Archive for April, 2008 Page 3 of 9
Really, this has become one of the most brutal, and most exhausting, things I’ve ever inflicted upon myself. Sleep is intermittent because I wake up coughing throughout the night. I can’t converse with anyone for very long lest I trigger a coughing fit. Sometimes these fits feel remarkably like drowning.
I have suffered none of the cravings one might expect from an addiction to nicotine, only what I call the “gap psychology” of those moments that used to be filled with a cigarette (at the bus stop in the morning, for example). Mostly and in the main it’s just the coughing, the persistent coughing. The ever-present coughing punctuated by the waiting for it to be triggered all over again.
Last month, I pointed out the vandalism conducted by the film crew shooting Twilight in the Portland area. At the beginning of April it was still there, and still is there today.
When brought to the attention of the Office of Film and Video, it was claimed by Michael Fine that the matter would be addressed. It still has not been addressed.
And so now I offer up this picture of the vandal himself, in the midst of the act of vandalism. It is one of four such pictures which I originally did not publish because, frankly, they are not very good pictures.
But perhaps the City is having trouble determining just who was responsible. Now, they have his picture. As does everyone else. Which makes it your move, Office of Film and Video.
The United States Army Security Agency (ASA) was, from 1945 through 1976, the United States Army’s electronic intelligence branch. Its motto was “Vigilant Always.” The Agency was the successor to a number of Army signals intelligence operations dating back to World War I. As well as intelligence gathering, it also had responsibility for the security of Army communications and for electronic countermeasures operations. …
Composed primarily of soldiers with the very highest scores on Army intelligence tests, the ASA was tasked with monitoring and interpreting military communications of the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, and their allies and client states around the world. ASA was directly subordinate to the National Security Agency and all field stations had NSA tech reps on site.
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ASA military occupational specialties (MOSs) included linguists, morse code intercept operators, non-morse (teletype and voice) intercept operators, communications security specialists, direction-finding equipment operators, cryptographers, communications traffic analysts, and electronic maintenance technicians and a 42 man Special Operations Detachment to conduct clandestine combat operations, among others. ASA had its own separate training facilities, MP corps, communication centers and chain of command.
These occupations, which required top secret clearance, were essential to U.S. Cold War efforts. ASA units operated in shifts, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. ASA troops were not allowed to discuss their operations with outsiders — in fact, they could not talk among themselves about their duties unless they were in a secure location. Even today, decades after they served, some of the missions still cannot be discussed. Owing to the sensitivity of the information with which they worked, ASA soldiers were subject to travel restrictions during and long after their time in service. The activities of the U.S. Army Security Agency have only recently been partially declassified.
Apparently, just before he enlisted in the Army in the mid-to-late 50s, my Dad helped a friend of his in college convert to Catholicism. In fact, my Dad’s dog tags (which I snagged last week) indicate Roman Catholicism.
By the time he returned from the Army, my Dad already was an agnostic. As a family, know so little about his time in military service that it’s entirely unclear why that was when he went from helping friends become Catholics to something else altogether.
It’s very quickly become something of an obsession, figuring out how to accumulate as much information as possible about that period of time. We know he was in the Army. We know he was stationed in Germany, apparently at one Bad Aibling Station where (we believe) he was listening to East German radio traffic and the like.
That’s about it. Or at least that’s all I know.
As condolences come in, suddenly we might have some access to material such as letters he wrote during that time. And today I discovered that the National Archives and Records Administration has an online process to guide you through generating an official request for a relative’s military records.
So the research, I guess, begins now.
Addendum: Interestingly, here is a description of someone else’s activities at Bad Aibling in the early 1970s. That’s later than my Dad was there, but I wonder how dissimilar his activities there would have been 10 to 15 years earlier.
Over at a blog called “Terrance this is stupid stuff”, they demonstrate that what they mean by the “stupid stuff” is the stuff they themselves post. In this case, unthinkingly touting Ben Stein’s pro-creationism not-umentary without regard to the various and many problems with the film, all of which already have been exhaustively documented.