John Noble Wilford:

I could hardly think of myself outside the context of the cold war. Without the intense Soviet-American competition epitomized by the space race, I would not have become a science journalist who wrote about astronauts going to the Moon to “beat” the Russians. I would therefore not be in Baltimore again, this time with astronomers who were preparing to look into the heavens via a giant orbiting telescope.

I found my way to Travelers Lounge, the bar that had been across from the gate to the Army Intelligence School at Fort Holabird. We used to tarry in the back room there, over pitchers of beer fueling arguments about politics and the American novel. I took a stool and told the bartender that it had been more than three decades since I last had a beer here, back in my Holabird sojourn.

“One of them comes in every few months and looks around,” the bartender said. “We’re about the only thing left from those days.”

So I had seen. The fort was gone. In its place stretched one corporate complex after another, buildings of glass and steel and spreading car parks. The names I saw were as unfamiliar as their digitized new-technology goods and services. I imagined I was looking on a monument to the cold war, and how apt it seemed.

The conflict we had lived through did not lend itself to heroic and triumphal iconography, nothing like the Iwo Jima flag-raising statue, nothing to glorify war or proclaim victory. So these commercial enterprises rising from cold-war technology, supplanting an old fort, were working monuments to the end of the cold war, monuments that do not look back.