V.V. (6) Argonne Experimental Facility

[jbor]

A quick check through some search engines reveals some interesting info. 
which I wasn't expecting on this. Apologies to millison and monroe.

The Argonne Experimental Facility actually seems to be the acronym for a
(series of?) nuclear reactor(s) built in the U.S. from the 1950s. There is a
page here about the dismantling of one such facility built in Idaho in 1952:

http://www.anl.gov/OPA/frontiers96/unisci.html

Following the links back to the Argonne National Lab, "one of the U.S. Dept
of Energy's largest resource centres", comes up with all sorts of
interesting post-WWII nuclear connections:

http://www.anl.gov/OPA/frontiers96/unisci.html

And stuff about the U.S. Navy's first nuclear submarine, the U.S.S.
Nautilus, launched in 1954:

http://www.anl.gov/OPA/history/fifties.html

The references in the text to Argonne (which *is* a French region, and there
was a battle of Meuse-Argonne in WWI in which American airmen would
conceivably have been involved) and the field hospital where strange
experiments in rebuilding the human body were carried out certainly *seems
to* lend itself to the title, much more so than American (or Allied)
Expeditionary Force, or any other of a dozen or so vaguely plausible
acronyms listed here:

http://www.acronymfinder.com/af-query.asp?String=exact&Acronym=aef&Find=Find

But I guess I should have checked it out properly first. The coincidence, if
that's all it is (an in-joke? a clue?), certainly gives one pause for
thought about Charles Hollander's interpretative strategies, however, even
if only momentarily.

best