Castro’s Cuba had finally provoked the United States into quarantine. Aerial films revealed the presence of offensive Russian nuclear weapons on Cuban soil, just ninety miles from Florida. I was born in Banis, a small sugar town on the eastern edge of Cuba. When the Americans went to the UN with proof of the missiles, many of those photographs were of areas near Banis.
It was a reckless gamble, and President Kennedy reacted swiftly, ordering the fleet to turn back or seize ships attempting to augment the aggressive buildup. I clearly remember standing at the beach with my parents, and you could see in the distance, on the horizon, gray ships that were American battle cruisers. That’s how close it came. No one knew at the time, but just off the coast, a heated argument kicked off.
Three Soviet submariners had to make a terrible decision. A US destroyer dropped a depth charge in the vicinity of a Russian submarine, knocking out its communications with Moscow. The protocol at the time for the Russian commander was to use the nuclear-tipped weapon he had on board, assuming that if he’d been hurt by enemy action, there must be a war on. So he had the hard decision to make as to what to actually do.
The captain’s name was Savitsky. Soviet nuclear protocol dictated that three senior officers must vote unanimously to launch the nuclear missile. The second-in-command voted against his captain. And by a 2:1 vote, a third world war was averted.
The story of the man who saved the world was not revealed until 1998. His name was Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov. As talks broke down, nuclear war looked imminent. Dad went away for two or three weeks.
He told me later, “We had the codes and we were waiting for the order to fire, and there was not a single one of us that weren’t convinced that this was going to happen. We were literally within minutes of pushing the button. All I could think about was that you and your sister and your mother were going to be vapor. ” It was maybe twenty years later before he would even talk about it.
The outcome was finally determined by one-on-one talks between Premier Khrushchev and President Kennedy. Khrushchev’s missiles in Cuba were a direct response to the threat of American nuclear warheads positioned in Turkey, right next to the Soviet border. The deal Khrushchev wanted to make, if he was to agree not to put missiles into Cuba, was for the Americans to move their missiles from Turkey. Kennedy reacted correctly to the Cuban missile crisis.
Had he not addressed it the way he did, quite frankly against a lot of the military and civil leadership, we may well have had the first nuclear war. And the first nuclear war may well have been the last one, because once it starts, I don’t know that you can contain it. Russian ships turned around and sailed home from Cuban ports with their decks loaded with missiles. The story put out in the press was that Khrushchev had capitulated, but Kennedy had given some ground too.
US missiles were quietly removed from Turkish soil. Both sides saved face. History’s most dangerous game of poker was over. Fear of nuclear annihilation swept the world.
The doomsday clock had never been so close to midnight. November 1962, the Cuban missile crisis was over. For many, there was a sense that the world had dodged a nuclear bullet. But the Cold War was far from over.
Vietnam, August 1964. In this small country almost no one had heard of, a civil war broke out. The Vietcong struck in larger groups than ever before. The people there had already been fighting for twenty years, first against the Japanese occupation, then colonial rule, now against each other.
I was born in the north before Vietnam was divided into two parts. My parents took us south because they witnessed the cruelty and atrocities. I grew up in the south, went to medical school, graduated, and joined the army. The communist Vietcong were close to winning the war.
Both sides were poor countries with no weapon production, so they relied heavily on their allies. The South mostly on the Americans, the North on communist China and the Soviet Union. Then a tiny incident in the South China Sea ignited a flame. A nighttime incident in the Gulf of Tonkin.
A US aircraft carrier reported being attacked by North Vietnamese patrol boats. The Gulf of Tonkin incident was billed as the first direct attack by the North Vietnamese on the US military. Some believed the incident was fabricated, but US leadership saw the events as all the reason they needed to turn its might on the North Vietnamese. Once they decided to send troops to Vietnam, it was a very, very bad move, because that kind of gave the communists a good justification with foreigners there in South Vietnam.
American troops waited to advance on Vietcong positions while Skyraiders prepared the way with their terrifying napalm bombs. Because the Americans relied so heavily on their superior firepower, they’d go into battle in the jungle like going into a big picnic. They made a lot of noise. The enemy could smell their aftershave and their cigarettes miles away and avoid clashes.
