Larry Larsen

Larry Larsen and the Morning the Wall Began: Cold War Service on the Edge of History

Larry Larsen didn’t enter the U.S. Army with a neatly defined dream. He entered with something more familiar—and more honest—than a polished plan: uncertainty. After high school and two years at St. Pete Junior College, he found himself staring at the question that catches a lot of young men at the edge of adulthood: What now? He had no clear career track, no confident “next step,” and he knew the draft was looming in the background like a calendar you can’t ignore. So he did what he still describes as the smart move—he took initiative, went to the recruiter, and tried to shape his fate before it shaped him.

Larry had one request that mattered to him. If he was going to give three years of his life, he wanted it to be something that felt bigger than routine. He wanted Europe. The recruiter’s answer carried a dry kind of humor—Europe is good, because otherwise we might have sent you to Greenland. Larry signed for three years. In doing so, he walked straight into one of the most sensitive geopolitical fault lines of the 20th century: Berlin.

He served from 1960 to 1963, as a heavy weapons infantryman—4.2-inch mortars. It’s a specialty that sits at the intersection of brute force and exact math, because mortars aren’t fired by instinct. They’re fired by calculation. Larry’s role evolved into fire direction control, the plotting and interpreting that turns a forward observer’s coordinates into instructions the gunner can use. Thirty days a year, he explains, they trained intensely—plotting rounds over live Army troops. That single detail explains why the plotting mattered. A miscalculation wasn’t just an error. It was catastrophic. His job demanded precision, calm, and an ability to hold responsibility without dramatizing it.

But the most defining part of his service wasn’t a training range. It was the city itself.

Larry was in Berlin when the Berlin Wall began—not as concrete, not as the iconic slabs of history books, but as something simpler and more dangerous: barbed wire. The first stage of division, he recalls, was a sudden call that wire was being strung around the city—east and west separating in real time. In the moment, it wasn’t “the Wall.” It was a developing crisis, and the U.S. response was initially sharp. Larry remembers the order coming down with President Kennedy’s name attached: go out, cut the wire, remove it—and if fired upon, return fire.

That instruction mattered because it reveals what the situation felt like at ground level: the possibility of a spark that could become a fire. For Larry and his unit, it was serious—real enough that they were preparing to move in the early morning hours to confront the wire directly.

Then, at the last hour, politics asserted itself.

About an hour before execution, the State Department overruled the order. The mission was canceled. Larry says it plainly: “that’s politics.” In the space between the military order and the diplomatic reversal is the quiet truth of Cold War Berlin—every action was measured not only by what it achieved, but by what it might trigger. The wire stayed. The city hardened. History moved forward without asking the soldiers if they agreed.

After that, Larry’s duty became what many Berlin soldiers remember: presence. Patrols. Showing force without provoking force. He describes riding in a jeep with an M50 machine gun, driving to checkpoints and guard points on the western side, making it unmistakable that the U.S. position was real, armed, and watching. The mission wasn’t to start a fight. It was to prevent one.

And then comes one of Larry’s most striking reflections—one that only time and conversation can produce. Years later, he spoke with a German who had been involved with the East German side. The German told him something that reframed the “what if” of that morning: if the Americans had cut the barbed wire, nothing serious would have happened. The East Germans had been issued rubber bullets. They didn’t want an international incident. They wanted control, not chaos. Larry repeats it with a kind of disbelief—rubber bullets. It’s a detail that exposes how close the world sometimes gets to catastrophe on the basis of assumptions. Larry’s unit prepared for live-fire escalation; the other side, at least according to that later account, was prepared to avoid exactly that.

Once things settled, Larry’s experience became even more unusual. His company commander selected him—an enlisted man—to become one of only three authorized drivers with access through Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin and East Germany. He would drive officers—captains, colonels, occasionally generals—into the eastern sector to observe traffic, monitor movement, and watch for Russian activity. The assignment wasn’t glamorous in the Hollywood sense, but it was high-trust. It required discipline, reliability, and a steady temperament. You don’t give that job to someone who wants attention.

