Apparently, just before he enlisted in the Army in the mid-to-late 50s, my Dad helped a friend of his in college convert to Catholicism. In fact, my Dad’s dog tags (which I snagged last week) indicate Roman Catholicism.
By the time he returned from the Army, my Dad already was an agnostic. As a family, know so little about his time in military service that it’s entirely unclear why that was when he went from helping friends become Catholics to something else altogether.
It’s very quickly become something of an obsession, figuring out how to accumulate as much information as possible about that period of time. We know he was in the Army. We know he was stationed in Germany, apparently at one Bad Aibling Station where (we believe) he was listening to East German radio traffic and the like.
That’s about it. Or at least that’s all I know.
As condolences come in, suddenly we might have some access to material such as letters he wrote during that time. And today I discovered that the National Archives and Records Administration has an online process to guide you through generating an official request for a relative’s military records.
So the research, I guess, begins now.
Addendum: Interestingly, here is a description of someone else’s activities at Bad Aibling in the early 1970s. That’s later than my Dad was there, but I wonder how dissimilar his activities there would have been 10 to 15 years earlier.
From what he told me over the years, that description of what the soldiers did at Bad Aibling is pretty much what Dad did as well. He also learned Morse code, into which he used to translate our names.