I grew up in Omaha Nebraska, about 20 miles from the Strategic Air command Headquarters. My dad and I would go past the base where they had an airforce museum, and you could see the bombers lined up near their runways.

In the Lincoln Nebraska area, where I eventually went to college, there were ballistic missle silos, and out in western Nebraska where most of my family farmed, is where they kept the realy big atlas missles.

When we played outside we could always see the "Looking Glass", which was a large airliner equipt with radar and communication systems. It was always up there in the sky. when one landed, the other was already airborn.

My freinds and I use to talk about what we would do when the civil defense sirens went off, knowing that we had just as many missles pointed at us as we did at the Soviet Union. We had this pact that if we were playing together, we would just sit there together as friends and watch the missles come in instead of going home to our parents. A couple of our folks had fallout shelters, but we saw the pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in history class and wanted nothing to do with that kind of end.

I use to have nightmares of walking in downtown Omaha and seeing the trails of missles coming down from the sky. A bright flash of light and the heat on my face as I saw people dissapear, leaving their shadows printed on the ground. I would wake up sweating.

That fear struck me everytime the civil defense sirens went off, and being from Nebraska, they went off all of the time for tornado warnings. I was not afraid of the weather, but for most of my childhood, the sound of those sirens would make my heart skip a couple beats, and my eyes would always look toward the sky.