March 15, 1989, left no doubt that “the times, they were a changin’.” This date, uncelebrated under the Communists, commemorates the day in 1848 when the Hungarians rose up against their Austrian overlords in a short-lived attempt to gain independence from the Habsburg reign. In 1987, antigovernment demonstrations on this day had been put down with the use of clubs. In 1988, the militia had scuffled with would-be celebrants. A year later, we learned that crowds of demonstrators would mass, seeking the kinds of freedom and justice embodied in our Bill of Rights. . . .
JD Call [the Army chief warrant officer who was the defense attaché office operations coordinator] and I decided to join the demonstration, not sure what might happen and more than a little apprehensive about the day’s events. . . . We stationed our support staff in my office as a mini command post. In addition to looking out on the Soviet memorial, my office also faced the street containing the national television station (Magyar National TV—MTV). Plans had been laid by the demonstrators to symbolically take over the station, which occupies an attractive building used as the stock exchange before World War II.
People began massing, and presently a representative of the demonstrators stepped before a microphone hooked up to outdoor speakers. As the crowd hushed, the speaker declared that the people were symbolically taking over the station. He read the same twelve points the heroic young poet Sándor Petöfi had recited from the steps of the National Museum in Pest in 1848. The litany included freedom of speech, assembly, and property rights—standard liberation fare.
The loud affirmation from the peacefully assembled crowd both thrilled and concerned me, but the few police in the area stood back, weapons holstered. After the speeches and readings, the crowd headed for the Parliament building. We tagged along, and once the large square in front was filled, a band began playing the Hungarian national hymn. Men quickly doffed their hats, people began to sing along, and the occasion took on a solemn, if a bit unnerving air. A similar crowd had been gunned down in the same location during the 1956 Revolution.
A thoughtless youth directly in front of us had failed to remove his cap, and around my shoulder came a long arm. An old, gnarled hand thumped the kid on the back, and when he turned around, his elder pointed to the cap, which the kid quickly yanked off. Everyone around squared their shoulders and stood a little taller. It had been thirty-three years since Hungarians had met together, not as members of a Communist country, but as ordinary citizens to honor their past and cheer for their future.
What might have been an opportunity for the government to thwart political change passed, and Ambassador Palmer and all of us began to believe with great certainty that democracy was on its way. There would be more events like this one, but March 15, 1989, will live on as a watershed event in the life of the transition.
• • •
In October [1989], the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party essentially fell apart. Holding their final Party Congress, the majority agreed to form the Hungarian Socialist Party, while a few diehards clung to their Communist underpinnings. Hard-liners such as Károly Grósz were effectively booted from power, and with little fanfare the starch went out of the Party that had ruled the country since 1948.
The government announced that on October 23, the date of the previously uncelebrated anniversary of the commencement of the 1956 Revolution, a ceremony would take place at Parliament Square. Long before the appointed hour, crowds began arriving, many of them spilling out of the subway stop near the building. Of all ages, nervous and excited, the Magyars assembled shoulder to shoulder in front of the sprawling seat of their soon to be changed government. While some still struggled down side streets for a view of the proceedings, the interim President of the Republic, Mátyás Szurös, who had replaced Bruno Straub, stepped before a microphone. He declared that from that day, Hungary would be known as the Republic of Hungary, no longer the People’s Republic. As he spoke, huge Hungarian flags affixed to the building teased the sky, furling and unfurling in the autumn breeze.
Andy and I stood among the crowd as silent witnesses, biting our lips as the people cheered, cried and doffed their hats when the Hungarian Army Band played the national anthem. Here lay proof of prayers answered—the army band playing the salutes to the redefined nation. There was a God, and a gentle One, for not a shot had been fired, not a rock thrown, not a fire set. This was the silk revolution. This was the role model. We in the West, along with all the members of the former Soviet Bloc, owe much to this small, daring nation that celebrated its first taste of freedom in over four decades that bright fall day.
• • •
The most memorable and instructive ceremony we witnessed involved the departure of the [Soviet] tank division headquarters at a caserne in Esztergom, northwest of Budapest. Ceremonies were scheduled for February 1990. . . .
