interesting conversation...

Well I had 5 grad parties today but one of them stood out in my mind. I was at a friend who I have went to school with since 4th grade and when I said hi to one of his uncles I noticed 2 unusual tattos, they happened to mean that he was once part of the USN (United States Navy) from 1970-1980. He was in Vietnam in 1970-1972 and was almost part of WWIII in 1973. Apparently we were at DEFCON 2 (for those of you who don't know DEFCON 5 means nothing is going on and DEFCON 1 is WWIII, I'm not sure if they use it in the post-cold war era though) for 48 hours straight. He was on a nuclear submarine that had missiles pointed at every key soviet site (Moscow, St. Petersburg, etc.). Apparently there was good intel that there might be a pre-emptive strike on Israel and back then a nuke on Tel Aviv was equal to nuking Chicago or NYC. So that's how close we came once. There were many other times that WWIII was almost started but he was out of the Navy by then. I know that most, if not all, of you that post comments here are old enough to remember all the cold war tensions between us and the soviets, so I would like to hear any interesting cold war related stories any of you have. Feel free to share.