Larry describes the practical challenge of it in a way that makes it real: he had to memorize East Berlin’s streets at night using landmarks. Street signs weren’t the solution. Familiarity was. Over time he came to know the city “like the back of his hand.” In a divided capital where most Westerners never crossed, that’s an extraordinary claim—and he doesn’t say it as boasting. He says it as fact.

And then, just before he was set to rotate home, Berlin reminded him what the Cold War felt like at street level.

He recounts being on duty when an armored personnel carrier on a two-lane city road deliberately drifted into his lane. Larry tried to evade by switching lanes; the APC mirrored him. In that moment he believed the intent was clear: a collision that could be framed as an “incident,” something that would ripple upward into headlines, protests, and military posturing. Larry’s response was quick, mechanical, and controlled. He slammed the brakes, executed a hard maneuver—double clutching, swinging the wheel, flipping the car around—and accelerated out of the danger. He got away. The APC surged forward, missing the crash it seemed to want.

What stays with him isn’t only the danger—it’s the timing. I’ve been here the whole time and nothing happened, and now—right before I leave. That frustration is another kind of honesty. Soldiers want to do their job and get home. They don’t want “one last thing” when the clock is already ticking.

Larry also shares a moment that reveals the strange humanity threaded through that era’s hostility. One day, while killing time near lakes around Berlin, he and his group watched women swimming. A Russian soldier arrived in a small, underpowered “putt-putt” car and parked nearby. The officers stayed in their vehicles, but Larry got out. They didn’t share a language, but they shared gestures—pointing, commenting, observing. The Russian asked to see Larry’s engine. Larry showed him the Ford’s large engine, and the Russian was amazed.

It’s a small scene, almost cinematic: two men on opposite sides of the Cold War, united for a moment by curiosity about machinery and the universal language of look at that. The tension didn’t vanish, but it paused. And in Larry’s telling, that pause mattered—because it proved that even inside a standoff, people still recognize each other as people.

When asked about influential figures, Larry remembers a sergeant in his squad—a Black NCO who handled leadership well and became a friend. It’s not a long anecdote, but it carries weight because Larry doesn’t turn it into a speech. He simply acknowledges competence and friendship, and then adds the truth many veterans share: over time, contact fades, people re-up, paths split, and “you wouldn’t see anything” after that.

Larry was offered something many soldiers were offered in that era: stay in, take a higher rank, and go to Vietnam. He declined. He doesn’t elaborate into politics; he just states his choice. For him, Berlin was enough. The Cold War was already a front line. He had done his part.

After service, he returned by ship to New York City and found his way back toward family in Minnesota. His life eventually settled again in Florida, with the long arc of retirement communities, geography changes, and family milestones. He has two sons—one near New York City, another in Alabama—and he is now a great-grandfather. It’s a gentle contrast: the young man who once drove through Checkpoint Charlie now measures time in generations.

When given the chance to speak directly to future viewers—sons, grandkids, great-grandkids—Larry’s message returns to the theme that runs beneath his entire story: discipline and direction. He tells young people, men or women, to join after high school. Not because it’s easy, but because it teaches you structure. Your hair gets cut. Your ego gets trimmed. You learn, sometimes painfully, that you are “nothing” in one sense—meaning you are not the center of the world—but you become part of something larger. You learn to follow orders, do the right thing, and carry yourself with purpose.

He admits he went in “pretty much lost.” When he came back, a neighbor told him he had changed. Larry didn’t think he had, at least not at first. But in hindsight, he recognizes what the Army did: it straightened his head out. It gave him a foundation. And it placed him, briefly but decisively, in a moment where history wasn’t something you studied—it was something you watched forming, strand by strand, in barbed wire at the edge of a divided city.

Larry Larsen’s service is a reminder that the Cold War wasn’t only diplomats and speeches. It was also young infantrymen in jeeps, plotting mortar coordinates with lives beneath the arc, driving through Checkpoint Charlie at night, and learning that sometimes the most important duty is not to fire—but to be present, prepared, and steady while the world holds its breath.