A Tribute to Veterans of the “other” Forgotten War

Veteran’s Day is a day of remembrance to honor fallen soldiers, but also those who served in all of the military Services, whenever and wherever they served.

The day has developed a rhythm: flags, “thank-you-for your-service,” and meal discounts. But there’s another, quieter truth humming in the background. We remember the fallen from Normandy, Chosin and Khe Sanh, the young men and women who trudged through deadly streets of Fallujah and the mountains of Helmand. Yet there’s another group who fought a war most of us have forgotten – a war that never officially began and never formally ended.

It doesn’t have the cinematic clarity of Omaha Beach or the black-and-white villainy of Saddam Huessein. There were no surrender ceremonies on battleships, no ticker-tape parades. But it shaped the world we live in as much as any conflict in human history. It was a 45-year chess match, played with spies, scientists, statesman and service members. The weapons weren’t just bullets and bombs, they were ideology, alliances, and preparedness.  And through it all, there were Americans who served every single day, often unseen, holding a fragile peace with their vigilance.

Ask a sailor who patrolled under the Arctic ice in a nuclear submarine, listening for the telltale hum of a Soviet sub. Ask a radar operator who sat in a concrete bunker in North Dakota, watching a green screen for the blip that would mean the world was ending. Ask the soldiers who rode freezing in an open gun-jeep patrolling the East German border or the pilots who flew nuclear-armed aircraft to the fringes of Soviet airspace, always one mistake away from an international incident. Their war (mostly) didn’t make headlines, because the whole point was that it never should.

That’s the strange paradox of the Cold War. Success meant nothing happened. No mushroom clouds, no invasions, no global collapse. You could serve an entire career (as I did), do your job perfectly, and come home to a country that had no idea what you’d just prevented. There were no victory medals for deterrence, no monuments for the tension that didn’t explode.

But that doesn’t mean it didn’t cost something. It did – deeply. Months of deployment (away from those they loved). Suffering through harsh environments to hone their deadly skills (they never used in combat).  Injury or death in a “training” accident.

Veterans Day isn’t just for those who fought in shooting wars. It’s for everyone who signed up knowing they might have to. It’s for the men and women who stood in the gap between “what could happen” and “what didn’t.” It’s for the long-watch sailors, the silent analysts, the guards on the wall. They carried a kind of burden that’s easy to overlook – the burden of constant readiness, of being a human tripwire in a world balanced on a knife’s edge.

The Cold War ended not with a bang but with a shrug and a crumbling wall. There was no single day we could circle on a calendar and say, “that’s when we won.” The Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet empire collapsed, and we moved on…fast. We cashed in the “peace dividend,” downsized the military, turned our eyes to the economy and the internet.

The veterans of that invisible war faded into the background. No one wanted to hear about nuclear alerts that almost went wrong, or Soviet defectors, or classified missions over the Barents Sea. The Cold War had been a shadow over our lives for so long that once it lifted, we didn’t look back. We wanted light and laughter and Silicon Valley.

But history doesn’t vanish just because it’s inconvenient. The Cold War veterans still live among us – quiet, steady, unheralded. Some bear physical scars, others carry the unseen weight of service that’s never fully understood. They kept the line steady during one of humanity’s most dangerous standoffs, and that deserves more than a footnote.

Gratitude isn’t about fireworks or flyovers. It’s about memory. It’s about recognizing that freedom isn’t just protected on battlefields, it’s preserved in the shadows, in the daily discipline of people who do their duty even when the reward is silence.

So, remember the “others.” The ones who stared down the Iron Curtain in Europe, who manned DMZ in Korea, who flew the skies ready to wage a battle that (thankfully) never came. Remember the men and women who fought to keep the fight from ever starting.

Their war had no victory parade—but it kept the world from burning.

The Cold War was the “other” forgotten war, and maybe it’s time we stopped forgetting.

Because in the end, Veterans Day isn’t about one war or another, it is about the promise behind all of them: that someone was willing to stand watch so the rest of us could live our lives. And that’s something worth remembering, every single day.