Into this context walked a young American pilot who broke his gum in half and passed it through a barbed-wire fence to children on the other side. The act presupposed something: that these children were worth considering as individuals rather than as residents of a former enemy country. It did not require the pilot to have resolved any of the questions about German guilt or American responsibility. It required only that he see the children in front of him.
The children seem to have registered this. The letters they wrote to Uncle Wiggly Wings did not read, in Halvorsen’s descriptions of them, as letters to an enemy or to an occupier. They read as letters to someone the children felt some connection with. The connection had been made through candy, but it was a connection. The subsequent decades of reunions and commemorations suggest it was not ephemeral.
## Halvorsen and the Long Arc of the Cold War
Halvorsen’s life traced the arc of the Cold War with unusual fidelity. He was assigned to the Berlin Airlift in 1948, the year the Cold War took its shape. He returned to Germany to serve in the Air Force Systems Command from 1962 to 1965, the years of the Berlin Wall’s construction and the Cuban Missile Crisis. He commanded the 7350th Air Base Group at Tempelhof from 1970 to 1972, during the period of detente. He attended the airlift’s fortieth anniversary in Berlin in 1989, months before the Wall fell. He served as a missionary in St. Petersburg, Russia, from 1995 to 1997, in the post-Soviet period. He received the Congressional Gold Medal in 2014, twenty-five years after the Wall’s fall.