Team Yankee Fulda Gap 86 - Bulletin number 5

[barca]

Team Yankee Fulda Gap 86 - Bulletin number 5

We know now that in the middle years of the 1980s, the “West” was being watched closely by intelligence services that served a network of dangerously ambitious and paranoid Communist masters.

 

We know now that as “we Capitalists” busied ourselves about our various concerns, we were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a scientist with a microscope might scrutinize the bacteria on a glass slide.

 

With infinite complacence, people went to and fro over the green expanses and bright cities of West Germany, France and the UK, focused upon their little affairs. They did this, serene in the assurance of their dominion over this western end of the European subcontinent.

 

Yet across an immense economic and geographic gulf, eastern minds that are as alien to our minds as the Mongols were to the Magyars, intellects vast, cool and unsympathetic, regarded the rich farms and industries of the West with envious eyes. As they did so, they slowly and surely drew their plans against us.

 

In the 86th year of the 20th century came the great disillusionment. It was near the beginning of August. Business was better. The war scare of 1983 was over, and fading into memory. More people were back at work. Sales were picking up. On this particular evening, August 4th, the Nielsen Ratings service estimated that over 40 million people would listen to or watch the baseball game between the Chicago White Sox and the Boston Red Sox.

 

In the meantime, an unprecedented number of Warsaw Pact tanks, ships, aircraft, soldiers, sailors and airmen were due to stand down from Joint Military Exercise Zapad-86, and return to their “normal” training bases.  They were extremely surprised to receive orders for them to remain in place and await further instructions.  However, indicators were soon forthcoming in the form of swarms of military logistics teams refueling the equipment and loading live ammunition. Commanders were seen carrying stacks of maps and sealed envelopes. The “Chekists”, who usually kept their distance during training exercises, were now everywhere and at everyone’s elbow.  Whatever would happen next, in the Red Army and the VolksArmee, felt like it was going to be different from everything that had come before…