Throughout the period of the Cold War, a tiny cluster of madmen maintained that the United States Army should not have greeted their Soviet brothers-in-arms when they met in central Germany, but rather immediately attacked them. Fortunately, Lt. Albert Kotzebue and Lt. Col. Alexander Gardiev were perfectly sane men who embraced tearfully on the banks of the Elbe River, symbolic of the millions who'd sacrificed to crush Nazi evil.

While the Cold War represents over 40 years of planetary insanity to most people today, perhaps future generations will look back at it with gentler eyes. Nuclear weapons have not been used in anger since 1945, giant armies did not devastate Europe, and if generations of Soviet and American youth did know war, it was not nearly as destructive as it could have been. The meeting at Torgau turned out to have a happy ending after all.