Where were you in 1973? I was a junior in high school in Heidelberg, Germany. 500 feet away was the U.S. Army headquarters where our dads worked. It was surrounded by a wall and the military police always checked our identification cards when we went in. A lot of my classmates would go over there for lunch. That particular afternoon as people were leaving the cafeteria, a powerful explosion devastated the area. The car bomb killed two people immediately and injured several others.
All of us had read about the notorious Beider-Meinhof terrorist gang, but it never seemed real until that day. From that point on, the checkpoint police carried guns at their sides and searched every car. Normal security was no longer good enough.