Welllll Okay. It seems like a million years ago when I was in the military stationed in Germany. It was at the height of the cold war. Ronald Reagan was president, and all the noise nutworks were proclaiming that he would start WWIII. Germany and the Fulda gap were the predicted route by which Russian troops would slice through western Europe and wipe the force of NATO off the planet.
I was stationed right in the middle of the biggest community of Americans in Europe near Kaiserslautern at the tip of the aviation spear, Ramstein Air Base. Ours was the ADA unit assigned the job of stopping Russian forces from closing that important base.
Stress? Nah. Stress was worry that your wife would find your stash of Playboy mags. Stress was having an unreliable vehicle and needing to drive twenty miles to base at breakneck speeds on a road shared with horse drawn wagons of cattle feed. Stress was having a boot that hated polish like the democrats hate the Constitution.
In other words, we'd have loved to have only a little stress in our lives. What we did have was Legos. And we, supposed adults, played with them.
I confess, that as a kid I never had them. I mean, who had time for them? There were too many things to do in a day to waste precious time sitting at home building with colored blocks.
We'd have a group of guys over. After supper, the cards would come out, and after a few rounds of Pinochle or Spades, some one would get ahold of the boxof Legos and we would all soon be making a space ship or a house, or something wild.
I guess we weren't crazy and abnormal after all. I left my pile of Legos in Germany. I'd like to think that some GI there still plays with them when things get tough and they need an escape from reality that does not involve a courts martial for being AWOL.
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