About

Welcome to "From the West, a Challenger", my likely only sporadically-updated blog of my misadventures in Cold War wargaming. I hope what little I have on display for you here provides at least a moment of entertainment.

Who am I?

The author, circa 1987.

Absolutely nobody of importance. I'm a low-level marketer at a large not-for-profit. My name's Edward. I was born in 1983, which makes me thirty right now.

I largely missed the Cold War as it happened. Literally my only memory of Ronald Reagan's presidency is him waving goodbye at the very end of it. Had I known the Cold War was happening, I would likely have been excited, and deeply saddened by its passing. Young children can be thoughtless creatures, and I would have cared little, at that tender age, that millions of lives hung in the balance and thousands of others were dying every year in the Third World to fulfill the nebulous aims of the two great superpowers. Even Desert Storm largely passed me by; my parents, kind, loving people, for the most part, banned any footage or discussion of the war from their house, and so I was only tangentially aware of it.

A few years after the end of the war, such as it was, when I was able to more easily read complex books, I discovered the various splendidly-illustrated books by Bill Gunston et al on the Soviet Threat: immense silver MiG-25s, the curiously appealing Yak-28, Kara-class cruisers simply bristling with missiles, and of course, inevitably, row upon row of T-72 (and they were all T-72s) tanks, poised to come rushing into Europe and end dull humdrum life as we knew it. Pow. No more Michael Jackson, no more Blondie, no more Arnold Schwarzenegger actioners. Just like that.

Of course, it was all over. But that didn't stop me from wandering around in the back yard, narrating the events of a titantic 1980s Jutland (if I had known what Jutland was, anyway) under my breath, referring to the massive library copy of Jane's Fighting Ships 1986 that I frequently checked out and lugged around in my weak little arms.

Now, of course, I'm more or less grown up. I'm responsible, sort of. I have a house, I'm married, and I may yet inflict offspring upon an unsuspecting world. However, I'm at last in a position to play out all those never-were wars I fought in my head as a child.