The number of American casualties was staggering. The cost of the conflict was a nightmare balance sheet in lives and money, costing America at least a thousand million dollars every month, with nearly 7,000 Americans dead. But the greatest death rate was among ordinary farmers and villagers. Vietnamese civilians walked hopelessly away from their burning homes, innocent victims of a dispute too complex for many of them to understand.
I witnessed the tragedy and the waste of war. During the war, collateral damage is always there. You can’t avoid hurting civilians. The peasants, the farmers, they are victims of the war because they have nowhere to hide, nowhere to run.
In 1968, the Tet holiday was anything but peaceful. A bloody battle raged in the center of Saigon. The Vietcong offensive throughout South Vietnam struck at the very heart of the Allied command. It brought home to all Americans the suicidal determination of their opponents, their ability to infiltrate and conduct a devastating guerrilla campaign.
I was brought down to Saigon to be the deputy commanding officer of the American Forces Radio and TV network. That was my day job, and my night job was special operations, clandestine work. I thought the North Vietnamese were very disciplined, very hardcore, willing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of their youth to the idea of reunifying Vietnam. 80,000 North Vietnamese troops struck all over the South.
The Tet offensive was a costly endeavor for the North, with over 45,000 soldiers killed. But the assault succeeded in proving that America was not winning, and that was a great political victory for the North. While the US came to realize that Vietnam was not going to be an easy war to win, the struggle for freedom continued elsewhere across the globe. January 1968, one country in Eastern Europe was about to push back against the restrictions behind the Iron Curtain.
I was a little kid, I lived in Prague suburbs. I was from a typical family, very state-controlled, a centrally planned economy where if you didn’t work for more than three months, you could go to prison for being a parasite of society. My parents were not communists. Czechoslovakia had a new party leader with new ideas.
Alexander Dubček challenged hardline communism and won. He put his reforms into action, a freer market, freer movement, and steps towards a multi-party government. He called his program socialism with a human face. The West called it the Prague Spring.
But the Russian noose was already tightening. Huge armies gathered on the Czech border. The reform that caused the greatest friction was freedom of the press. Hopes of the Czech people rested on Dubček’s shoulders.
Europe held its breath, aware of the lessons from recent history. It was this same intransigent attitude which caused the Hungarians to revolt in 1956. No one wanted the bloodshed that Hungary experienced repeated in Czechoslovakia. The Prague Spring lasted eight months, until August the 21st.
Suddenly we saw tanks at the end of the street, and we were very excited about it, shouting, “Tanks, tanks! ” And we were running our tricycles close to the tanks. Russian, Polish, and Hungarian troops carried out their cold-blooded occupation of Czechoslovakia. Demonstrators carried a flag stained by the blood of a patriot in a growing wave of protest.
Resistance, futile though everyone knew it to be, continued. Burning vehicles were pushed into tanks and tracks to set them on fire. Crowds jeered and argued with the blank, uncomprehending faces of the troops they thought were their allies. But defiance was crushed under the tracks of the Russian tanks.
Tempers flared, and the Russians started shooting. A nation that had grasped freedom now had it snatched away by naked force. 72 Czechs and Slovaks were killed. Dubček was ousted, and his reforms were reversed.
The Prague Spring was over. Czechoslovakia began a twenty-year stretch of hardline Soviet rule. Worlds away from the cobblestone streets of Prague, the US prepared for its next Cold War endeavor. One small step that could be a giant leap for freedom.
The space race so far was three to nothing for the USSR, who had managed to put the first satellite, the first animal, and then the first human into space. The USA was determined to put the first man on the moon. On July 16th, 1969, astronauts Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins set off for the three-day journey to the moon. On July 20th, 1969, two members of the human race set foot on a rock in outer space.
The president of the United States called them by telephone. “Hello, Neil and Buzz. I’m talking to you by telephone from the Oval Room at the White House. I just can’t tell you how proud we all are.
For every American, this has to be the proudest day of our lives. Because of what you have done, the heavens have become a part of man’s world. ”
I knew a lot of these guys. You grew up with them.
It takes a special kind of person to place oneself in harm’s way in that manner, and all of them did it, whether they were cosmonauts or astronauts. Heroes. The strategic importance of the United States being the first to put a person on the moon cannot be understated. The USA was finally ahead in the race to explore space.
