Nostalgia is an inappropriate emotion to feel about an armed international crisis, I know. And yet I have to admit: Being back at the brink with the Russians feels familiar and homey to me. I spent my entire childhood and adolescence mentally preparing for the eventuality of war with the U.S.S.R. Hearing about the Russians’ sudden seizure of a warm-water port, I thought: Ah — at last, a global conflict with which I am comfortable.

It may be hard for younger people to imagine that we once lived in terror of these same lovable oafs who had trouble rigging up working bathrooms in Sochi. But there was a lumbering, tanklike implacability to the Russians — you can still see it in Putin’s reptile-eyed insistence that he has no intention of invading the Ukraine as he invades the Ukraine. Born in 1967, I was too old to have practiced duck-and-cover drills, but my generation was still expected to do algebra homework, attend Sunday school and refrain from premarital sex with the understanding that human civilization might be cremated on 40 minutes’ notice. No wonder the boomers found it hard to believe the government’s assurances about the necessity of intervention in Vietnam after being told by grown-up authority that their grade-school desktops would shield them from a nuclear blast.

For half a century, we waited for a war that never came. We watched movies and TV shows and read books about it, from “Dr. Strangelove” to “Red Dawn,” John LeCarré to James Bond. Military geeks loved theoretically stacking up the forces and weaponry of the opposing sides against one another on battlefield Europe — if only the Soviets would just roll their tanks across the Iron Curtain already. But the treacherous Ivan never did it. I’m reminded of the drug education unit we had in sixth grade, c. late ’70s, when we were shown a briefcase full of simulated drugs — glistening pills that looked like candy and had evocative names like Pink Ladies and Black Beauties and Yellowjackets — drugs I would never see or hear of again in my life. I braced myself to resist peer pressure that never came. I can only imagine how disappointed the Joint Chiefs of Staff must have been. For decades they readied themselves for World War III with a glittering, deadly array of weaponry: Tridents, Poseidons, Peacekeepers, Minutemen, Pattons and Davy Crocketts, Eagles and Cobras, Sioux and Chinooks, Blackbirds and Stratojets — all gone the way of Pink Ladies.