Originally titled: Czechs And Balances. From December 6, 1989. – JDW
You can crush the flowers, but you can’t stop the spring. – Alexander Dubcek
I served three years, eleven months, twenty-three days, eighteen hours and thirty-two minutes.
It seemed longer.
I’d flunked out of college, something that can happen when you don’t go to class or complete the required assignments or study.
My father did not take my failure well.
Getting a job was out of the question; in my mind, a job was just more school and I’d had a belly full of numbing curricula and boring lecturers and tedious homework and multiple-choice tests.
I was eighteen. 18.
So, my old man gave me a choice. I could volunteer for Nam, where at least I’d have a weapon to protect myself.
Or he could kill me first thing in the morning. Sleep on it, he said, looking like a combination of Hulk Hogan and Mr. T. With a toothache.
He was really upset with me and he had every right to be.
The next day, Dad, ever the accommodating parent, drove me to the Marine recruiting office.
They were closed for lunch. So was the Army. Bless their hearts. I suggested we leave and return later. Much, much later.
Dad growled.
We tried the U.S. Air Force next. That’s when I volunteered for combat.
I figured the boys in blue weren’t likely to be mucking through no rice paddies any time real soon.
I signed up and the next day I was getting my head shaved in San Antonio. Basic training was its own kind of hell, but it was better than school.
Until some guy in reflective sunglasses and a gray suit came to our barracks and we were forced to take a day-long class learning an artificial language. Of course, there would be a test.
Turns out the top ten guys were going to Yale to study Chinese, the next ten to Monterrey to learn Czechoslovakian – whatever that was – and the rest of us would be taught to say “Give me liberty or give me death” in Vietnamese and assigned to latrine duty at Da Nang.
To make a long story shorter, that’s how I came to be sitting at the “A’ position in the National Security Agency’s spy station in Hof, Germany, on August 21, 1968. Charlie Flight was working the graveyard shift, midnight to eight, and all was quiet on the Western front. Or Eastern, I get confused.
I had my headsets on and I was studying Miss September in my favorite magazine. I was concentrating rather hard, when I heard something odd, so out of the ordinary that I ignored it, like it was an aural mirage. Then I heard it again.
Russian. That’s strange. I glanced at my intercept equipment. Everything was where it was supposed to be, pointed straight at the Czechs.
When I heard that voice again, I turned on the tape record and started writing. I wrote phonetically. I hollered for my analyst.
He din’t understand, but I did. I didn’t know much Russian, but just enough to recognize an invasion when I heard it.
Prague Spring would never see Autumn.
A Russian linguist took over my chair, and I grabbed another position. I searched for the first Czech voice I could find and confirmed my suspicions.
The Russians had sounded as if they were involved in routine military maneuvers, maybe war games.
The Czechs acted like it was the real thing. They were babbling like truckers on the Interstate using their CB radios. he Russians were coming and the Czechs didn’t know what to do.
They couldn’t fight back, could they? It was chaos.
We weren’t doing much better. I had confirmed my suspicions about the invasion. I had convinced Sargent Rivers, who had a little more trouble convincing the Lieutenant, who seemed worried mostly waking up the Colonel at his time in the morning.
We’d alerted Berlin, which alerted Washington, who wanted to know if we were absolutely, positively sure about this.
The Sarge told me later the Lieutenant told him the conversation went something like this:
“Are you sure?” “As sure as we can be, sir. We had our best man on it, sir.”
“Who was that?”
“Airman Welch, sir.”
“Airman? AIRMAN?!! What in the hell is an Airman doing on A?”
“Airman Welch is our top operator, sir.”
“Then why in the hell isn’t he a sergeant?”
Well, ummm, you see, sir, Airman Welch isn’t exactly military material.”
“Listen to me carefully. You get this Welch fella off of there and put a sergeant on it. And you damn well better be right about this.”
I heard later that everybody in Berlin got a medal for discovering the invasion. I got a three-day pass, which I decided was better than some ribbon to pin on my chest.
It was a sad thing to be a part of, that invasion. Even though I was spying on the Czechs, I felt a certain camaraderie, even brotherly love. Now that I spoke the language, they never did seem like the enemy.
