The mission of USAMRIID is medical defense. The Potomac bends through oak-blanketed mountains at Harpers Ferry and enters farmland, and eventually passes near Reston, Virginia, a town outside the Washington Beltway where farms give way to business parks, and where in the eighties office buildings accreted like crystals. Fort Detrick, the envelope of USAMRIID, sits in rolling country on the eastern slope of the Appalachian Mountains, in the drainage of the Potomac River. Vent stacks on its roof discharge filtered exhaust air from sealed biological laboratories inside the building. Or they call the place RIID, as in getting rid of something. Military people call the structure the Institute, or they call it by its acronym, USAMRIID, drawling it as You Sam Rid. The main building of the United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases is an essentially windowless concrete block that covers several acres at Fort Detrick, an Army base in Frederick, Maryland, fifteen miles east of Antietam.
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