Dear readers, I must confess, this is a profoundly depressing story for me to write. Though the United States of America ultimately did win the Cold War by virtue of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, my country and her allies suffered many a humiliating defeat and setback along the way, from the Vietnam War, to the Soviets beating America into unmanned (Sputnik) and manned space flight (Yuri Gagarin), to the Soviet shootdown of U-2 Dragon spy plane pilot Francis Gary Powers on May 1, 1960.