We arrived mid-morning on a brisk day, and were treated to a well-orchestrated parade, complete with band, dancing and speeches. An English-speaking officer escorted us through a barracks and company-grade officer family quarters. This experience began to reveal why our fears of the Soviets had been justified. It wasn’t their weaponry, which, while formidable was not as . . . technologically up-to-date as ours; nor were their tactics of high concern if the exercises we had observed were to be believed. Rather, the answer to the question of which side might have won a ground war could be found in the soldiers’ open-bay barracks.
Hungarian winters can be cold and damp, with frequent high winds eliciting stinging tears, and promulgating frightful chest colds. Yet here in one of the damper areas of the country, near the Danube River, Soviet soldiers slept in a cold barracks on cots covered with one small wool blanket each. In the latrine, only cold water was available for shaves and showers. This was a headquarters barracks, and had obviously been cleaned and readied for foreign observers. How much more crude the accommodations in the outlying areas must have been, we thought. Western military forces might have had the technical edge, and the flexibility factor might have worked in our favor, but I believe we’d have been hard-pressed in a long-term endurance test. . . .
The officers’ quarters, crammed into cheap, concrete block buildings, by our standards were very cramped, badly maintained and poorly furnished. Yet the wives had no desire to return to their homeland, for they knew there would be no accommodations anywhere to equal the quality they enjoyed in Hungary. In some casernes, families shared bathrooms and kitchens. Andy and I recalled how many problems American military families had sharing laundry facilities, and couldn’t imagine how more forced togetherness would work in a rank-dominated community. . . .
When the Soviets were vacating the MiG-29 base on Csepel Island, we drove around the perimeter and were amused to see Soviet troops selling tires, tools and gas to the Hungarians. We had heard rumors that no funds had been forthcoming from Moscow for the withdrawal, which meant that commanders were having to sell off what they could to pay for their departure operations. But we suspected a great deal of black-marketeering was going on as well. I cautioned my folks not to stop to buy anything near the bases. We didn’t need to get ourselves in trouble. However, most of the Western attachés came home with some souvenir—an old bent red star, a length of barbed wire, a rusty tool—our booty for winning the cold war.
[At a unit withdrawal at an army installation near Szeged, an attaché from another NATO country harasses the Soviet commanding general so much that the Soviet military issues no further invitations to observe troop withdrawals.]
But we had observed so much. We had been among the first Western military personnel to get inside the great Soviet war machine, to see how the soldiers and officers lived, to touch their equipment, to talk with the staffs, and to raise glasses to a peaceful future. I’m very grateful to the Soviets for allowing us this privilege. It came at a considerable personal price to the senior officers, who nevertheless endured the withdrawals, and our intrusions, with dignity and goodwill. I hope Russian officers know that the majority of
us didn’t gloat over the changes that dictated their removal from Hungary. Rather, we respected them, we learned from the experience, and were extremely glad we hadn’t had to face them in battle.
Anne Visser Ney
(1958–)
U.S. Coast Guard
Anne Ney, Coast Guard and USCG Reserve veteran, served from 1979 to 2010. She grew up in Ohio and makes her home in Saint Petersburg, Florida. She holds a BS and MS in biology from Georgia Southern, a BA from Eckerd College, and an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has appeared in Rosebud, Tea Party, the St. Petersburg (Tampa Bay) Times, and other venues. Her work “The Theory of Everything” received a National Institutions for Military Education Services Student Spotlight Award, and her essay “Middle Passage, Morning Watch” is anthologized in Red, White, and True: Stories from Veterans and Families, World War II to Present. She is currently refining a collection of essays about her military service and geopolitical borders. The following is an original essay submitted for inclusion in this collection.
Ice Curtain
“Chicken shit?” the Captain of the Port said.
“No, Sir. Chicken ship, with a p. She’s an old Soviet trawler converted to carry frozen poultry.” I paused my brief as the COTP and Task Force Officers cleared throats and shifted behind gray metal desks, our temporary furniture. Burnt coffee, fresh drywall, and aftershave scented the makeshift conference room. Twenty-three years later and still I’m the only woman around, I thought.
