Border Site Summer: Tales from the Super-Secret Army Security Agency

Description: Signed by AuthorBorder Site Summer is the second installment in the author's lightly fictionalized accounts of life at Army Security Agency (ASA) listening posts in Germany during the Cold War. Take a measure of M*A*S*H, a dollop of Animal House, stir in a bit of Catch-22 and you'll have life at an ASA border site. These remote signals intelligence posts looked down from isolated mountaintops onto communist East Germany and Czechoslovakia and were manned by small detachments of linguists, intelligence analysts, and technicians. Most of these young men were reluctant soldiers who volunteered for ASA rather than being drafted into the infantry. Many were college drop-outs, and nearly all had well above average scores on Army IQ tests. Adult supervision was minimal at these outposts; discipline was lax, and alcohol and immaturity often led to incidents that would strain the credulity of by-the-book soldiers.One outpost was on Hohenbogen in the Bavarian Forest where a tightly knit group of men worked at a mountaintop intercept site and lived in hotels at the foot of the mountain. This book peeks behind the curtain of secrecy surrounding the activities of ASA’s border sites and describes how the men of the Hohenbogen detachment worked, lived, partied, and loved. One character had been wounded in Vietnam two years earlier and was struggling with PTSD, alcoholism, and night terrors as he tried to find inner peace in the remote countryside.He and most of the other men lived in the village of Rimbach, a destination for tourists from Berlin and elsewhere who enjoyed the mountain scenery and hiking in the Bavarian Forest. In addition to the single women in tour groups who drew the attention of the romance-starved young Americans, there was a suspected Soviet military intelligence agent whose sloppy tradecraft led to his discovery by detachment personnel. Despite sometimes comically inept leadership, the ASA soldiers did their job well and kept watch on the border with the communist East while enjoying life on "the hill."Border Site Summer is the sequel to Snow Mountain Misfits. The third and final installment in the trilogy, A Borderline Case, was published in early 2024 and is also available.

Price: 14.95 USD

Location: Millsboro, Delaware

End Time: 2024-09-04T21:04:08.000Z

Shipping Cost: 4 USD