Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire The Cuban Missile Crisis.

About this date in 1962. The world was close to a nuclear war .

I remember the crisis. Heard lots of words like "megaton," and didn't fully comprehend what was happening as a seven year-old.

We still are.

I was 21 months old.
Scared me so bad I chit my pants.

I remember and I remember Ft. Polk at the same time.
Cut Pine trees growing in the barracks at Polk before we
could move in.

I was eighteen, old enough to know about it, too young to be smart enough to worry.

I was nine. I remember it well, we practiced bending over and kissing your ass goodbye in school.

We are not the worlds policemen, not our problem.

I was in a KB-50 outfit at Yokota AFB, Japan at the time, we were on strip alert for several days but never went anywhere. News was hard to come by, I think maybe AFRS was getting censored at the time, we did not find out until quite a bit later exactly what happened.

I remember that...... Hearing the news and listening to my parents generation talking about it. I was 12 and in the 6th grade at a catholic school. It was pretty unsettling and something that I had never experienced in my 12 years on this planet.

I was 15 y/o. Remember it well. The school principal came on the loud speaker and dismissed school. Told everyone to go home and be with their parents as nuclear war was about to happen.

My father was stationed in Fort Polk with the National Guard. He always told me stories of this time. He was convinced we were headed to nuclear war.

My opinion of it is,..both sides were playing an intense game of "chicken". But I think both sides were still a long way off from actually pushing the button.

For one thing, Castro and all of the Russian advisors in Cuba knew for a *fact* that the entire island would be wiped from the face of the earth during the first minutes of a nuclear exchange.

They weren't eager to commit suicide.

If Kennedy hadn't backed out of Bay of Pigs the crisis probably would have never happened.

10 years old in Ft. Lauderdale, FL, lived about a mile as the crow flies from Port Everglades which was full of troop carriers with LST's hanging off the sides and various support ships. Jeeps with mounted machine guns were blocking every road in.

Nuclear war, total annihilation, parents intently watching Walter Cronkite and Huntley/Brinkley, who cares...? My friend John and I would ride our bikes by there on the 17th St. Causeway to look at all the warships and guns and stuff. We thought it was the coolest thing we'd ever seen.

You got that part right. I was in my second year at Defense Mapping and looking at a lot of U2 photos of Cuba. We had the radio running 24/7.

Always wondered why the Cubans couldn't have grabbed some nukes right then and there, how easy to become a rogue superpower! There would not have been a thing the Russians could have done about it, or the Americans either. Consider that we fought all around the globe since then, but never overthrew a PITA government 90 miles away...….

One of my 1970's high school teachers, Mr. Brown, told us that he was a paratrooper, in the plane on the runway, with the engines running, awaiting the order to go. Frightening times.

I was a teen, remember duck and cover drills in school--what a crock--
Didn't know, and wasn't taught, enough to be scared as hell-- cause--"Murica!!

I was 11 yo, in a small Kansas one room country school. We did the hide under the desk drills. Lot of good that would have done.