It was a landmark in human endeavor, and also a foothold into the future battleground of the Cold War. September 1969, the United Nations. Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko replied to President Nixon’s latest request for peace talks: “To think that the United States can obtain at the conference table what it failed to achieve with a half-million-strong army on the battlefield would mean to be obviously at variance with reality. ”
More talks were held in Paris with the North Vietnamese, but the dialogue was hardly meaningful.
It appeared as if the only thing each side was prepared to accept was the virtual surrender of the other. Hopes for a breakthrough rested with the new president of the USA, Richard Milhous Nixon. Nixon’s definition of a just peace required the North to allow South Vietnam to remain free of communism. He believed there was only one way to get that commitment.
He ordered the bombing of North Vietnam and the mining of Haiphong. From December 26th to January 1st, US Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps air crews flew more than 650 tactical air strikes, and the Air Force flew 126 B-52 missions against military targets in North Vietnam. But the B-52s were also wiping out non-military targets. Troops taken prisoner were shown the horror of their work.
Since being captured and being a prisoner, I have seen areas that were non-military targets, a hospital and a school. The bombings stirred up protest worldwide. American university students powerfully expressed their conscience. I understood that there has been and continues to be opposition to the war in Vietnam on the campuses and also in the nation.
Under no circumstances will I be affected whatever by it, said Nixon. It was a crazy time. The country was torn apart by how people felt about Vietnam. I can recall a group of students, probably five hundred or a thousand, who were going to trash what was called the Coolidge Labs at the University of Michigan.
The Coolidge Lab had an atomic reactor in it. You can’t have students going in tearing up a lab with a reactor. By 1970, American involvement in Vietnam was a constant source of frustration, particularly among the young. On May the 4th of that year, Cold War tension across the USA reached a boiling point at Kent State University when the National Guard opened fire on a protest.
They fired 67 rounds. Nine students were wounded. One was paralyzed for life. Four of them died.
Jeffrey Miller, age 20. Allison Krause, age 19. William Schroeder, age 19, and Sandra Scheuer, age 20. Two of the students killed were not even involved in the protest.
I saw the pictures of those four youngsters in the evening paper the day after that tragedy, and I vowed then that we were going to find methods that would be more effective to deal with these problems of violence. The Kent State University shootings were a real problem for the forces in Vietnam. The GIs thought that the American people were against the war, and it was very disheartening to them and led to very low morale and to drug use and to other problems. In the chaos, President Nixon drew down US involvement in the war.
American military leadership, much of it from West Point, had been superb. Despite relentless international protest, mass bombings continued for three more years. There seemed to be no end in sight to the madness. In more than thirty years of sound and fury, more than three million dead, wounded, or missing.
56,000 dead Americans. 188,000 South Vietnamese. 900,000 North Vietnamese. Two million dead and wounded non-combatant civilians.
Finally, in January 1973, peace talks reached a conclusion. At 12:30 Paris time on January 23rd, 1973, the agreement on ending the war and restoring peace in Vietnam was initialed by Dr. Henry Kissinger on behalf of the United States and Special Adviser Le Duc Tho on behalf of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. The president told us the agreement would be signed on Saturday.
American troops would come home within sixty days. “It’s overdue. Long overdue. The people are tired of it.
They want to get to their homes. They want to get back to the countries, to the farms. I really do. I think it’ll last.
”
“The Vietnamese people themselves are strong people. And I think they will be able to get themselves together. I think we’re doing the right thing by letting them give a chance. ”
Two years after the US withdrawal, with the fall of Saigon, the South succumbed to the forces of the Vietcong.
Ten years of hardline communist dictatorship followed. The Cold War between democracy and communism continued. Our two nations now had five times more missile warheads than they had just eight years ago. Tens, hundreds, thousands of systems, any one of which was capable of destroying a widespread piece of humanity in the blink of an eye.
With tragic errors in judgment on the one hand and giant leaps forward in technology on the other, the neutron bomb, but also strategic arms limitation treaties, were all just around the corner in the mad world. A devilish weapon, basically totally inhuman. Heat.
Heat.
