West Berlin was the best place to get eyeball to eyeball with the enemy, so the air force flew us there. This was 1987 and the infamous Berlin Wall still had two years of life left in it. We attended various classified briefings and got a helicopter tour of the Iron Curtain, flying over death strips guarded from watchtowers and barricaded with razor wire.
One evening we donned our uniforms, passed through a border checkpoint, and walked into East Berlin for supper. The city was still considered occupied and the military personnel of the occupying countries could pass into one another’s zones, although it was a one-sided passage. The East didn’t allow their troops into the West, knowing they would never come back.
In our walk from West to East we traveled back to 1945. Color had yet to come to this part of the world. Everything was gray and drab, even the clothing of the women. Remote-control TV cameras mounted on buildings watched us and other pedestrians. The streets were heavily patrolled by Kalashnikov-toting East German and Soviet guards. They glared at us like we were the enemy, which, of course, we were. As we passed one pair of guards, I pointed to a medal on my chest and said to John Blaha (class of 1980) in an intentionally loud voice, “And I got this one for killing ten commies.” The hostile expressions of the guards didn’t change. Apparently they didn’t speak English, which was probably a good thing for me.
Our air force host led us to his favorite East Berlin restaurant. I was prepared to be disappointed, but the place was clean, brightly lit, and staffed with young and beautiful East German fräuleins. As we entered, the rest of the patrons, all East German and Soviet military officers, gave us their best game face. We ignored them. Several tables were shoved together to accommodate our entourage and we got down to the business of drinking. We were soon a rowdy spectacle for the rest of the crowd. They stared at us with disapproving expressions, as if laughing and smiling were forbidden in the workers’ paradise.
Later in the evening an intoxicated John Blaha grabbed a vase of daffodils and began to peer into each bloom with the focus of a horticulturist. I wondered if he had slipped into alcohol poisoning, but he whispered to me, “I’ll bet the KGB has bugged this vase. They’re probably in a back room listening to everything we’re saying. Well, I’ll give them something to think about.” He lifted the flowers to his mouth like a microphone and began to speak loudly into their blooms: “Mike, wasn’t that briefing about our new F-99 Mach 7 fighter really interesting?” Then he handed the vase to me.
I joined in the fun. “Yeah, and to think Mach 7 is its
The others at the table picked up on our disinformation campaign and the vase of flowers went from hand to hand while the rest of our group made even more outrageous claims about secret weapon systems we had recently seen or flown. Meanwhile, the humorless commie diners stared at us as if we were mad. Since we were talking into daffodil blooms, I could understand their bewilderment.
When the vase finally made it back to Blaha, he closed the floor show by speaking into it in an exceptionally loud voice. “Why is it that visiting Soviet basketball teams never play the Celtics or Lakers? Whenever they come to the USA they always play some piss-poor university team. What are they…pussies?” We all wondered how that would translate back in the Kremlin.
Imagine my shock when, several months later, Blaha ran into my office with a newspaper article describing how the Soviets, for the first time in history, were going to allow their basketball team to play an exhibition game with an NBA team. “I told you that vase was bugged,” Blaha shouted. We laughed at the image of an army of KGB spies hunting for that F-99 fighter.
Our journey into the heart of the enemy camp wasn’t the highlight of that evening. Back at our hotel, four of us donned our bathing suits and headed for the sauna. There we encountered a middle-aged fräulein with a Mr. T physique who handed us towels and shower clogs and then pointed to our suits and said,