As with Conclave, I have used numerous venues and locales I am familiar with and have traveled to, some of them quite small and largely unknown locations. For example, a major event in Chapter 17 occurs in the small town of Alling, a suburb of Munich. There really is such a town and a friend of mine lives there. The city of Porto in Portugal (Chapter 8) provides another venue and is, as described, a wonderful location on the Atlantic coast. Several of the former locations and bases of the US Army Europe (USAREUR) are also as described, or once were back in the Cold War era. Patrick Henry Village in Heidelberg was a major piece of Americana in West Germany for five decades, as was Army Headquarters at Campbell Barracks and the V Corps headquarters at the Creighton Abrams Building in Frankfurt.
In Berlin, the Berlin Documentation Center mentioned first in Chapter 5 actually exists, but not in the neighborhood described. And during this period the hotel at Tempelhof Airport existed as portrayed and was the usual accommodation for service members travelling to Berlin on the Army duty train that appears in Chapter 14. I rode the duty train in August 1973 and the trip was exactly as discussed in the narrative – plus I stayed at Templehof.
And if anyone ever gets the chance to stay at the Bayerischer Hof Hotel in Munich, where the annual Munich Security Conference is held, don’t miss that wonderful experience.
Lastly, the little post at Fischbach actually existed serving a purpose similar to that described in Chapters 22 and 23. Indeed, the soldiers who served there have a rather active web site where they share stories about their often tense existence. And, of course, many locations providing more mundane backdrops, such as McLean, Virginia, are also quite real and remain quite vibrant.