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this stuff up. It has to happen to you in real life, and then you pinch yourself to make sure you don't wake up in your own bed outside of Pittsburgh on a winter morning. | stayed in Rome for three years from the months before the landing at Normandy in 1944, when the German front lines were still only a few miles south of Rome and our boys were slugging their way up the slopes of Monte Casino, to early 1947, when | was shipped back home and my wife and | threw everything we had into the trunk of a used Chevy convertible and drove across the farmland state routes of peace time America from Pennsylvania to Kansas. I'd been away five years. But now | was home! Driving top-down across Missouri to an assignment that was considered a plum for any young officer on his way up the army ladder: Military Intelligence School, only one step away from Strategic Intelligence, the army's version of the lvy League; | was moving up in the world. And what was |? Just a draftee out of Pennsylvania who was chosen for Officer Candidate School, and now fresh from a wartime intelligence command in Allied occupied Europe and ready to begin my new career in Army Intelligence. Having been in Africa and Europe for so many years, | was anxious to see America again. By this time its people were not stooping under the weight of the depression nor in factories nor in uniform sweating out a desperate war across two oceans. This was an America victory, and you could see it as you drove through the small towns of southern Ohio and Illinois and then across the Mississippi. We didn't stop overnight to see St. Louis or even to linger on the Kansas side of the river. | was so excited to be a career officer that we didn't stop driving until we pulled straight into Fort Riley and set up an apartment in nearby Junction City, where we'd live while they got our house ready on the base. For most of the next few weeks, my wife and | got used to living in America again on a peacetime army base. We had lived in Rome after the war while | was still trying to help pacify the city and fend off the Communist attempts to take over the government. It was as if we were still fighting a war because each day had brought renewed challenges from either the Communists or the organized crime families who had tried to infiltrate their way back into the civilian government. My life was also in danger each day from the different cadres of terrorists in the city, each group with its own agenda. So in contrast to Italy, Fort Riley was like the beginning of a vacation. courses in career training. | knew how to be an intelligence officer and, in fact, had been trained by the British MI 19, the premier wartime intelligence network in the world. My training had been so thorough that even though we were up against crack Soviet NKV Dunits operating within Rome, we were able to out think them and actually destroy them. Prior to the war, the United States really didn't have a peacetime intelligence service, which is why they quickly formed the OSS when war broke out. But the Army Intelligence units and the OSS didn't operate together for most of the war because communication lines were faulty and we never really trusted the OSS agenda. Now with the war over and Army Intelligence having come into its own, | was part of a whole new cadre of career intelligence officers who would keep watch on Soviet activities. The Soviets had become our new old enemies. In intelligence school during those first months we reviewed not only the rudiments of good intelligence gathering - interrogation of enemy prisoners, analysis of raw intelligence data, and the like - but we learned the basics of administration and how to run a wartime intelligence unit called the aggressor force. None of us realized during those early days how quickly our newly acquired skills would be tested nor where our enemies would choose to fight. But those were confident days as the weather turned warmer on the plains and the days grew long with the coming of summer. Before the war broke out and when | was in high school back in California, Pennsylvania, my hometown, | was something of a bowler. It was a sport | wanted to get back to when the war ended, so when | got to Fort Riley, one of the first places | looked up was the bowling alley on the base, which had been built in one of the former stables. Fort Riley was a former cavalry base, the home of Cutter's 7th Cavalry, and still had a polo field after the war. | started practicing my bowling again and was soon rolling enough strikes that the enlisted men who bowled there began talking to me about my game. Before too many months had passed, M. Sgt. Bill Brown - the men called him "Brownie" - stopped me when | was changing out of my bowling shoes and said he wanted to talk. "Major, sir," he began, more than a little embarrassed to address an officer out of uniform and not on any official army business. He couldn't possibly have realized that | was a draftee just like him and had spent the first few months in the service taking orders from corporals in boot camp. "The men at the post want to start up a bowling league, sir, have teams to bowl against and maybe come up with a team to represent the base, " he began. "So we've been watching you bowl on Saturdays. " "So what am | doing wrong?" | asked. | figured at first maybe this sergeant was going to give me a tip or two and wanted to establish some authority. OK, I'll take a tip from anybody. But that's not what he asked. 12 And | was back in school again. This time, however, | was taking "Sergeant?" | asked.