My brother was a major with the Big Red One, assigned to the Fulda Gap for REFORGER. Their job was to buy time for the guys who were going to buy time for the reinforcements. His estimated life expectancy in the event of an “aggression” over the Gap was less than a lake fly’s.
Our life expectancy wasn’t much longer than your brother’s, perhaps 15 minutes. There were 50+ Warsaw Pact squadrons ready to take out the NATO air bases, and that was just what was in East Germany. It wouldn’t have been pretty.