stuttgart... went to Berlin over Labor Day weekend in 1990 and chiseled off my pieces of the wall. A fascinating time. Quite an experience having the Trabis clog up the autobahns, no?
I always used the Berlin wall to explain communism to my kids. When they would be told in the government schools that communism wasn’t so bad, I would tell them that the only thing they need to know about communism is that people risked their lives to escape it and so the totalitarians had to build walls to keep the people from trying to leave.
Also teach them of the “Air Lift” into Berlin!!!
Of course we will. We’ll read about how the evil Germans put up a wall to keep out Dreamers who only wanted to come to Berlin to make a better life, and how the German people fought valiantly to tear the wall down so that the immigrants could have all the government benefits they deserved.
My kids roll their eyes at the stories I tell of my tour in Germany (77-81). They can't believe I actually lived without TV for four years. I lived 12-15 miles off base, and AFN wasn't strong enough. Back then, VCRs were just coming to market, and I didn't want to spend $700+ for a unit, and $50 for a movie.
In the beginning it was about escaping the commies. As time went on it seemed to have changed. Not sure what the welfare state is in Germany now. I know a lot of turks and other protected classes moved there. I know in ‘62 it was pretty sobering for a 15 year old to observe the ominous wall, barbed wire fences, no man zones, guard towers and bricked up buildings on the dividing line.
I was stationed in Berlin 1973-75 in the middle of the Cold War. I lived at Tempelhof Airport, site of the Berlin Airlift. When I first got there, the base commander was the “Candy Bomber” Lt. Col. Gail Halverson.
It was a huge contrast between east and west. Kurfürstendamm Str. at night was lit up like NY City. Looking into the east was like looking at a dead city. We were allowed to go through Checkpoint Charlie (in uniform) and immediately you could see the difference. The sidewalks were cracked and uneven, walls on the buildings were crumbling, everything was drab and grey.
One thing I will always remember was the girls in East Berlin. They tended to not wear any makeup and I thought they were beautiful. The West Berlin girls wore an inch of makeup and looked like street walkers. I wanted to bring one home with me but I couldn’t figure out how to get her through the wall!
We’ve done an awful job explaining it to our kids.
They really have no concept of why Communism was such a
feared and destructive ideology. Hence their lack of reticence to vote for people who would take us in that direction.
Duh! Duffle bag? LOL! I went to a club (west Berlin obviously) when I was there called the Rizi Bar. There were phones at each table and if you wanted to call a table that had someone you might like to talk to there was a map of the place with the number for each table printed on it. Interesting times for sure. My Uncle flew supplies in during the airlift.
I just got back from a trip to Berlin. Had not been there since. 1976.
I got teared up when I could STRADDLE the markers where the Wall used to be. The difference between then and now is almost indescribable...
Thank God for Ronald Reagan, Maggie Thatcher and John Paul II...
Go ask the folks in Ferguson,Mo about the Berlin Wall...
God blessed us with great leaders then. He's not doing that now, unfortunately. But we had a great run.
JFK drafted me in 1961 when the commies built that wall around E Berlin. Though I never got over there to see it in person, I sweated out the Cuban missile crisis at ground zero at Ft Myer, VA at the height of the Cold War. I remember the great Berlin Air Lift and the ‘duck and cover” drills we were taught in grade school after WWII. Those were scary years which I wonder if are included in the American history classes taught in schools today? To see that wall come down in TV news reports were was remarkable indeed. God bless Pres. Ronald Reagan!
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