Last weekend I chatted with an American gentleman I knew as Coach since he used to be my brother-in-law’s tennis coach.

We sat in the warm August night talking about sports – because he was Coach and I was a Sports Writer – but as the night grew darker I realized he wasn’t just a tennis coach.

If anything, he was everything but a tennis coach having backed into that profession by accident after a decades long successful career selling agricultural machines and gunpowder.

And then he told me about the last time he had been to Stockholm.”Back in the early 1970s,” he said.

“Oh” I said

“I was in the Navy. I was the radar operator on a bomber,” Coach said. (He was still Coach).

He must’ve seen the baffled look on my face because he went on.

“I was on the USS Intrepid. Y’know, the one that’s now a museum in New York?”

I nodded eagerly. I did know it. And Coach had served there?

“We were patrolling here, looking for Soviet submarines. I had the button to engage the nukes here,” he said and made a gesture with his hand, “and another one here, to drop it.”

He dropped his hand to the side of the deck chair.

I was speechless. As a Cold War kid, I got the chills from hearing his story. And then, immediately my mind went to Rouen France

Back in the late 1990s I was a business development officer at the Canadian Embassy and one of my first training sessions was held there.

It was a nice town. I remember jogging through the downtown and walking in the rain to the other side of the bridge to buy the local hockey team’s cap. But mostly I remember meeting my new colleagues from around the world.

After a long training day with exhausting presentations and group work and dinners we all found ourselves in the hotel bar talking about this and that. For some reason I was fascinated by my colleagues from Moscow, Liliya and Nikolai.

Liliya was a blonde lady in her early 50s. She didn’t speak much but she was nice and she was always there.

Nikolai looked like a Soviet hockey player; he was dark-haired, stocky, and he held a slight resemblance to actor Michael Williams who you may remember as Judi Dench’s real-life husband and on-screen husband in A Fine Romance.

He didn’t exactly take over the bar, either. He liked to lean back and listen, but we got to talking. And since the Soviet Union had collapsed less than a decade earlier I was curious about life behind the old Iron Curtain where everyone had a past as something else.

“What did you do before you joined the Embassy?” I asked him.

“I was an officer onboard a nuclear submarine” Nikolai said.

“No!” I exclaimed.“Yes,” said Nikolai. And that’s all he said about that.

I wished Nik had been there with Coach and me. I think Coach would’ve liked Nik.