Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History

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Authors: Andrew Carroll
Tags: United States, General, History, Travel
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circumstances.
    A guard at the main gate asks me why I’m here.
    “I’m going to the museum,” I say. This is true. I’m curious to see if they have any exhibits about remote viewing. The guard notices my camera in the front seat.
    “No pictures, okay?”
    “It’s for the museum,” I say. This is mostly true.
    Photography isn’t exactly encouraged on any military base, but there’s particular reason for sensitivity here: Fort Meade is home to the NSA—the National Security Agency or, as Washington insiders joke, “No Such Agency” because its cryptological operations are so secretive. I place the camera inside my backpack, and after the guard completes a security check of my car, he tells me where to go. I follow his directions to the letter, and as much as I’d hoped to catch a glimpse of Buildings 2650 and 2651 along the way, there’s no sign of them.
    Inside the museum, I start with the Meade Room, which features a plaster bust, portrait, and photographs of the general, along with numerous pictures of his beloved but battered horse Old Baldy. During the First Battle of Bull Run an artillery fragment bloodied Old Baldy’s nose; at Antietam his neck was gashed; a bullet ripped into his stomach at Gettysburg; and at Petersburg he got punched in the ribs by another shell, prompting Meade to retire him for the duration of the war. Old Baldy made his last ceremonial appearance as the “riderless horse” at Meade’s own funeral, and he outlived his owner by ten years. Euthanized and buried, Old Baldy was later disinterred and decapitated so a taxidermist could mount his head for public display.
    There’s nothing in the museum about remote viewing anywhere. Machine guns, howitzers, and captured enemy uniforms, including a German
Pickelhaube
helmet with the little spiky thing on top, fill the glass cases, and the exhibit culminates with the prized “big toys,” as one docent calls them, in the last room—three full-sized tanks, the Mark VIII Liberty, the M3-A1, and a Renault FT-17. With such impressive weaponry on display, I suppose a bunch of guys sitting behind a desk squeezing their brows to envision Soviet sub bases overseas wouldn’t fit in.
    Bob Johnson, the museum’s director, has agreed to meet with me, and he’s familiar with the remote-viewing program.
    “Do you know where Buildings 2560 and 2561 are?” I ask.
    “I’m pretty sure they’ve been torn down,” he says. “They were over near Kimbrough, the hospital. Those are all empty fields now.” I have a map of the base, and he indicates where he thinks they would have been.
    Even broaching the subject makes me feel a little silly, and I emphasize to Bob that my overall trip is a serious enterprise. But researching Fort Meade’s psychic warriors did open up a whole category of historic sites that are unmarked for reasons of national security. Many a hair-raising moment has occurred in these tourist-unfriendly places—be they military bases, radar installations, nuclear-missile silos, or “undisclosed locations” where senior government officials are secreted away in public emergencies—and the relevant stories are barricaded behind steel-reinforced walls and razor-topped electric fences guarded by armed sentries. Stopping by to photograph them isn’t a question of bad manners, like visiting a private home uninvited. It’s grounds for arrest.
    But as with private homes, for every great story that remains hidden for now, new ones crop up over time. Before leaving Fort Meade, I show Bob a memoir I’ve brought along by a former World War II soldier who did basic training here and then joined the 603rd Camouflage Battalion. Their main assignment, something of a ghost story in itself, was classified for decades. “The 603rd was one of four noncombat units that were part of a phantom division called the Twenty-third Headquarters Special Troops,” the seventy-eight-year-old veteran, William Ralph Blass, reminisced.
    Our identity was kept

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