Salute: Cold War veteran part of Strategic Air Command
“People don’t really know how close we were nuclear war,” Leesburg resident David Grant Williams said as he recalled his time spent in the United States Air Force from 1979 to 1983. “We were in the middle of the Cold War and I was on a nuclear weapon base that at any moment could be hit.”
Rewind a few years.
Williams grew up in Minnesota where surviving the cold was just another day, as sometimes the windchill cold drop in the negative thirties. His father, Gerald Grant Williams, owned a big law firm and was a city councilman, so there was hardly a place that David went where people didn’t know he and his family.
“I was his constant shadow,” David said. “I was going to grow up, become a lawyer like him and follow in his footsteps. But one day, my mom asked me if I really wanted to be a lawyer or be a good businessman with 10 lawyers.”
David’s grandfather fought in the trenches during World War I and his father fought against the Germans in World War II so David grew up hearing the stories of war. As he looked as his options in life, David chose to enlist in the Air Force.
“I scored high on my entry test and they asked me where I wanted to be,” David said. “I was a professional skier at the time so of course, I said somewhere out west where I could ski.”
Being from Minnesota, he was used to it.
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David took part in the strategic air command, with most of his duty requiring high level clearance and top secret security as he was at a base that housed intercontinental ballistic missiles.
“We had to make sure the missiles were capable to fire should we have gone to war,” David said. “Every day, you didn’t know if that was the day they would be launched, or worse, be attacked. If one of those were to go off, I would have been obliterated in the mushroom cloud.”
While at the base, David recalled protestors coming out to protest the nuclear weapons.
“They would spit on us and throw things at us,” David said. “The irony is that they were spitting on the people who were protecting their right to spit on them.”
David worked closely with the base commander on several special projects.
“It was a different time and you did what you had to do to survive,” David said.
However, David did get to experience some of the best adventures of his life during his enlistment. He was able to go free hand mountain climbing, white water rafting, hiking in the mountains and even was chased by a grizzly bear.
In 1983, David left the Air Force as a Sergeant and became an entrepreneur. He moved to Florida after taking one step out of the plane onto our “squishy grass” and 75 degree weather.
Using his experience from the service, David began working in marketing and organizing large conventions. For a time, he went “straight up broke” but persevered and worked as a cab driver and heavy equipment operator until he got back on his feet. Today he enjoys dabbling in the entertainment industry by filming his own tv productions and hitting the range with his buddies.
“The Air Force gave me a great opportunity and responsibility that you would never have in the civilian world,” David said. “Some veterans had bullets flying at them, some had bombs, some never saw combat, but everyone had to go through basic and that is tough enough. Everyone had their mission and we are a brotherhood because of that.”
This article originally appeared on Daily Commercial: Cold War veteran part of Strategic Air Command
