Defense Secretary Gates is in Chile doing something and promoting the new START treaty. I do not know why he is in Chile – which as far as I know is not involved with START – but while he was there, he visited a military academy where this picture was taken.

The guy in the background,  looks a little too Nazi for my taste.

In the early 1960s – after the Beatles song  I Want to Hold Your Hand came out, but before Why Don't We Do It in the Road? which I always thought pretty much covered the arc of the 60s, but that is another story – I taught continuous wave radar to Germans at Fort Bliss, Texas. Because of the heat, classes started at 6am and the Germans would march in – in the morning twilight wearing grey uniforms and jackboots  – singing Deutschland über alles.

I thought that was a little too much, but, at least, they had the common decency to not wear helmets. Now even we are wearing a sort of old German helmet.