When the Rounds Were Ammo

The soldiers arrived in the dead of night, packed shoulder to shoulder in trucks with canvas walls that obscured the route to a secret destination. They were the first World War II recruits for a new covert operation called the Office of Strategic Services, a long, vague name that hid what the soldiers would become: spies, saboteurs, commandos and undercover agents.

The troops were unloaded at a large, bland tent city.

“It was six of us to a tent with a potbelly stove in the middle,” said the O.S.S. veteran Caesar Civitella, describing the night in 1943. “We had been sworn to complete secrecy. They told us to go to sleep, so we went to sleep.”

When the soldiers emerged from their tents in the morning, they turned to glimpse a palace beside the campsite, an immense Mediterranean-inspired clubhouse overlooking a Shangri-La — the rolling hills and golf holes of Congressional Country Club, site of this week’s 111th United States Open.

During World War II, the club’s more than 400 acres about 12 miles outside Washington had been leased to the United States government to serve as the training ground for America’s first intelligence agency, the forerunner to the C.I.A. and American Special Forces.

“We came out of the tent and thought, ‘Hey, country club living,’ ” Civitella said. “But we were wrong; it was no country club life.”

In fact, another O.S.S. veteran, Alex MacDonald, later called the training at Congressional “malice in wonderland.”

The practice range became a rifle range, and bunkers were used for grenade practice. The dense wooded areas were perfect for nighttime commando exercises, and an obstacle course, set with booby traps, stretched across the first and second holes. Hand-to-hand combat was taught next to a mock fuselage from which paratroopers learned to jump. Men crawled on their bellies across fairways sprayed with live machine gun fire, and the greens made excellent targets for mortar practice. So did the caddie shack and every rain shelter on the course.

“We literally just blew the place up,” said Al Johnson, who, like most of the living O.S.S. veterans — there are about 200 — is in his late 80s.

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