At the end of two months at Fort Dix, my orders came through to join the 338th Military Intelligence Service Battalion at Fort Meade in Maryland, the large, multipurpose Army base situated midway between Baltimore and Washington D.C. It was home to the Second U.S. Army Headquarters and quartered more than 20,000 soldiers on the post. 

My battalion was one of four that made up the 470th Military Intelligence Brigade. Each battalion was assigned to a particular intelligence function: signals intelligence, aerial exploitation, and two for prisoner interrogations.

When I arrived in the Spring of 1953, I was among hundreds of new soldiers sent to staff up the operation. It turned out that my unit were all guys who had been born somewhere else. They were originally from Poland, Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Many of them were Jewish but more of them were not. What we all had in common was we spoke Russian.