"And a bomber above her wherever she goes..."

Driving home from my Russian lesson today, I suddenly spied a low-flying AWACS plane, a menacing black silhouette against a sky full of grey rain clouds. It gave me a lump in the throat and truly startled me for a moment - was that just an atavistic reaction to a black bird-of-prey silhouette suddenly popping into my field of vision, or was there more to it? The line from "The Crow on the Cradle" I quoted in the title immediately came to my head when I saw the plane, and I spent the rest of the trip thinking about it.

Could it be that the silhouette of the plane with its large jet engines reminded me of planes like the Superfortress, planes whose silhouettes Maksim would have been taught to distinguish during his time in the radar troops? Would they have had large posters with silhouettes of the different aircraft, so they could memorise what each of them looked like?
At the time, Maksim was still very young and impressionable, and perhaps they were told lots of scary scenarios of what would happen "if the Americans drop the bomb on us". Or is it just a residue to this life, where we were force-fed lots of cheerful stories about life after a nuclear disaster or war at school? (The Chernobyl incident happened when I was 11, apparently that inspired all our teachers to give us only such kinds of reading assignments. Thanks for nothing.) Or another possibility - since my classmates didn't seem to mind those stories, did I only react to them so strongly because they jogged my memory and reminded me of something heard in another time and place?