I was 12. I was scared because my parents were scared, and they could usually fake me out.

quote:

Originally posted by GWbiker:
. . .Here is the Soviet Sub commander who probably saved us from a Nuclear war....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov

Gotta be a special place in heaven for Vasili Arkhipov. God bless him, and keep him! We should all view him as a hero!

I was in either 9th or 10th grade then. We lived about 40 miles from a SAC air base. A Lot more than normal numbers of bombers , fighters, fuel tankers flying around making a lot of noise.

We figured that the Ruskies had a nuke or two aimed at the base. If things did get hot we would become a shadow of our former selves.

I remember the getting under the desk and away from windows in elementary school along with other CD stuff, more in the fifties.

I was 21 years old at the time, living in Still water Oklahoma and a member of a U.S. Army reserve unit, Btry, B, 4th Bn, 30th Arty. We were sitting on our duffle bags awaiting the orders for activation/deployment....which never came.

quote:

Originally posted by ZSMICHAEL:The movie, " On the Beach " which premiered in 1959 featured the aftermath of a nuclear war with the survivors waiting to die in Australia when the nuclear fallout reached them. It scared the hell out of me......

Copies of "On the Beach" was sent to several Nuclear power countries....including the Soviet Union which probably gave the Russians something to think about.

We also owe thanks to the memory of Bobby Kennedy who pressured JFK to continue to negotiate with Khrushchev. Our Military wanted JFK to authorize an invasion of Cuba.

My memory has me walking to class at the University, as the ships neared Cuba. It seemed strange to me i was doing the same every day thing i always did, while life as we knew it could drastically change. It was kinda hard to think about studies that day. Funny thing, it turned out things stayed the same. Then later, much later i guess, Paul Harvey i think, said President Kennedy had been shot. Kept waiting for good news, but good news never came.

Years later the news announced an airplane had crashed into one of the towers, and i wondered about the accident. Then as i watched, right before my eyes, a plane crashed into the other tower.

quote:

Originally posted by Elk Hunter:

quote:

Originally posted by George43:
Germany, SP5, Signal Corps. Kinda exciting.

What was your unit?

Pirmasens Germany, UHF, C company, 102nd signal BN, Stratcom.

As we used to say "The infantry said follow me, the Signal Corp said call me when you get there".

This message has been edited. Last edited by: George43,

I lived through it, but it didn't make much of an impression on me.
Well, I was about 21 months old, so not much of anything made an impression on me at that time...

I was 9...I remember how my teachers and family were seriously stressed and worried and how hard they attempted to cover that worry up...it weighed on them and it showed. When it had passed, they were like different people when the weight had lifted.

My mom and grandmother were Jehovah's Witnesses at the time and they were sure Armageddon was days away...but I think my grandmother was sad in some ways it didn't happen

I was nine.
The news showed the ships but the danger of war wasn’t on my mind.

I had an absolutely great teacher at the time, of "Current Events" in my senior year HS.

He discussed this at length with us, and made the subject interesting. Besides teaching us how to read the 'newspaper' (which exists only in theory now) he drew maps on the blackboard from memory, of such places we had barely heard of : Viet Nam, Cambodia, Burma....etc.

Having a "safe space" meant considerably different then than it does now, along with a lot of other social vaporwear.

Yes, I was a 1Lt USAF serving at Adair AFS, Oregon at the time. I think we went to DEFCON 2 at the time.

flashguy

I was around 12 but I remember it. I was old enough to realize the danger. My uncle was in the National Guard and got called up to Fort Hood.

I am 68. I remember. We did CYA drills at skool, SoCal Fullerton.

I was 14 and in Junior High. Funny, I had an American Govt. class and the teacher made a big deal out of it so yeah, I remember it very well. We didn't do any drills or get under the desk though.

I was in high school and for me it was kind of overshadowed by JFK’s assassination. They announced it over the loud speaker during lunch at school, but the Cuban Missile Crises was a scary time.

Yes. I remember it. My younger sister and I have birthdays that are 2 days short of two years apart, so we celebrated then together, except the midddle of October 1962.

That helped make the events pretty memorable.

And the "Duck and Cover" at school, the sirens at noon, the "broadcasts" and Conelrad interruptions of TV and radio, and people were very "serious and on edge".

That last part has stayed with me all my life.

And as much as I love a laugh and a joke, there is a drop dead serious side of me that is so unfunny, it ain't funny.

Sometimes, I think my childhood, really was, B&W.

I was IN IT! (I am 74 years old now).

I was assigned to an aircraft carrier - The USS Essex (CVS 9) and I was IN the Cuban Missile Crisis as it happened sailing around Cuba and the Essex was an anti-submarine carrier (I was 19 then and it was my first active duty assignment).

We DID think that there might be a nuclear war, but I felt it was better to be there where I might be able to do my part in it to keep it from happening than to be a civilian trying to take some kind of cover!

I didn't actually know how close it was to actually going nuclear until over 20 years later!

At least I think today that the Russians better understood the concept of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) than the present threat of Kim Jung Un does!

RonJon

I also did the hide under the desk drill.

I was a senior in high school in Jacksonville, N.C. the home of the 2nd Marine Division at Camp Lejeune.

My Dad was a Chief Warrant Officer at the time. As the stuff heated up, very fast as I remember, he came home, packed his personal trash and got on a ship. All the Marine dads in the neighborhood disappeared within a day.

Wives were told there would be some kind of 'contact' from the base, but what I remember mostly is the level of freaked out, a word that had not been invented yet but should have, that my mom achieved.
I had to take my sisters and brother to a neighbor because she kept telling them that we were all going to die.

We cancelled a football game too. Bummer.