* Why was the afghan war called the Vietnam of the Soviet Union

Indeed, even today, many of my students espouse some version of this mentality, which also continues to inform an important strand of US political thought. Long after the USSR collapsed, elements of this mentality stayed with me. In the distorted view of my youth, the Soviet Union was above all things concerned with destroying the American way of life, and “socialism,” in all its manifestations, constituted an intrinsic evil. But as a child growing up in a mountain town very similar to the one depicted in the film, Red Dawn felt entirely realistic. It’s cartoonishly violent and my students usually respond with laughter at the absurdity of it all. Of course, none of the students or teachers is armed. The soldiers attack in the middle of a school day for some reason and proceed to fire rocket launchers and AK-47s indiscriminately into the school. I sometimes show my students an opening clip from Red Dawn in which Soviet paratroopers launch an all-out assault on a high school in a small Colorado town.

But Hollywood films like Red Dawn and the Rambo series probably did as much as anything to shape my childhood worldview.

My earliest childhood memories were set against the backdrop of Reagan’s “evil empire” speech, news coverage of the Chernobyl disaster, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Like many kids of the 1980s, my fascination with communism, the Cold War, the Soviet Union, and so on, derived from paranoia and fear, as well as a belief in the infallibility of America’s role in the world.

Q: Describe your background and what brought you to the Wilson Center.

* Why was the afghan war called the Vietnam of the Soviet Union