Tension on Red Alert

In 1966, I was again posted to Germany and this time with 3 Fighter Wing they called Zweibrücken. My work again was on the aircraft. In those days we had, the Cold War was very hot in those days and it was a matter - we were only a matter of a few minutes that the Russians at that time could have overcome our base quite easily with their aircraft because it only took maybe about ten, fifteen minutes from the time they took off to the time they’d be over our head. They used to have a call, “Snowball, snowball, snowball.” When you heard that you, you knew that it was an alert and at all times those alerts were red alert, in a sense. This was caused by a possible movement of troops in the Russians which were so close to our border down there that any time that they moved anything, everybody went on red alert. It was quite tense for the family as well. The idea was that if anything did happen, they were on their own. They had to take my car and go. I don’t know, they had different areas that they were told where to go for evacuation of the base. At that time, we were quite busy on the aircraft because we carried the nuclear weapons in those days and we had to arm the aircraft and everything, get them ready but those aircraft were on alert 24 hours a day with the pilot sitting right in the aircraft. So it was quite, it was quite tedious for us and quite hard for us to be able to leave your family behind with the possibility of invasion by the Russian troops.