[short_intro]While the World focused on the War in Vietnam, there were daily reminders of the Cold War in Berlin[/short_intro] Yeah, while Vietnam was a pretty hot zone and pretty screwed up from the beginning, Berlin was a cold war zone, with daily incidents at the wall.  We had free access to the East and our visible intelligence officers cruised around in green military vehicles.
One time a car was coming through the checkpoint back to the West when the gate crashed down on the roof.  Just another harassing tactic.  The next day a Russian intelligence car was rerouted down a one-way street dead end, where a skunk was tossed into the engine while the driver was trying to turn around.  Retribution.
Have you ever seen a heavy tracked vehicle make a turn at 30 mph?  Tanks turn by putting the brakes on the inner track while speeding up the outer track.  At speed the outer track digs into the soil as it’s moving sideways and forward at the same time (commonly known as slip-skid), and the track throws up a lot of dirt.  The dirt is scraped off the surface onto the track, the gets thrown off as the track hits the driver gear at the rear.  Guys would do this in a tank range where there were Soviet watch towers 30′ away – the object was to see how far they could throw the dirt over the [main_last]wire fencing.[/main_last]