Lt. Col. Brad Jensen, who teaches UC Berkeley’s Air Force ROTC program, plans to soon retire after 26 years of military service. His job has taken him all over the country, including Louisiana, Utah, Guam, California, Virginia and North Dakota. Berkeley marks his last stop.

When he enlisted in 1982, the Gulf War was underway. “We sat alert, we had our airplanes, aircraft and missiles on alert and Russia was the big threat,” Jensen said. “We thought the world might end in a nuclear holocaust.”

He nodded to the dozens of Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force members doing training exercises in the middle of North Field. “We send cadets around the world for language training and cultural immersion to try and get them prepared to go work in the Balkans or the Middle East or Asia,” said Jensen, who speaks Dutch, Spanish and French. “They’re going to be stationed anywhere in the world.”

What has changed most about the military between then and now, he said, is a greater understanding of the enemy.

“In some ways, it’s a much harder threat to defend against than the Russians were during the Cold War,” Jensen said. “You know what their missiles were, you knew if we didn’t threaten them they wouldn’t hurt us. But we don’t know that with the terrorists–they want to destroy us and we don’t know where they are.”