History is usually written long after historical events play themselves out in real life.  It's rare to understand the gravity of historical events as they are actually happening. For example, I was in the Army and stationed in West Germany when the Berlin Wall came down in November of 1989.  It was news where we were, but I don't think many of us in Rheinberg really understood that the epochal event of our generation was playing itself out only a few hundred miles away.  We look back at it today as the touchstone that it is — the death knell of the Soviet Union.  But at the time, most of us didn't recognize it as such. That's likely because for all of my life, and most of my parents' lives, the Soviet Union was the grand villain, the ubiquitous enemy, a fount of evil that simply was.  It was the perpetual enemy to be feared above all else, and it was the reason I and hundreds of thousands of others...(Read Full Article)