In the January 2017 edition of AUSA’s ARMY magazine, COL(R) Kenneth Carlson ’66 shares a personal story about the impact of the Berlin Wall.
Several months ago, I was playing golf with some young people when I mentioned that the eighth hole at the Brambleton Golf Course in Ashburn, Va., should be called Berlin. They asked why. I responded, "Because it has a wall right across the fairway." They had no idea what I meant, so I asked them if they had learned about the Berlin Wall in a history class. None had ever read or heard anything about it. So I explained.
In 1964, as a U.S. Military Academy cadet on Army Orientation Training, I had visited Berlin with several classmates. Two of us were sitting at a restaurant quite close to the wall when we noticed an elderly woman standing at a street crossing. She never moved, even when the light changed. Instead, she kept checking her watch. When the minute hand reached 12, she reached into her purse and with drew a set of binoculars, looking across the wall. We stood and looked as well. Across the wall, about four blocks in, an elderly man leaned out of a window at least five or more stories high on an East Berlin building. He also had binoculars. The two waved at each other for a minute or two and then blew a kiss to each other. Then the elderly man pulled back into the building. The woman put her binoculars into her purse and began to walk away.
I got up and ran to her side, asking in English, "What did we just see?" She replied that the man was her husband. He had been in East Berlin on business on Aug. 13, 1961, when the wall was erected. The East Germans would not let him return to his home in West Berlin, nor did they permit telephone calls between the East and West sectors. They did permit mail to be sent and received, but she and her husband wanted to see each other. So they picked a day and time each week when they would wave across the wall. They had done so for three years.
Article re-published with permission of AUSA. Full Article»