Cold War

As kids, the Cold War made no sense to my parents. My father even said, "I wondered why they called it the cold war." They were both unaware of the true magnitude of what was at stake, but their two shorts stories were quite different. My mother's is simple: the Cold War had no effect upon her. My dad on the other hand said it shook his childhood a bit. My father mentioned that the scariest incident he could remember during the Cold War was the Cuban Missile Crisis. Along with his parents, adults throughout his neighborhood were scared of what could happen, and began building bomb shelters. During school, my father and his classmates went through drills in which they would crawl under their desks, and curl up in balls. Of course this would do nothing against a nuclear attack, but this was the mentality that emerged out of the Cold War. The Russians were the "big bad guys" and were no ally of the Americans.