Fifteen years ago today...

I was in the first semester of grad school, sitting at the counter of Big Jim's BBQ on the corner by UVA. I was wearing my black Harris Tweed blazer, probably a blue oxford shirt, grey t-shirt, definitely jeans and brown shoes. I was eating--what else?---the Big Jim's special (which memory serves was about two bucks), reading John Hart Ely's Democracy and Distrust. There was a tee-vee above the grill, that was set to Tom Brokaw. The sound was off. I noticed the waitress was staring at the set, jaw slack, so I looked up.

The image didn't process at first: Berlin Wall.

Check.

Yep the Berlin Wall---there's the Brandenburg Gate, behind the wall.

What are those people doing standing on top of it?

I remember sitting there staring for about fifteen minutes, dumbfounded. There were about five other people there, and nobody said a word. Finally, a younger guy with a red ball hat and a Marine Corps look about him said in a low, slow voice, "Fuck yeah!"

YIPS! from Robbo:

I was in the midst of my first semester of law school on that day. Needless to say, I wasn't paying as much real-time attention to the Outside World as I do now. However, it at last sank in on me, too. I still can't read P.J. O'Rourke's description of his feelings on being at the Wall as it started to crumble and seeing an East German Border Guard's hand sticking through a hole in it, without getting rather choked up myself:

I really didn't understand before that moment, I didn't realize until just then - we won. The Free World won the Cold War.

All the people who had been sent to gulags, who'd been crushed in the streets of Budapest, Prague and Warsaw, the soldiers who'd died in Korea and my friends and classmates who had been killed in Vietnam - it meant something now. All the treasure that we in America had poured into guns, planes, Star Wars and all the terrifying A-bombs we'd had to build and keep - it wasn't for nothing.

And the best thing about our victory is the way we did it - not just with ICBMs and Green Berets and aid to the Contras. Those things were important, but in the end we beat them with Levi 501 jeans. Seventy-two years of Communist indoctrination and propaganda was drowned out by a three-ounce Sony Walkman. A huge totalitarian system with all its tanks and guns, gulag camps, and secret police has been brought to its knees because nobody wants to wear Bulgarian shoes. They may have had the soldiers and the warheads and the fine-sounding ideology that suckered the college students and nitwit Third Worlders, but we had all the fun. Now they're lunch, and we're number one on the planet.

(from Give War A Chance, one of P.J.'s best.)

UPDATE from Steve:

Here's what some of our readers remember about that day:

I'll never forget that moment. We were living in Mexico, and saw it live on a Mexican channel. Standing on that wall!

But what made a bigger impression (on me) was a few years later when I watched the "Hammer And Sickle" lowered for the last time over the Kremlin, and the old t'sarist tri-color hoisted in its place. Never thought I'd live to see that day.
Posted by EdWonk at November 9, 2004 01:24 AM

I was back in college for the second time, just after coming back from a stint in the Army in Germany. I was in ROTC. That whole fall I kept saying to people in my class, "Gorby's going to roll west. It's his only chance to save the Soviet Union. Honecker will put tanks in the street before he'll let the mob take him down."

I could not conceive that they were just going to surrender. Changed my whole worldview in a minute.

I said "Well, then Gorbachev is a fool, or they're a hell of a lot weaker than we ever thought." Turns out both were true.

And thank God for it.
Posted by DWC at November 9, 2004 08:20 AM

I was in law school with Robbo and remember thinking that when I graduated from college in 1985 and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Army I never dreamed I would live to see the collapse of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and German reunification, much less in four years. Even further back, in Catholic grade school, I remember the nuns lead us prayer for the conversion of Russia. May we live in interesting times . . .
Posted by LMC at November 9, 2004 09:13 AM

I was a junior in high school. I remember thinking, "Wow, the Berlin wall. I bet German chicks are hot."
Posted by Rusty at November 9, 2004 09:46 AM

Rusty, don't even get me started on the Katerina Witt thing I had going then.....Mmmmmmm, lusty commie lass that she was. You just knew watching her at the Calgary Olympics that underneath it all (and underneath THAT you perv!) beat the heart of a true Hayekian free market libertarian......