I was under Coast Guard recall orders to serve as intelligence officer to Charleston’s maritime security project, hurriedly formed after 9/11 to “detect, deter, and destroy” terrorism in and through South Carolina’s ports. The TFOs were loaners from federal, state, and local enforcement agencies. I was a counternarcotics and migrant interdiction intelligence type. The COTP was a shipping safety guy. We eyed each other nervously.
“Chicken ship,” the COTP repeated.
“Yes, sir, a fishing trawler built to double as a surveillance platform for the Soviet intelligence machine. Former Ice Curtain vessel.”
“Ice Curtain?” a sheriff’s deputy said with an ain’t-she-cute affect.
I ignored him. “The US-USSR Convention Line of 1867. They fished their side of the Line and, when possible, fished the Donut Hole.”
“Donut Hole?” Krispy Kreme-and-cop jokes rippled across the desks.
I moved on. “The former trawler claims to be carrying chickens to market in St. Petersburg.” I paused for the deputy’s benefit. “Russia, not Florida. Recommend a dockside boarding.” I reasoned that the Russian ship’s electronics completely overpowered its humble cargo. “Plus, she’s been anchoring off Groton and Norfolk for days, sometimes weeks, at a time.”
“Waiting for chickens?” he said.
“Or to catalog fleet movements to Kuwait,” I replied.
The COTP slowly digested the new thought food dumped onto his already overflowing plate.
The Russian ship moored at North Charleston’s former Navy base on a chilly, windless morning good for photography. I studied its red hull from two quays downriver then readied my camera. Her hull cast a dark reflection. Between us lay the Coast Guard Cutter Dallas, her crew mustered at quarters on her flight deck.
I had history with Dallas and her sister ships Mellon, Munro, and Chase. Dallas was my last floating unit; Mellon, my first. Dallas carried me across the Atlantic, beyond the Mediterranean through Istanbul, and into the Black Sea. It was a show-the-flag cruise mostly, in 1999, after the Soviet breakup and before the Global War on Terror. Mellon carried me across the International Date Line, into the Bering Sea, and nearly to the Arctic Circle. I loved sailing aboard the 378-foot cutters: fast, highly maneuverable combatants built for Coast Guard operations during Vietnam.
I studied Dallas’ graceful lines, universally recognized red-and-blue racing stripe, and U.S. COAST GUARD boldly stenciled on her white hull. With care, I framed a shot of Dallas and the Russian. I imagined the old adversaries’ surprise at their sudden proximity. It occurred to me that I knew the Russian ship.
On Good Friday 1980 I reported to the Mellon, the eleventh enlisted woman on a cutter billeted for ten, plus its 150 men. I was a young Seaman Apprentice Quartermaster newly schooled in basic navigation, seamanship, and flag and flashing-light signaling. The following Monday Mellon sailed for Pearl Harbor and Navy training.
For four weeks Mellon and her crew navigated fake minefields, tracked and torpedoed pretend Soviet submarines, shelled nonexistent enemy ships, and fueled at sea from a very real Navy oiler. We survived nuclear war by packing into the cutter’s hull where we waited cross-legged and shoulder-to-shoulder in a grown-up version of 1950s duck-and-cover drills. Someone cut a fart when the bridge piped the warning, “Nuclear attack imminent!” Dutifully, we tucked heads between knees. A Boston accent said what most of us thought: “Everyone bend over and kiss your ass good-bye.”
By the time we sailed for June’s routine Alaska Patrol, I played the old salt, charting Mellon’s northerly progress through the heaving grey Pacific. I felt powerfully connected to the ocean’s expanse and fantastically insignificant under deeply starred night skies. A week after leaving Hawaii we entered the Bering Sea, one of the world’s richest fishing grounds, through Unimak Pass.
