Not at all unusual especially if the old man has experience in signals/comms tech and sigint, analogue RF communications and other such things. Especially as our generation is a bit less willing to do that sort of stuff with the attitude “my country, right or wrong”.
it goes on in Blighty too on a more subtle scale, more with mixed military/civillian projects.
Even in my 30s during my public service there was an interesting experience when I went to an optician to try out some new contact lenses, I worked for DEFRA but the opticians had somehow written this down as DERA (now QinetiQ).
This Indian optician was really curious about what it was like being brown skinned and in the Services, and it took a lot to try and to convince her I was not going off back to Afghan, I had never been there anyway and worked for a civillian public service organisation. (it was a bit like being quizzed by your mum for something you may or may not have done).
I also said with genuine surprise -are they really going to let in someone the other side of 30, who is short sighted to the point he cannot see his hand in front of his face without contact lenses or specs, into HM Forces? She rather sheepishly said “OK, I understand you might not want to talk about these things”, but apparently I was clearly still eligible for service if I had certain skills.
At my work this old boy (who has difficulty with speech and mobility but is still fit enough to wander the entire site and occasionally attempt escape) constantly watching me working on the telephone cables (to the point I had to raise an alert as he was getting underneath my ladder and putting all of us in danger). This sort of thing isn’t unusual where I work, but he clearly seemed to know what I was doing, and took particular interest in the use of my 340 test set to monitor line conditions (including whatever audio was on the circuits). I asked the matron later – “did this old boy work for the Post Office?” She said “yes, he did, and then was sent by the Government to a foreign country where he did various sigint tasks”. She also had asked both of us how we worked out which wires went to each block terminal, and in spite of his health could still remember the “blue, orange, green, brown, slate” and “white, red, black, yellow, violet” of the pair colours.
it would be easy for the American soldier to act like a doddery old American left over from the Empire days or WW II era (and be overlooked), as who suspects an old man?
