Winds of Change

I still get tears when I watch this video. Tonight my wife and I were looking at stuff on youtube and I thought I would look for this video. I found it, and the memories came flooding back.

On my birthday, June 6th, 1987, I turned 21 on my way to my first duty assignment in the Federal Republic of Germany. Two and a half years later I watched as the Soviet Bloc crumbled. Everything we trained for, the enemy that we expected - all of a sudden was simply not there, or so it seemed. I was a 23 year old Specialist (E-4) in the 820th Ordnance Company in Bitburg, Germany in November of 1989. We were way over in western West Germany, supporting the Battalion that was tasked to provide air defense for Bitburg, Spangdahlem, and Hahn Air Force Bases. Nobody expected, at least those of us in the ranks, that things would change so dramatically, yet they did. A day or so after the wall "came down", we saw Trabants (Trabies) full of what were formerly East Germans all the way West in our little part of the world - it was a strange, yet exhilarating sight!

For forty years American servicemembers had been keeping watch on 'The Bloc" - Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland,and East Germany, and suddenly it seemed as if it was all over, and we won. We watched through the summer and fall as it happened, first in Poland, then spreading throughout the rest of Central Europe, the feeling, the first blossoms, of true freedom. It seemed almost unreal that it was all coming apart. The threat that our fathers - even our grandfathers - had stood against, no longer seemed so threatening.

Bitburg is now, for the most part, closed. The housing area still houses airmen stationed at Spangdahlem. Our unit, the 820th Ordnance Company, was deactivated by 1991, and we all went on to new things. I went to White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, and became the reenlistment NCO. By now a Sergeant, I was involved in testing some pretty cool stuff. But there are probably tens of thousands of us who were there - in Germany, in the Autumn of 1989, who witnessed a truly historic event.
It really changed many of us, though for many only hindsight allows us to see these changes. Most of us at the time did not really see what was happening, caught up in or own little piece as we were. But the world truly moved in a different direction, and now Poland wants US bases on its soil.

For myself, I don't think I understood exactly what was happening in Europe that year of 1989. I knew that all summer Poland was in turmoil of some sort, Trabies were showing up in Bitburg, that pieces of the wall were for sale in front of the BX, and that, on Christmas Day, Nicolae Ceauşescu, the Romanian Communist Dictator, and his wife, were shown being executed on television.

It was a whole new world - and I got to see it, and I'll never forget it.