Twenty years ago, the Soviet Union imploded as the Communists attempted a coup and failed. The empire's periphery peeled away and the retreat from the Soviet borders begun in 1989 continued:
First came Mikhail Gorbachev, who moved a monolithic Soviet Union toward reform. Then in August 1991, an ill-conceived coup attempt by clumsy and occasionally drunken men opened a crack that could not be closed.
A few pieces of the empire fell off and floated away. Soon the rest of the mass collapsed.
I don't remember much of those days in August. I was in Battle Creek at a Michigan National Guard base, lying in my bunk the night before we were going into a field exercise with the brand new Mobile Subscriber Equipment (basically, portable cell phone towers in the forest) that we'd trained to use over the prior year. Someone was listening to the radio playing cards and they announced a coup going on in the Soviet Union.
Holy crap, I thought. The nuclear-armed USSR, already stripped of their eastern European empire is potentially going to get taken over by someone mighty upset about all that? I was a history major. This was big. But I was tired and would have a lot of work to do in the morning. I fell asleep.
For the next 96 hours, we ran a continuous FTX, and I was in my van (I was a node center operator, 31FV4) or around it for all but about a dozen hours. Once I went back to the barracks to get 5 straight hours of sleep and a shower. I heard almost nothing about what was going on around the world in Moscow. My focus was on the machinery I had to demonstrate I could use and answering questions to satisfy the retired sergeant major, who worked for the contractor that set us loose in the field, that I knew what I was doing after a year of training during our weekend drills and during the three weeks we were called up to serve that summer, culminating in this FTX.
It was weird. It was conceivable that war could break out in Europe as elements within the Soviet Union resisted the loss of empire. Yet I was 100% focused on signal gear in my little corner of the military.
By the time we came out of the field and I saw a newspaper, it was all over in Moscow. Worrying about nuclear war would have done me no good over the past 4 days and might have interfered with my mission in a Humvee-mounted radio room.
So that was my big lesson from the coup attempt of 1991. It was quite a lesson in perspective.
Actually, when in basic training, I had a glimmer of the lesson I got in 1991. Then, our Navy shot down an Iranian civilian airliner and rumor swept our company that we would ship out to war. Then, I could figuratively slap them around to clue my fellow trainees in that the Army was not about to send a bunch of half-trained recruits off to war.
You worry about what you need to worry about. Anything else is a luxury worry.
