Millsboro veteran pens sequel to Cold War novel

Two parts M*A*S*H, one part Animal House and a dash of Catch-22. That was life at the U.S. Army Security Agency’s Cold War listening post atop Snow Mountain (Schneeberg) during the mid-1960s.

In his new novel, “Border Site Summer: Cold War Tales from the Super-Secret Army Security Agency,” Millsboro resident Jeremiah Davis takes readers on a tour of a once-secret outpost near what was then the West German border with communist Czechoslovakia.

Very few people outside the ASA or the intelligence community know what day-to-day life was like at those border sites, because knowledge of their operations was classified at the time.

This book is a fictionalized account of a summer at a remote detachment where the author served as a highly trained linguist and radio intercept operator. The story begins with a history of the locale, which had been used by sentinels as an observation post for hundreds of years. Maps of interest, photographs and links to other documents are scattered throughout the book. The author’s descriptions of the young men he served with, the local women they loved and sometimes married, and the everyday business of the unit provide a fascinating insight into Cold War-era signals intelligence operations.

This book peeks behind the curtain of secrecy that screened the men of these ASA detachments from the “real” Army. His novel is a notable if unorthodox addition to literature about Cold War military intelligence and ASA.

The book is available in both paperback and eBook form at Amazon.com, as is its prequel, “Snow Mountain Misfits.”

Davis is a retired National Security Agency senior intelligence officer and linguist as well as an ASA veteran. He is the recipient of NSA’s second-highest award, the Meritorious Civilian Service Award, and is a longtime member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers and the American Legion.