Early Cold War Boyhood Fantasies

[MineralMan]

An odd dream last night triggered this memory:

I was born about a week before the Hiroshima bomb was dropped, so I grew up during the cold war. I started entering puberty in 1958, at age 13. I remember having fantasies and dreams about the country being invaded by Russians. There was a lot of talk among adults back then about such things. My father even built a fallout shelter under our house after the Cuban Missile Crisis. I helped. We kids got to dive under our desks at my Southern California school in "A-Bomb" drills.

Meanwhile, as a typical small-town boy, I used to hike in the hills around my small town. With a neighborhood friend, we explored pretty much the entire area surrounding that little town. So, when I heard adults talking about the Russians coming, I guess it was natural for me to think, "What would I do if that happened."

Well, my dad was a hunter, so he taught me how to shoot a rifle at a pretty early age. I was damned good at it, too. I didn't enjoy hunting all that much, but I did learn about firearms and how to use them. So, in my 13th year, when I asked myself "What would I do..." all that got combined into a boyhood plan.

I knew many spots in the hills around my home town that would make excellent sniper positions, so that's what I thought about. When the Russians came, I'd be up in the hills, picking them off, one by one. I even planned escape routes from each position that brought me back to my house.

I'm sure I wasn't alone in that kind of thinking. Fortunately, sometime after my 14th birthday, I had a girlfriend who lived nearby. All of those ideas seemed to disappear after that. It's funny what you think is important during that odd period of life, I guess. I somehow stopped thinking about sniping at Russians completely.

[Aristus]

1. Same exact thing happened to me in the Reagan-80's.

I had daydreams of being a Red Dawn-style commando, and fighting for Old Glory in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains.

Then I met my first girlfriend, we made out at the movies, and I forgot all that Red Dawn crap.

You don't need stupid, adolescent Rambo fantasies when you're getting laid on a regular basis...

Incidentally, haven't watched Red Dawn in decades. Right-wing piece of shit...

[MineralMan]

2. Well, perhaps not "getting laid," but thinking about that possibility

anyhow. A better fantasy than sniping at non-existent Russians, for sure.

[Aristus]

3. Well, it didn't happen right away. Like you said, it's a better fantasy.

By the time it started happening for real, most of the guys I knew were still acting out juvenile fantasies, wearing camo and running around in the woods.

[The Genealogist]

4. Most of my cold-war related memories are of fearfulness

I think the apex of the anxieties of the late cold war, for me, was the move The Day After. My father rarely censored anything for me, indeed he would tend to make me watch scary movies. I think it might have been his way of counteracting fears I had. Anyway, that movie is still seared in my memory. It aired on a Sunday, and I remember being a 10 year old lying in bed, fearing that every bump in the night was a nuke coming. I remember the constant fear of he USSR, presented as a godless lot bent on destroying this country. My grandma had a file drawer full of folders for countries of the world, with articles about where they stood vis-a-vis the USSR vs the US. She could tell you who was on what side. Movies like Red Dawn reinforced my fears. What I don't remember is other kids my general age being all that concerned about it. Rarely did Cold War era concerned come up in conversation.

[pecosbob]

5. I spent an entire decade of my life believing nothing I did mattered in the long run

due to what I viewed as the inevitability of nuclear war. I was wrong...that hopelessness has now morphed into a somewhat one-sided struggle against predatory trans-national corporations and criminal empires.

[FakeNoose]

6. I remember the Cuban missile crisis, JFK staring down the Russians

I was maybe 10 when it happened and the adults all looked terrified around that time. I think my parents and grandparents didn't want us kids to know how scare they were. I grew up in Saint Louis, and I guess the thinking was that the nukes would hit other places first before they got to us. We thought that would give us time to get to a bomb shelter somewhere.

The whole thing was over in about a week as I recall, but it was a very tense week. I grew up Catholic and we used to pray for "the conversion of Russia" at every Mass.