Reflections of a stormy petrel

As I said - I served in the Italian army when the Italian army was part of NATO and staring down the barrel of a lot of Soviet guns. In case of war, we would have had to hold the mountains and plains of north-eastern Italy and possibly advance into Yugoslavia and Austria if the Warsaw Pact violated the neutrality of those countries - which was taken practically for granted. And I lived through the long period of Communist terrorism in my country, which has not even now altogether died out. Don't tell me about the Cold War; I was there. And I happen to know that almost every Social Democrat in Europe was a sworn enemy of Russian Communism.