The Foreign Service Journal, November 2019

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | NOVEMBER 2019 63 whacks to bring back our own concrete souvenirs. This time, we strolled through Checkpoint Charlie with the curious crowds moving in both directions—no inspections, no guards, nothing. More than a decade later, I was again stationed in Germany. There were no longer nuclear artillery units; no jets loaded with nuclear weapons sitting on runways ready to take off; and U.S. forces were at a fraction of their former strength. In the years since, we occasionally feel a pang of nostalgia for the drama of the time. Little did we know that the Berlin Wall would be so completely obliterated that the German govern- ment would have to take steps to preserve sections. Now you can buy tiny slivers of concrete attached to postcards—not the fist-sized chunks we smashed out of the Berlin Wall in Novem- ber 1989. Kelly Lauritzen is a management-coned Foreign Service officer cur- rently assigned as a consular officer in Guangzhou, China. In 1989 he was serving in the military, based in Aschaffenburg, Germany. A Gift from a Journalist James L. Bullock Moscow, USSR I n November 1989 I was starting my third month as press attaché with U.S. Embassy Moscow’s press and culture section (known as P&C). The Soviets, for some reason I do not recall, did not allow the U.S. Information Service to operate within the USSR under its actual name. With only Arab-world experience until then, I was not an old Soviet hand. But I had studied Russian in college, so I was asked to break a Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs assignment to fill an unexpected vacancy in Moscow. I was thrilled. It was an exciting time to be heading for the Soviet Union, as Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness) were upending four decades of Cold War routines. Embassy Moscow operated primarily out of an antiquated building on the Garden Ring Road, not far from the Kremlin, Marion Lauritzen in front of the Berlin Wall with her children in late November 1989. COURTESYOFKELLYLAURITZEN