Wall to Wall: Living under the Cold War
Soviet airmen used to play a game with the Americans near Keflavik Air Base in Iceland.
It was the 1980s, which meant even little skirmishes between the Soviet Union and America had the possibility to cascade into nuclear warfare. Children were no longer practicing duck-and-cover drills in schools and people were no longer building bunkers in their backyards, but the threat of war still hung over Keflavik — a little air base stuffed between the North Atlantic Ocean and the Islandic mountains.
The game started when Soviet bomber planes skirted too close to Iceland’s airspace. One tip of a wing too far could mean a violation of NATO airspace, forcing the Americans at the base to react.
That reaction could blow a Soviet plane from the sky, leading to war.
But the Soviet planes never directly violated the airspace. Men at the base would scramble into their jets when the Soviets showed on the radar, and they would catch them in the air and make radio contact, telling them to disengage before one wing tipped too far.
After a couple of rounds, the men from Keflavik started to recognize the Soviets in the planes, getting to know their faces through the glass of the cockpits.
Sometimes, they even nodded to each other across the air, inches separating them from war.
This was the story Sgt. Randolph Tate was told when he arrived at Keflavik in 1987. Tate had grown up under the shadow of the Cold War. He was born only a year after the building of the Berlin Wall and a month before the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 — the closest the Soviet Union and the U.S. had ever come to nuclear warfare.
“There was always that threat,” Tate said about a nuclear attack during the Cold War. “(The U.S. and the Soviet Union) couldn’t reach a resolution and therefore, they could destroy the world. Both countries could destroy the world three or four times over.”
Tate grew up in Stafford, Virginia, without any desire or calling to join the military. But when his mom told him he needed to find a job after he graduated high school, he enlisted in the U.S. Air Force the same month President Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union the “empire of evil.”
In fact, Tate joined the militaristic fray during a decade when the world saw revamped tensions between the Soviet Union and the U.S.
Several events, such the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the subsequent 1980 protest of the Moscow Summer Olympic Games, stoked the fire against Communism. Even pop culture got involved with the conflict in the 1980s, leading to movies like “Red Dawn” and “Rocky IV” that heavily alluded to the Cold War.
However, Tate did not join the military to fight against Communism or defend the patriotic notion of American democracy. He simply needed a job. When asked what his initial response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was, Tate admitted that he probably didn’t even know about it as a senior in high school.
He had graduation to get ready for. Communism was the farthest thing from his mind.
That changed, however, when he began his military career.
After going through basic training in Texas, Tate was stationed in Delaware to work security for the Military Airlift Command. His job was to guard the planes wherever they went — Europe, Africa and Middle and Central America.
Tate flew to Europe twice a week, which meant coming closer to the front lines of the war over Communism. Tate said serving in the U.S. military crystalized the tensions between the Soviet Union and America for him, calling the Soviet Union the “bad actor” of the world at the time.
“I think with the Soviet Union, with the tension, you knew who the enemy was,” Tate said. “Whether it be the Soviet Union or a proxy government that the Soviet Union was funding … Everything was geared towards that. The reason why we had planes, tanks (and) armed forces is because of the Soviet Union.”
The tension of the Cold War even affected how Tate trained. Threats of biological and chemical warfare meant one thing: know how to wear a gas mask and protective suit.
The chem suits, officially called Nuclear Biological and Chemical (NBC) suits, weighed 25 pounds and resembled camouflaged hazmat suits, complete with gloves, boots, a jacket and a mask. To train, Tate and the other airmen were put in an enclosed building, and someone would drop in a teargas grenade. Then, they had three seconds to seal their masks or suffer the consequences of the gas.
“In Europe, your gas mask was with you every day,” Tate said. “That’s just because of the threat of biological or chemical (warfare). That was just the way of life as far as NATO Europe in the ’80s.”
After Delaware, Tate moved to Iceland and worked in Tactical Airlift Command, securing the fighter planes. After a year, Tate was stationed in Nebraska and worked Strategic Air Command, protecting bombers and the planes that held the nukes.
Wherever he went, though, the Cold War cast a shadow.
“Like I said, you knew who the enemy was,” Tate said. “It’s a lot easier to plan because … if you got to fight the same boxer every bout, you’d start to know their tendencies, when they’re going to bring the hook or the jab.”
Tate left the military before the Soviet Union could land a direct jab, before a wing tipped too far into restricted airspace. After six years in the Air Force, Tate’s service ended, and he moved back to Virginia to begin his civilian life in September 1989.
The Berlin Wall fell a few months later.
“I got out in September, and it fell in November, so I like to say I had something to do with it,” Tate said with a laugh. “It was time. I can’t explain it any more than that. You could feel the difference in Europe toward the late ’80s that you could feel wasn’t there even in the mid ’80s.”
After the military, Tate pursued being a game warden, but his eyesight was too poor to fulfill the role. Eventually, Tate attended culinary school, and he has spent his life in the kitchen ever since.
Almost four decades after he first enlisted in the military, Tate, along with the rest of the world, watched Russia invade Ukraine in February 2022. The rekindled tensions between Russia and the U.S. harkened back to the Cold War era, but Tate said the world is different now than it was then.
And so is he.
“I was gung-ho, let’s go, let’s fly into Moscow right now,” Tate said. “I was a 20-year-old guy. You’re bulletproof at that age, and then, as you get older, you realize the Kevlar you wear kind of falls off a little bit each year. You try to be smarter and more holistic about the view of everything because there’s nothing new under the sun.”
Looking back now, Tate listed the humanitarian aspect as one of his favorite parts of the military. Even under the shadow of something as tense and dangerous as the Cold War, Tate got to hand supplies to children in Central American villages and help the people of Mexico City after an earthquake.
When Tate first arrived at Keflavik Air Base in Iceland, the Soviet Union stood as the faceless enemy — a chunk of land on the map trying to prevail a dangerous ideology.
However, the story he was told about the Soviet pilots nodding across the air to the same Americans they saw every time they skated too close to NATO airspace gave the Cold War a face. Tate said they were just men doing their jobs, just like he and his fellow airmen were trying to do at Keflavik.
He likened the story to how British and German troops occupying the front lines of WWI put down their arms on Christmas in 1914 to sing carols together. Tate said that even in war amid the chaos and the carnage, a side of humanity remains.
“I think people underneath, they all want just to basically live their lives,” Tate said. “To be able to go to work, feed their family and have a better life for their kids, no matter the society or ideology … God instills that taste (for freedom) in you, and once you’ve had that taste, anything else will not do.”