The way I remember it, the rest of the guys, we were all heartened by Alexander Dubcek’s “socialism with a human face,” and we were proud of them for their bold move to a kinder, gentler state.
Dubcek was Gorbachev twenty years ahead of his time. Deposed by the Russians, he’d been declared a non-person, and given a clerical job in the forestry bureau. His name and picture were banned from all Czech media.
Now he’s free again. And my heart soars to see him today on a balcony overlooking Wenceslas Square, his name chanted by a half-million of his countrymen.
“I am standing before a people who have again raised their heads,” the old man said. “We have been living in the darkness for so long. Even if there was a sign of dawn, that was twenty years ago.
“But why should we live in the darkness if we know that we can experience the dawn?”
The Czechs have found the answer to that question.
We all can.
Epilogue. I wrote this piece as the Velvet Revolution was taking place. Been frightened of fascism all my life.
The following comes from the International Center on Non-Violent Conflict.
Czechoslovakia became a nation state after World War I when it became independent of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Following its division and partial incorporation into Nazi Germany until the end of the Second World War, it became a part of the East European Soviet sphere.
In the famous Prague Spring of 1968, massive reform swept through the Czechoslovakian government, with Alexander Dubcek at the helm. Although modest compared to Gorbachev’s own 1980s reform in the Soviet Union, human rights and a free press were encouraged, and civil society flourished. This was too much for the Soviet regime of the time, however, and in August of 1968, Warsaw Pact troops invaded. Mass nonviolent civil resistance by Czechs ensued, which increased the cost to the Soviets of their occupation, and stalled their complete control for about eight months. Ultimately, in the aftermath of the 1968 invasion, the most repressive of the East European regimes was installed and the pre-invasion reforms were swept away, leaving serious restrictions on economic activity and education, as well as free speech, even in comparison with neighboring communist countries. Between 1945 and 1989, according to Lawson (2005:83), 250,000 Czechs were imprisoned for political acts; “243 were executed, 3,000 died in prison, camps or mines, 400 were killed trying to cross the border and 22,000 were sent to forced labour camps.”
Resistance to the authoritarian government persisted throughout the communist period, from “home seminars” held from the 1950s on down to Charter 77, an organization created to monitor the government’s commitment to human rights as part of a Helsinki conference. A robust underground intellectual life flourished within a fairly narrow circle, attracting major European intellectuals who lectured in the home seminars. Opposition to the regime was primarily cultural, rather than political, however, and sometimes symbolically represented in drama and music after 1968, because of the severity of government repression of dissent. A month after the August 1968 Soviet invasion, for example, rock music became a medium for much political dissent, including the Velvet Underground-inspired rock band, Plastic People of the Universe, who donned satin togas, painted their faces with bright colors and wrote incendiary protest songs in English (see Bilefsky 2009). When they were thrown into prison in 1976, Havel himself championed their cause.
The signature actions of the Velvet Revolution were enormous mass demonstrations (up to one-million in a country with less than 16 million total population) and the public rattling of keys as a dramatic collective show of defiance. If the movement had a flair for the dramatic, it was because much of its choreography came from playwright Vaclav Havel. Decades of underground organizing and cultural dissent erupted in a November 1989 choreographed revival of the political memory of previous resistance, against Nazis and Communists. The movement had its roots in parallel structures, especially critical theatre, music, and home seminars that cultivated the spirit of dissent within the country’s intellectual culture during the years of the worst repression.
Twenty-one years after official reform of Czech communism had been crushed in 1968 by the invasion of Warsaw Pact troops who invaded Prague and put down the reform movement, memorials to a student killed by the Nazis and to the 1968 Prague Spring and its subsequent repression were orchestrated by students who marched through the city. They were met with police tear gas and water cannons but the students nonetheless created more protest events. Marches and mass demonstrations paralleled grassroots organizing by actors and students around the country. False rumors of a martyred protester led to outrage and organizing, mass demonstrations, negotiations with government and party officials that forced the resignation of the Politburo, and the creation of a new government dominated by non-communists.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKDLQWEvubc