Todd Brewster & Peter Jennings (9 page)
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Authors: The Century for Young People: 1961-1999: Changing America
Tags: #History, #United States, #Juvenile Nonfiction, #20th Century, #Historical, #Biography & Autobiography
For Americans, it was amazing to watch Europe's post-World War II order fall before their eyes. And it wasn't the force of atomic bombs or the threats of a new tyrant that toppled these governments, but the power of an idea: liberty. Was it really possible that the Cold War was ending at last?
There were many heroes of the new times: Gorbachev, of course, and for many Reagan was a hero, too. For even though he was no longer president, many people believed it was Reagan's nuclear arms buildup that had forced Gorbachev to realize that Russia could not keep up and had to change. In
Poland, the head of the Solidarity union, Lech Walesa, had never given up the fight for freedom. And in Czechoslovakia, the writer Vaclav Havel had stood up to the Communist authorities, and had stood for justice and truth, since the Prague Spring of 1968.
The Iron Curtain that had divided Europe for so long was coming down. But the most dramatic event of this momentous era came in Berlin. Since 1961 the Berlin Wall had separated West Berlin from East Berlin, and many had died trying to cross it in desperate attempts to escape from East Germany. In 1989, with Communism vanishing like smoke around them, East Berliners marched to the wall shouting,
“Tor auf!
Open the gate!” The most hated symbol of Communism still separated Germans from each other. On the other side, West Berliners also crowded to the wall, wild with expectation.
Then, while guards put down their rifles, East Berliners climbed over the wall, jumping into the open arms of the West Berliners below. “The wall is gone, the wall is gone,” people chanted happily. In a surge of joy, Berliners on both sides began pounding at it with hammers and chisels and pickaxes, turning the terrible wall into a pile of souvenir rocks. Everyone was giddy with excitement, with relief, with hope. The Cold War was over.
Machine Dreams
1989â1999
In the final decade of the twentieth century the new, emerging world felt strangely different. The Cold War had defined so much of Western life for so long that it seemed as though a crippling lifelong pain had finally disappeared, and now it was time to learn how to walk all over again. But where, exactly, was the world headed?
In Europe the collapse of Communism was followed by puzzling questions. Could West Germany absorb East Germany and still remain stable? And if it did, would a unified Germany once again threaten world peace? In Eastern Europe the disappearance of powerful Communist governments brought age-old conflicts to the surface. Yugoslavia was split
into warring ethnic groups. Czechoslovakia had broken apart into two states, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. And the Soviet Union had ceased to exist, bringing a handful of newly independent countries into the world. Would all these changes lead to more conflict?
Yet even as these changes shook Europe, there were many signs that democracy and capitalism were uniting the world. For the first time in fifty years the countries of eastern Europe were holding real elections. In places as far away as South Africa, democracy was triumphing. There black citizens were allowed to vote for the first time in 1994. They immediately elected as president Nelson Mandela, a man who had been in captivity for twenty-seven years for his pursuit of black equality.
Capitalism was taking hold in so many countries that a single enormous global marketplace was rapidly emerging. And this new capitalism had a distinctly American style, creating what one historian called “McWorld.” As the Internet brought the world closer together, people wondered how this newly linked globe would coexist with the old hatreds that still pitted one ethnic group against another. Would the new technologyâand the “global village” it was creatingâbe enough to bring a new age of world peace?
In the summer of 1990 a conflict erupted in the Persian Gulf that demonstrated what President George Bush called the “new world order.” On
August 2 Iraq invaded the tiny country of Kuwait, which had large reserves of oil. The United Nations ordered Iraq's leader, Saddam Hussein, to withdraw his troops from Kuwait, but he steadfastly refused. By early 1991 more than two dozen allied nations gathered troops for an invasion of Iraq. Called “Desert Storm,” the invasion was quickly successful. In just over forty days Iraq was driven out of Kuwait. In a clear sign of the changing times, the Soviet Union joined the United States in its attack on Iraq. It was the first time since World War II that Americans and Soviets had fought on the same side. And the two nations fought together in a new role, as a kind of international police force countering acts of raw aggression. But just as important as the Gulf War's new alliance and new purpose was the way the war was fought. Both of the century's world wars had used increasingly destructive technology. Now, with satellites mapping the world and computer-guided bombs that could hit military targets with pinpoint precision, it seemed possible that war could become less destructive.
Mark Fox, born in 1956, led four major air wing strikes and flew eighteen combat missions during Desert Storm.
W
hen I was a teenager, I really wanted to have a motorcycle, but my father was a doctor and he flatly refused. He said,
“I've pronounced too many kids your age dead. You can't have a motorcycle. But if you'd like to do something exciting, I'll help you learn how to fly.” So I started flying gliders when I was in seventh grade. I had already known that I wanted to fly airplanes, even then. And when I discovered that there were airplanes that landed on ships, well, that sealed it for me. I entered the Naval Academy in 1974, the year after I graduated from high school.
In 1990 I was assigned to a squadron called VFA-81 in Air Wing 17, or the Sunliners, and we were attached to the USS
Saratoga
. We were scheduled to go in a normal deployment to the Middle East in August, so we were as trained and prepared as anybody when the Iraqis invaded Kuwait on August 2. We made it to the Red Sea, on the western side of the Saudi peninsula, by August 20 or 21. By that time Kuwait had been captured and there was this furious churn to get forces into the region to be able to deter any further aggression. We stayed there for five months before the war actually started. Now, I have a Christian faith, which helped me deal with the possibility of my own death. I felt that if the Lord called me home on this, then that's where I'd want to be. On the other hand, the idea of killing people was
distasteful to me. Fortunately, with the technology and tactics at the time, we were far more precise about pinpointing the bad guys who were carrying weapons and driving tanks or airplanes. We could strike our targets with a minimal loss of life.
On January 15 we got word that the diplomatic efforts had failed and that we would soon initiate our opening sequence of strikes against Iraq. We had been training for these strikes for months, so there was a certain level of excitementâand a little bravadoâat the anticipation of finally seeing action. At the same time, there was a lot of soul-searching and serious thought given to the fact that, no kidding, we're gonna do this. The opening strikes from the
Saratoga
were designed to suppress the defense around Baghdad. I wasn't on that first mission, but as I was being briefed for the second strike, we learned that one of our pilots was shot down and killed in the central part of Iraq. It was like ashes in our mouths. He was a good buddy of mine, a father of twoâour children went to the same preschool together. It really helped bring home the realities of what we were doing.
My first combat mission was the first daylight strike on the seventeenth. From the Red Sea, over Saudi Arabia and into Iraq is
somewhere between 650 and 750 nautical miles, one way. And there are no tactical airplanes that can go that distance without refueling, so on each mission we had to hook up with air force tanker planes. Typically there would be a sum total of maybe four or five air force tankers spaced out in a five-mile area in the sky, and there might be five navy airplanes attached to each tanker getting gas. So in that five-mile patch of sky there might be twenty-five to thirty navy jets all gassing up at the same time. It was an amazing sight, especially at night with all of the lights. It looked like the Empire State Building flying on its side through the sky.
We were about thirty miles south of the target and we were just now getting into the heart of the Iraqi surface-to-air missile envelopes. We got a radar lock on another group of airplanes flying very high and very slow just above our target, which is not where fighters defending a target would normally be. I wound up looking behind me for about the next minute, trying to see if this was a trap. These planes then turned and flew away from us. I had to decide whether to run these guys down or just go ahead and complete my mission. I thought to myself, “I came here to drop bombs, not to chase MIGs around.” So I let him go and rolled in on the
target. I dropped the bombs and did my jinks [erratic evasive maneuvers]. Now, I wasn't gonna come 640 nautical miles and not see my bombs hit their target, so I looked to see my four two-thousand-pound bombs falling together like four little fish in a pond. It was a really nice sight. But I could also see the muzzle flashes and the smoke and the dust coming from all over the field. There were literally dozens and dozens of little corkscrew bottle-rocket-looking things shooting up every which way down below me. It was clear that with all of this antiaircraft fire, it was no time for me to speculate anymore. So I went back into another series of adrenaline-fed jinks and peeked back at the target just in time to see my four bombs hit their target. And that was the first time I smiled all day. I turned back and headed for the carrier. Less than two hours after I landed, I was being briefed for my next mission.
Americans followed the progress of the Persian Gulf War on television, both on the three major networks and on the new Cable News Network. CNN offered Americans one of the most dramatic moments ever in television news, a chilling live picture of war as it happened. While the three networks
had to decide whether to interrupt other programs to show the news, CNN was a twenty-four-hour window on the world. And CNN was not just broadcasting to American homes. By 1998 its cable links brought the news to 120 million homes overseas, making it the first truly global network. With so many people around the world watching the same images, it was hard not to feel that national boundaries were becoming less and less important.
In March 1991 American television screens were showing graphic footage of violence closer to home. In the early morning hours of March 3, a plumbing parts sales representative named George Holliday used his camcorder to capture the violent beating of Rodney King, a twenty-five-year-old black man, by four white Los Angeles police officers. The videotape was seen on television by millions of people.
Many black citizens asserted that the attack was not an isolated event. They said blacks were routinely treated with greater suspicion than whites and suffered harsher treatment from police officers. Now the whole world became an eyewitness to the kind of police brutality that African Americans claimed to face on a regular basis. It seemed unthinkable that the police officers arrested for the beating of Rodney King would not be convicted. Surely the videotape was proof of a serious crime. But the lawyers for the police officers argued that
King had been resisting arrest and was more threatening than the videotape made him look. The jury found the officers not guilty.
When the verdict was announced, Los Angeles erupted like a volcano. Hundreds of fires were set, and looters smashed into stores and ran off with millions of dollars' worth of merchandise. Innocent bystanders were attacked. In three days of unrest, fifty-four people were killed. It was the worst riot in America in this century.
Connie Chang, a daughter of Korean immigrants who was born in 1960, tried to help her parents protect their store from looters.
I
 had seen the Rodney King video on television and I did not agree with what the policemen did. I thought they were guilty of overreaction. And I believed that if he was a white guy instead of an African American, then they would not have done what they did to him. But I was not prepared for the riots. It was awful. Since the center of the rioting was in South-Central, I got worried because there are a lot of Korean businesses there, including my family's liquor store. My brother and an employee were in the store when the riots began, and my parents told them to shut the store down and come home.
In the first hours of the rioting, my
brother and I watched the coverage on TV and my parents listened to the Korean radio station. Because so many Korean shop owners were affected, Korean radio spent twenty-four hours a day doing nothing except coverage of the riots. Around seven-thirty my parents were listening when the station interviewed this one guy who started announcing the name of our store and saying that people were breaking the door in and taking some stuff out. So my parents went there and I joined them later.
Ours was a small store, a neighborhood store. And the majority of our clients were African American. We had black employees, too, and I treated them like, you know, my brother, and they treated me like their sister. But who starts looting our store? It's not neighborhood people. It's people coming from other areas. And they think it's all right because they don't know us and they think that all Koreans make money from out of their pockets.
When we got to the store, it looked terrible. An African American neighbor helped us get through the mess and into the store. Inside, we found that the lottery machine was gone. The telephones were gone. Even dishes and our rice cooker. The looters took a whole lot of merchandise and when they
took it, you know, they dropped it, so the whole place smelled of alcohol. My two brothers and my cousin and my father all got up on the rooftop and stayed all night with guns, protecting the store. And they stayed on the rooftop I think three or four days. We were so worried about them we couldn't sleep. And yet even with my parents around, people were still trying to break the door down and get inside.
In the days after the riots, a lot of people came to the store and said they were sorry about the damages to our store. I think the damage was around $50,000 or $60,000 and insurance only paid half of that. Afterward my parents considered leaving America and going back to Korea. You know, it had hurt our feelings so much after the riot to see what it had done to our store. It's like all our hopes and dreams were gone. But if we went back to Korea, we would have to start all over again there, too.
After the riot I told everybody to put a smile on their face all the time. Just to show that we are human beings, too. When you are nice to people they won't be mean to you. They will be nice to you. Or at least we hope so.