Cold War veterans like me thought WW III couldn’t happen. Looks like we could be wrong.

I am not a combat veteran. I entered active duty near the end of the Vietnam War and was on thirty-day notice orders, but was I was never deployed as the draw-down began. I left active duty before the fall of the Berlin Wall and Desert Storm. In the interim, I was an active duty Army officer with command and staff tours in Europe and United States. I was a “garrison trooper.” That is normally an insult in the military. But it is not for those of us who patrolled the DMZ in Korea or who confronted the Soviet armored behemoth across the Fulda Gap.

Ours was the so-called Cold War; a world-wide struggle lasting from 1945 until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Even that is only partially right, since men and women still keep watch on the DMZ or in missile silos, submarines or strategic air forces. Still, it seemed to us and the country that it was. We won. The Bear lost. The specter of a third world-war faded from public awareness, replaced by the conflicts new generations of veterans would be called to fight.

But now I sit and watch as Ukraine is ravaged, and the genie is out of the bottle again, turned loose by a deranged ex-KGB Colonel who believes the same dream as Corporal Hitler: that his enemies are fragmented and weak, and that he can turn back the clock of history even if it means opening the gates of hell. Now the fall of Ukraine threatens to become the tipping point for world — war just as Hitler’s attack on Poland or the assassination of a minor nobleman were.

To be sure, in recent years we have all seen incomprehensible pictures of shattered cities, of armadas of tanks sweeping across deserts, of soldiers in hostile lands or drones striking anonymous targets. But this is different. This, glimpsed through a door we thought decades of patient service had closed and barred, is the specter of continent-wide total war among nations.

I have heard correspondents say that this kind war is obsolete, not supposed to happen anymore, even that this shouldn’t be possible in a “civilized” country, as if civilization was unique to Europe. It is more likely that it is, as General McMaster said on a televised interview in the opening days of the war, “The end of America’s holiday from history.”

This scares me. Hell, it terrifies me. This is a vision of war without hope and without victory — only lonely victims. But in a strange way I must admit to a bit of nostalgia. This was to be our war, the kind of war we trained for and trained others to fight, and it was a war that we honestly expected to have to fight. There was certain bravado about us. We knew we were good, even if we didn’t think that we would be enough. I know this is misplaced nostalgia, but other veterans from those days will understand. It was simpler then — we were the good guys and over here; they were the bad guys and somewhere over there beyond the wire.

Now, some American veterans are going to Ukraine to join the fight against Putin’s insanity. It’s an American tradition like the Lincoln Brigade of the Spanish Civil War or the Layfette Escadrille of WWI. Team Rubicon, a disaster relief organization of veterans that I belong to, has sent assessment teams to Poland. But I am 75 now with a wife and kids and grandkids, and there is little point in pretending that I can or should pick up my pack and move out.

I will watch and admire the courage of the Ukraine military and people in their forlorn hope. I will hope that our current President, who served in the Senate for 36 years of the Cold War, can, continue to rebuild alliances with our allies, stand with free people everywhere, and speak and act with reason rather than tantrums. Above all, I pray that we can walk the knife edge between two unthinkable outcomes; on the one hand turning our back on our allies and the struggle and, on the other hand, tipping the world into a new and devastating world war.

God help us all.

David Arnold is a former Field Grade Army officer and senior academic administrator; retired, he now lives in Versailles.