Last Sunday while reading the paper, I came across an unusual real estate ad. It listed for sale an Anti-Ballistic Missile complex located near the Canadian border in Nekoma, ND. I am familiar with this site and was actually a bit appalled that this was for sale to the general public and not in a preservation status. According to the Cold War Tourist's website, it is the only facility of its kind, responding to Soviet threats to the Grand Forks Air Force Base with nuclear capabilities. Of course it is no longer operational and gauging by the pictures on the Cold War Tourist's site, in need of a major restoration.

As I sat and looked at the picture of this historic site, it conjured up early memories of duck and cover drills in elementary school. Living with the threat of a nuclear holocaust must have wedged itself into my psyche and those around me. I remember “playing war” with a few other children in elementary. We would grab some encyclopedias and look up military items to battle each other with, a version of a role-playing game I suppose. My anti-aircraft gun takes out your Messerschmitt! War must have seemed so remote, so far away, for us to treat it as a game. Our childish minds did not grasp the reality that living in eastern North Dakota placed us on the front line.

At the time, there were over 150 minuteman missile sites connected to the Grand Forks AFB. I don't think this truth ever really hit home for those of us who grew up in the region. We would read in a book that Grand Forks was number 3 on a list of targets for the Soviet Union and laugh about it. As residents of a small town we saw ourselves as so provincial. “Who would ever want to attack us North Dakotans?” We would say. The land of lefse and lutefisk. What is there to attack? Towns with nearly as many bars as churches, some roads weren't even paved, the cafe where farmers congregated in the mornings to discuss nothing more pressing than the soybean harvest. We simply did not understand what was literally under our feet. It was nothing personal. If we had met our Russian counterparts we may have had a lot in common.

Age has brought a new perspective to that scenario, if it had ever unfolded. I no longer laugh that my region of the planet was high on the list of targets. To the people in charge, it is all just a grand chessboard, or like a game of Risk. Place some missiles here, away from the centers of power, where the elite lived in their mansions and high-rises. We meant nothing more to them than collateral damage. We were not people in their eyes but the sacrificial lambs for the glory of the United States.

The cold war was history's largest pissing contest, an attempt to fill the power void left after WWII. Although it was presented as such, it was not to actually protect freedoms or a way of life, but to say, “my gun is bigger than yours and I have more of them”.  The irony is that while I was playing the game of war, so were the people at the top.

The pyramidal shape of the Stanley Mickelson site rises unnaturally from the beauty of the surrounding prairie. Much like the actual pyramids at Giza, it is representative of the goals of the powers that be, made possible on the backs of ordinary people. Although thousands of years separate us from the ancient Egyptians, the average person is still seen as expendable to the ruling elite of the planet. Right now in Pakistan, the Obama administration conducts drone strikes where, unfortunately, civilians are killed on a regular basis. But on paper they are just numbers in another senseless, unauthorized war. The Mickelson site should serve as a reminder to all people, no matter if they are Russian, American, or Pakistani, that the people in charge of our safety and security, really only care about their own safety and security.

Source and for additional information please visit the Cold War Tourist's Website.

http://coldwartourist.com/