The Peacekeeper Rail Garrison’s forgotten mission
Ever heard of the Peacekeeper Rail Garrison? Even if you lived through the Cold War, you might not know about this nearly forgotten nuclear mission. The 1980s were a scary…
5 things you didn’t know about the Berlin Wall
This week in history, East German soldiers closed the borders between East and West Berlin. What started as a makeshift wall in 1961, pieced together with barbed wire, soldiers and tanks, eventually morphed into a 15-foot high symbol of division tha…
How the fall of the Berlin Wall affected techno music
Berlin is known as the techno music capital of the world. Much to the chagrin of Detroit, where the style originated, the German city took the style and baked it…
Walking on the grass and 4 other things that almost made the US lose the Cold War
It is generally accepted that the Cold War began when the Allies sounded “ENDEX” in Europe after the defeat of the Nazis. The geopolitical tension between the United States and…
How US special-operations forces helped the US military win its first post-Cold War victory
As the threat from the Soviet Union declined in the early 1990s, a new challenge for the US arose in the Middle East. The first Gulf War was a textbook conventional…
Top-tier special operators of the Cold War worry about modern ‘soft skills’
As the shadow operators of the Cold War reveal more and more about their formerly classified service, they’ve highlighted the wide set of skills necessary for finding success as they stared into the eyes of one of the greatest adversaries the U.S. …
A communist soldier made a daring escape through the Berlin Wall in an APC
May Day was a big deal in East Germany. As a matter of fact, it was a big deal in all of the Communist Eastern Bloc countries during the Cold War era. It was, after all, a day for celebrating workers around the world. Since Communist countries wer…
The top-secret plan to cripple Berlin during a Soviet invasion
During the Cold War, an Army Special Forces unit was tasked with sabotaging Soviet infrastructure and crippling an invasion force to buy NATO time should war break out. The mission was so secret that the entire thing was almost forgotten — until a…
This is how David Bowie helped bring down the Berlin Wall
In 1987, singer David Bowie played a concert in West Berlin, near the Reichstag. The performance was so loud, a massive crowd gathered on the East side of the nearby Berlin Wall to better hear his performance. He could hear the East Germans…