Two-thirds of the Bering’s pollock- and crab-rich area falls under U.S. jurisdiction, although its fish are harvested mostly by foreign trawlers and longliners carrying U.S. State Department permits to operate. For weeks Mellon threaded the large foreign fleet’s nets, lines, and factory ships to deliver and recover Coast Guard boarding teams enforcing federal law and international treaties on the huge foreign fleet. I scrutinized what I could through binoculars from Mellon’s bridge wings, envious but too junior to review the permits, compare catch logs to fish-hold counts, or inspect fishing gear for rule compliance. I stood watches: maintained the navigation plot, wrote ship’s logs, and monitored bridge radios for Mayday calls breaking through the fleet’s working patois, a rich mix of German, Polish, Korean, Japanese, and occasionally Russian chatter.
Between watches I haunted the flying bridge to survey my horizons with the ship’s Big Eyes, yard-long binoculars mounted on a pedestal, gimbaled to correct for ship pitch and roll, and yoked to revolve through 360 horizontal degrees and from nearly overhead to the deck. Through them I searched the Bering as I imagined the Arctic Ocean beyond the far-off strait, western Alaska’s small settlements, and the Aleutians’ volcanic islands arcing from Unimak toward Russia’s desolate Kamchatka peninsula. The Ice Curtain hung from the Strait southwest to the western Aleutians, a geopolitical boundary between Soviet and the West, democracy and totalitarian regime.
The chart called the boundary the US-USSR Convention Line. It is the outer limit of Seward’s Folly—Alaska—acquired by the US under the 1867 Treaty of Cession. It unevenly divides the Bering into Russian (one-third) and American (two-thirds) waters. During the Cold War, the Convention Line was the maritime answer to Europe’s Iron Curtain.
Mellon’s chart also marked the two-hundred-mile wide Exclusive Economic Zone. Under United Nations Law of the Sea agreements, a coastal nation controls resources in or under the ocean within two hundred miles of its coasts. The Donut Hole, which would draw Krispy Kreme jokes during my future brief, is beyond any nation’s 200-mile reach.
I struggled to understand the implications of these two competing boundaries until my mentor, a happy Hawaiian petty officer, showed me on the chart how Soviet trawlers had to cross a slim section of U.S. Convention waters to reach the Donut Hole’s 48,000-square-mile, wide-open fishing ground. “It’s an accident of nature. They can fish if they’re there, but they can’t get in without State Department permission,” he said. I studied the chart and its prioritized boundaries until I understood. It was only by permit that the Soviets could expand their fishing operations. By dumb luck, Seward’s Purchase included what would become a coveted high-seas fishing ground.
And, poss
ibly, a place where Soviet intelligence could reach a thousand miles closer to the U.S. coast.
“So what are we doing?” I asked the Hawaiian. Mellon’s turbine engines were whining loudly and we seemed to be flying, not toward the Arctic Circle for sightseeing as previously announced, but west, toward the Convention Line.
“State pulled Russia’s permits.”
I wondered why.
“Afghanistan,” he said. He saw my blank look. “They invaded Afghanistan. We cut them off.”
I relieved the next morning’s watch to find Mellon’s captain, ops boss, and deck watch officer glued shoulder to shoulder and eyes to oculars with binoculars pressed to the bridge windows. The off-watch section lay below to spread the news about the Soviet trawler the electronics picked up on the midwatch. Even without binoculars it now loomed off of Mellon’s bow, four miles dead ahead according to the radar, two miles outside U.S. Treaty waters.
The DWO did not lower his gaze but ordered the helm to come right. I logged the course change as Mellon fell in step with the Soviet. The old man lowered his binoculars and nodded, uncharacteristically somber. He left orders to maintain a two-mile buffer between Mellon and the Ice Curtain.
The Coast Guard has served in every U.S. armed conflict from the Revolution through the Southwest Asian wars. But its true expertise lies in wielding the instruments of peace: enforcing laws and treaties. Of the nation’s five armed services, only the Coast Guard performs this service without violating civil rights or waging an act of war. If the Soviet ship violated the 1867 Treaty, it would fall to Mellon to defend America while defusing tensions with the world’s other nuclear superpower.
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