20 years ago today..
 

The Wall started coming down 20 years ago today. Took a few months for it to really take effect, but Nov. 9th was the day that is was announced that GDR citizens were allowed to cross over, and the checkpoints were opened up.

I lived in Stuttgart at the time. I was young, but I remember it being talked about on the car radio on our way home and it was all over the news, my dad wanted to watch it and I didn't get to watch my tape of Sesamstraße. I have a horrible, horrible childhood memory.. but that is one that for some reason I remember really well.

It took another few weeks before they were literally tearing parts of it down. Obviously I didn't quite understand it all (I really don't think I understood the difference between 'us' and the GDR at the time...) but I still remember the images, especially on the nightly news of tons of people gathering around the gates that night.

Making some of you feel old?

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Ya beat me to it...

This is me from December 1989...
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Finding a hammer in Berlin was next to impossible. We must have looked at every store within a five mile radius. People were so friendly and offered up there hammers for a few swings, not to mention wine and champagne.

20 years later...

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was stationed in Stuttgart,
visiting my Uncle in Kaiserslautern..
incredible night..

Rika

Can you believe it was only 20 years ago? So much has changed but it still seems like it was just yesterday. When it was up, the Wall and the Iron Curtain seemed like they would last forever. Now that they're gone it seems like they never were there.

Looking back, I realize that I had just graduated from college in 1989, so all of my growing up was defined by the Cold War, but my adult life has been completely post-Cold War. Who would have known on January 1, 1989, what a different world the place would be in just a year.

We went up to Westminster College yesterday to look at the parts of the wall they have there as a memorial. For those who don't know, Westminster, in Fulton, MO, was the place where Winston Churchill gave his "Iron Curtain" speech back in 1946.

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All of this was before my time...

Dave, Where is that large chunk at?

I was staying with friends near Halle in July, 1989 and there was not the slightest inkling there of the border ever opening. Hungary had opened theirs in May and the DDR had just started requiring visas for their folks to visit Hungary. I went to Austria from Leipzig and then we drove to Hungary. While crossing into Hungary, there we could see the abandoned Trabbis on the side of the road and E. Germans wandering through the fields. It was very cool.

Simi Valley, Ca. At the Reagan library.

I was flying an ambulance mission that night. Returning to Tempelhof Air Base in Berlin I asked the controller for a visual approach and got it as the weather was reasonable for Berlin in the fall. This allowed us to circle over East Berlin and then onto final for the base runway.

Ahead was the Berlin Wall and all of a sudden we realized that the lights around Check Point Charlie were much brighter than normal, and lots more activity at the crossing than normal. We asked the control tower what in the world was going on and they were the first to inform us that the Berlin Wall had fallen.

We secured the patient, got the plane put to bed and went out with everyone else and got drunk. History was being made!

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Ramp as it looked that night:
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What you saw months afterwards, the East German and Russian soldiers selling their equipment. An AK47 went for $200...
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Having a drink with the helo pilot afterwards, then heading home to crash.
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Awesome story Joe.

I was in Jakarta at the time, and as these things sometimes happen, that night I was at a reception hosted by the East German Ambassador to Indonesia. It was a very sad affair, because everyone there knew that these East Germans living large (relatively) in their diplomatic positions would very soon (within days) be unemployed. To their credit, they cracked their best champagnes that night, and had more ordered in. But that was it. They were gone two weeks later. Actually one of the attaches stayed on. Sent his wife back to Leipzig. He now runs the top private investigative agency in Jakarta.