Cold War

The Cold War is the conflict against which Dan Davis’s military service and survival take shape. As it boils over into the Six Weeks War, his work at Sandia Weapons Center connects the global military crisis to his personal history: he is away from the base when it disappears, and that chance absence leaves him alive to draw his veterans’ benefits.

Military Service and Independence

Dan has a degree in mechanical engineering when the Six Weeks War begins, but he is serving in the Army rather than pursuing a commission. His decision reflects a conviction inherited from his father: he wants to complete his term of service without commanding or being commanded, and without surrendering his time to schedules. Military duty is therefore both his immediate circumstance and something he intends to leave behind.

When the Cold War intensifies, Dan is a sergeant-technician at Sandia Weapons Center in New Mexico. His work involves putting atomic material into bombs, even as he makes plans for life after his service. The contrast is pointed: he is technically skilled and directly involved in weapons production, but his ambition is personal independence rather than advancement within the military.

Escalation and Survival

The crisis reaches Sandia while Dan is away in Dallas, where he is drawing a fresh supply of Schrecklichkeit. Sandia disappears; the fallout from the event moves toward Oklahoma City. Because he is not at the weapons center, Dan survives and is able to draw his GI benefits. The narrative makes his survival depend on a specific, accidental separation from the military installation where he works.

The Cold War also belongs to a wider history of military research. Dan recounts that cold exposure had been known since the 1930s as a laboratory technique or last-resort therapy, but the Six Weeks War transformed its status. Research teams developed a method to drug and hypnotize a subject, cool him to precisely four degrees centigrade, and preserve people in stasis for military use. The account presents war as an accelerator: immense funding and staffing produce results, however inefficiently, that can turn an experimental procedure into a system for storing people and deploying them when needed.