I grew up in Harlingen, down in the Valley, and joined the Army in 1957, when I was eighteen, because my father said I could pick cotton or pick a service and I didn't like cotton. They sent me to Fort Knox and put me in a tank, and except for a year in Vietnam that I don't write about, I stayed in tanks for twenty-six years. I started as a loader on an M48 and finished as a master sergeant on the M1, which came along just in time for me to retire from it in 1983.

Thirteen of those years were in West Germany, on three tours. Most of it I spent as a tank commander, the man standing up in the hatch with the headset on, responsible for fifty-some tons of steel and three young men who were usually smarter than they let on and dumber than they thought. Later I was a platoon sergeant and then a first sergeant. My wife Frances came over with me on the last two tours, and our kids grew up partly in Army apartments with stairwells that smelled like everybody's supper, and they still say "danke" to waitresses in Killeen.

We retired outside Killeen, near Fort Hood, where I did my last tour, because after twenty-six years you want to be near a PX, a VA hospital and men who know what you're talking about. I read Tom Clancy because he is the only novelist I have ever read who seems to know what I'm talking about too. I buy every one the week it comes out and read it in my recliner while Frances watches her programs, and I keep a red pen on the armrest for the mistakes. There are not as many as you'd think.

For the young people: the Fulda Gap is a stretch of lower ground through the hills in the German state of Hesse, running from what was the East German border toward Frankfurt. If the Russians had ever come west, a lot of people in my business believed that was one of the places they'd come, with a whole army behind them. For forty years the United States kept soldiers there to see that they didn't, and to make it expensive if they tried.

I was at Fulda twice: once in the sixties with the 14th Armored Cavalry, and once in the seventies after the 11th Armored Cavalry, the Blackhorse, came over from Vietnam and took over the border. What I can tell you about it is what any soldier who served there would tell you:

• The border was a real place, not a line on a map. A fence, a plowed strip, towers, and men on the other side with binoculars looking at you looking at them.

• The alerts came at three in the morning, always. You went from asleep to rolling out the gate faster than you'd believe. You never knew if it was a drill until it was over.

• Every man knew where he was supposed to go if it was real, down to the spot on the hill, and we'd been there so often in training we could have found it blindfolded.

• We knew we were outnumbered. We also believed we were better. Every soldier I served with understood his job was to hold until help came from the States, and every fall during the big exercises we watched it come and told ourselves it would come that fast for real.

• Winter at Grafenwöhr, firing gunnery, was the coldest I have ever been, and I have been to Korea in January.

• The German people were good to us. Families on the farms around the posts had us home for dinner, and our kids went to their festivals. Frances learned more German in a year than I learned in thirteen.

The wall came down ten years ago this November. I watched it on the news in my living room and I'll be honest, I sat there and cried, and Frances held my hand. Thirty years of waiting, and it ended with young people climbing on a wall with hammers. Nobody fired a shot. That is the best outcome a soldier can ask for.

Red Storm Rising came out in 1986, written with Larry Bond, who designs war games, and it is the war my units trained for. The Soviets come west, NATO holds, and it stays conventional the whole way: tanks, planes and submarines, no nuclear weapons. I was three years retired when it came out, and I read it in two nights, and it gave me the strangest feeling, like reading a letter from a life I didn't get to finish.

He gets the feel of it. The first days, when nobody knows what's going on and the plan goes out the window. The tiredness. The way a battle on the ground depends on a convoy in the Atlantic a thousand miles away. And he doesn't make the Russian soldiers into cartoons. His Soviet general, Alekseyev, is a professional doing a hard job for a government he has doubts about, and I believe that, because I watched their side through binoculars for years and they looked like soldiers to me.

Clancy put most of his tank war up north, on the flat country, around Alfeld and the Weser River, not in my Gap. I've forgiven him. The Blackhorse would have liked a chapter, that's all.

The one thing we argued about at the NCO club was the nuclear part. Most of us thought a war like that would have gone nuclear inside a week. Clancy says it doesn't. I'll take his version. I'm just glad we never had to find out who was right.

My old crew. If Jerome Marcos (gunner, 1975-1977, the best eye I ever had in that seat), John Collier (driver, never once threw a track he didn't warn me about first) or Bobby Latorre (loader, who could put a round in the breech faster than anybody in the squadron and complained the whole time) reads this, write me. Frances says she'll make tamales.

Another old soldier on here: The 4077th Through a Medic's Eyes is a man who was an Army medic in Korea in 1951, grading M*A*S*H on what it got right and wrong. Same idea as mine, a different war, and a better TV show than anything they've made out of Clancy.

My grandson, who is fourteen, plays the Rainbow Six game on the computer and is very good at it. I've watched. I asked him how many of his men he'd lost that afternoon and he didn't know. I told him a sergeant always knows. He's been counting since.

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