Now for the long answer.

I was a soldier of the Cold war. I was involved with the cold war from early childhood. When I started the first grade in 1954, my father was a worker at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant near Piketon, Ohio. The plant produced nuclear weapons grade uranium and his job required him to have an extremely high security clearance. When I was in the third grade, someone in my father's department left the plant with a piece of one of the highest classified items at the plant. A "no holds barred" investigation was conducted by the FBI. Although my father had nothing to do with the incident, he was a member of the department and was investigated along with the other members of the department. During the investigation, an FBI agent came to my school and interviewed me (an eight year old third grader) in the presence of my principal. The agent asked me to identify various terms. Unfortunately, I identified the name of the missing item. It was a term that I had heard in a history class taught by the principal the previous day. The agent then grilled me concerning various aspects of my father's private life and friends. That was my first contact with the cold, cruel, and dirty aspects of the Cold War.

When I was in the fifth grade, my father accepted a job at the Metropolis, Illinois, plant of the Allied Chemical Corporation. That plant processed uranium for the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant (PGDP) which processed uranium for the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant. The family moved to Paducah, Kentucky, and lived a few blocks from my mother's brother, a worker at PGDP. I grew up "in the business" of the Cold War and became an Eagle Scout in the process.

I was seventeen years old when I graduated from high school in 1966 and was half way through my freshman year of college before I was old enough to join the military. I signed up for the draft and started talking to the recruiters. The navy offered me a six-year electronics program. My uncle, a World War II airman, called from the center of the central control facility of PGDP and came up with a counter offer. He had a friend who worked with him and was a major in an army reserve unit who had a friend that was the commanding officer of an intelligence army reserve unit. Several positions were available in the unit for linguists and I was given one of those positions. Thus, on May 18, 1967, I entered the Cold War as a participant. After basic training, I was trained in the Russian language at the Defense Language Institute and received other intelligence training in Maryland. I left the unit in 1973, near the end of the Vietnam War.

About five years later, I enlisted in an armor company of the Kentucky Army National Guard for a year.

In 1984, I returned to my original unit. I found that the unit had been reorganized and that it was necessary for me to return to active duty for ten weeks to receive training for another job in the intelligence community. After I completed that school, the requirements for that job changed and I was required to return to the language school for a year. When I returned home, the army deactivated my unit and created another type of intelligence unit in its place. I was then required to go to another active duty school for six months to train for a third job in the intelligence community.......a job which extended to the highest levels of the government. Finally, my unit was moved about 200 miles from my home. After a year of flying (at government expense) to a training location over 400 miles from my home one weekend a month, I terminated my connection with the military. 

A few months afterward, in 1989, I continued my efforts in the Cold War when I became an employee at PGDP, following in the footsteps of my father and my uncle.