American Military History, Volume 2 by Richard W. Stewart

On November 9, 1989, crowds of elated Berliners surged back and forth through ever-enlarging holes in the wall that for so long had divided their city. Similar, albeit smaller, demonstrations also occurred all along the border separating the former East Germany from the West. American soldiers observing these festive affairs soon realized how much was changing in the strategic environ- ment that had brought them to Germany in the first place. Within a few years, Soviet troops evacuated all of their former satellites in the Warsaw Pact countries, those satellites reconfigured themselves as independent and democratic states, the Soviet Union itself collapsed into fifteen different countries, and Germany reunited into a single nation.

With little notice the Cold War ended and with it the Ameri- can military's forty-year preoccupation with containing Communist expansion within an enormous arc that swept from the Norwegian border through Germany, around the southern rim of Eurasia, and across the Korean peninsula to the Bering Straits. (See Map 25.) In hot wars and in cold, two generations of American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines had secured the line separating the Free World from the Communist bloc; now this frontier suddenly disappeared everywhere except in Korea.