The Sound of Freedom

Memories come flooding back of what the world felt like back in 1981 when I first heard the scream of the GE J79 jet engines from CF104 Starfighters roaring down the runway. In the bravado of the Cold War era we called it "The Sound of Freedom". It was a time when the Soviet Union was portrayed to us by our leaders as this unholy force that was hell-bent on ruining us. Standing by this pedestal outside Soellingen Germany in the fall of 2008 this sentiment seems more and more ridiculous as it gets buried by the passage of time and as we hear from other normal people who grew up on that side that they were told the same stories about us. The Rhine River valley is much quieter now than I remember when we were there playing our war games. Tractors plowing the asparagus fields paint a much more sedate landscape today. I can still imagine the distant echo of the sonic boom from the Mach 2 run I did with the test pilot a quarter of a century ago. Freedom sounds different today.