When I did my basic course in '86, we had an instructor who told us he was in Germany in the early '80's.
He said they used to have alerts all the time where they would load up and go to their assembly areas.
He said in '83, they got an alert, loaded up, went to their assembly area got orders to forward deploy. Then he said he really got freaked out, because they started issuing small arms. You generally don't issue small arms (it's a logistical nightmare) for an alert.
He said they stayed forward for a week or so, then rolled back to garrison.
Some of us still remember all the wargaming in the Fudla Gap.
I was in Bavaria in ‘68 when the Russian tanks rolled into Prague to quell the Czech “outbreak of liberty”.
We had a very similar serious alert. I was issued my M14
but ammo wasn’t passed out. At that point I figured we weren’t going to get involved.