The Red Dawn Culture

It all started with the Wolverines.

Maybe there were some hints of it that started earlier – like the car wars of Road Warrior or watching John Rambo use his hollow-handled survival knife. But Red Dawn was the nascent example of “what if?” scenarios before TSHTF became the nom de jour of locker room and campfire discussions of our youth. It was the watershed pop culture event that really got folks thinking about what would happen if America was invaded by a foreign power.

It was familiar and yet something we had never seen before. The scene in the high school with the airborne invasion kept us looking up towards the skies for opening parachutes. I’ll never forget the time Big Mike and I were riding bikes at the elementary school and saw two Apaches going overhead for the first time – we were convinced they were Russian Hinds – or at least some kind of scout ‘copter for the upcoming invasion.

The Chair Is Against The Wall. The Chair Is Against The Wall.

It was empowering to be a kid and see the kids able to hold off the Russian threat from their campsite up in the Rocky Mountains. We knew that we were going to be the ones that would have to repel the invasion forces – hiding out at our hunting leases and taking raiding parties into town for supplies. Never mind that we were too young to drive and were miles and miles away from our un-stocked and completely indefensible deer camps.

And then there was the scene where they geared up in the local sporting goods store . . . They were all weapons we’d known from hunting – a deer rifle, pump shotgun, the ubiquitous Winchester 30-30 we all owned or our fathers owned; even the compound bow that was lurking in the closet of some friend’s older brother.

It showed us the value of hunting and living off the land. It spurned a million conversations about who would do what when the Russians came. I remember endless discussions with my middle school friends about who would make it and who wouldn’t– all on the basis of who hunts and fishes and knew how to camp.

John Has A Long Moustache. John Has A Long Moustache.

Years went by and the Cold War ended. The Russians had turned from enemies to allies and were replaced by eco-terrorists, Y2K and when those ideas failed – became the foundation for our shared obsession with zombie invasions. All of it had roots somewhere in John Milius’ grand vision of WWIII.

Looking back, the movie was far from perfect. The concept of a Russian-led invasion of the United States seems almost silly with post-peristroka hindsight, where Russia didn’t seem to be the military behemoth we feared so much in the 1970s and 80s.

Still, the scenario that was painted by Colonel Andy Tanner (Powers Booth) seemed realistic enough at the time:

First wave of the attack came in disguised as commercial charter flights same way they did in Afghanistan in '80. Only they were crack Airborne outfits. Now they took these passes in the Rockies . . . They coordinated with selective nuke strikes and the missiles were a helluva lot more accurate than we thought. They took out the silos here in the Dakotas, key points of communication . . . Infiltrators came up illegal from Mexico. Cubans mostly. They managed to infiltrate SAC bases in the Midwest, several down in Texas and wreaked a helluva lot of havoc, I'm here to tell you. They opened up the door down here, and the whole Cuban & Nicaraguan armies come walking right through, rolled right up here through the Great Plains . . . We held them at the Rockies and the Mississippi. Anyway, the Russians reinforced with 60 divisions. Sent three whole army groups across the Bering Strait into Alaska, cut the pipeline, came across Canada to link up here in the middle, but we stopped their butt cold. The lines have pretty much stabilized now.

I don’t think any of us really fear the possibility of a Russian-led invasion at this point, but the idea of “infiltrators” coming up from Mexico certainly does hold some concerns and parallels for the islamo-fascist terroists we face today.

I am sure that the FBI is not actively looking at airborne terrorists as an active threat, but rest assured, I and the rest of the dudes that grew up watching Red Dawn in the 1980s would know exactly what to do if it did happen.

Wolverines!!