Border Site Summer

by Jeremiah Davis

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 Army Security Agency (ASA) border site in Germany during the Cold War. These remote signals intelligence listening 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 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, loved, and sometimes struggled with loneliness.