I went back to visit it about 20 years later when I was back in that area in a rented car, and decided to pay a visit. The base was not in use, the main gate was gone, and there was just one of those barrier arms across that road that was stuck in an upright position, so...I just drove onto the old base.
It was deserted, but largely looked like it had when I left it. I was even able to go to our old family quarters and go inside the house, the door was open and the front yard was dug up.
It was neat.
Then, when I went to another part of the base where a gigantic parabola about 100 feet across that they used to bounce military messages to the other side off the moon used to be, it was gone. I was about to go down and check out the place on the base my Boy Scout Troop used to camp at, but I noticed a camera on a pole pointed right at me, and decided I had seen enough, and left.
Some years after that, when Google Earth became a thing, my brother and I would go on Google Earth and look up all the places we had lived, and this old Naval communication station in Maryland was one of them. It was fun, we could see our old house and the fields near the parabola we use to play games at, though that giant dish was gone. At the lower right corner, I could even see the swampy area I had gone swimming in a nasty creek and got leeches on me!
What was odd though, that even though there were many things that had not changed on the base since we lived there (you could even see the shadow from the large water tower at about the 10 O'Clock position of the yellow push pin) where the fields were we used to play in near Ammon Drive near the bottom, there was now what looked like a runway. We looked at it and didn't think it was a real runway with taxiways, it was a bit of a puzzle. That part of the base, the whole lower half of the image had been built up.
When you look at the image I posted above, you can still see the long road straight road coming into the upper left corner of the image diagonally which is lined by trees, leading to where the main gate was, but that little barrier arm was gone.
There was a sign that said "DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY COUNTERTERRORISM UNIT" and as I drove down that long straight road, there was now a huge glass and concrete structures that stretched across the road.
I had the very real feeling that, like Frodo going on the road into Mordor, there were a lot of lidless, sleepless eyes, an automated system that had run my plate number, with my personal information being displayed on many screens!
As I drove up the the gate which looked like extremely thick bulletproof glass, a guard came over and looked at me expectantly. I stammered something like "Er, I used to live on this base, and was driving by to visit it, but...I guess that isn't going to happen now?" He didn't say a word, but nodded his head side to side slowly in the negative, and when I asked if I could turn around, he pointed to how I could do it, and I did.
When I got home, I went on Google Earth, and when I looked at the satellite image, it was an image taken BEFORE the image above. Those old structures like the fields we played in and the old parabola antenna were there.
I then figured out that what we thought might have been an airstrip, was more likely a defensive driving training course where agents train how to handle various traffic elements if there were hostiles attacking.
At the time after I saw the image above, Google must have been handed an image by the government and told to display that old image instead. I just went back and looked at it now, and it seems like a more current picture, so someone must have decided it wasn't worth the effort to conceal what was going on there anymore.