Photo by Graham Cullen Ellwood Wineholt, the post adjutant at American Legion Steadman-Keenan Post 96 in Brunswick, discusses his time in the Army.

At the time, the quartermaster who gave it to Wineholt said that even though he was retiring, he wasn't really going to be out of the Army until he was buried.

Now Wineholt said he plans to be buried in uniform.

"I hope I look nice," he said.

The post adjutant at American Legion Steadman-Keenan Post 96 in Brunswick , Wineholt was drafted into the Army in 1950.

"Uncle Sam told me to (join)," he said. "I didn't regret it."

Wineholt said that when he started in the Army, he wasn't enchanted with it.

"I hated the Army -- everything you did, it was either marching or you had to stand out in the rain."

After a while, he realized the Army gave him the opportunity to do things he'd never done before.

Originally trained to work in communications, he was transferred to a medical corps unit and deployed to Germany.

At that point, the post-World War II reconstruction was largely over, he said.

It was "like nothing ever happened," Wineholt said. "I was surprised."

He took advantage of his leave time to travel around Europe, visiting places he'd heard of growing up -- the Champs-Elys?es and Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Black Forest and the spas of Bad Kissingen in Germany, and many castles.

"I wasn't like the other soldiers," he said. "They were more interested in carousing. I couldn't see it."

Despite speaking a little German and no French or Flemish, he also traveled to Belgium.

A friend of his in Brunswick , Ethel Strailman, had asked him to go there and find Martha "Josie" Solibrex. She had been a washergirl when the 8th Air Force, including Strailman's husband, Donald, was stationed there.

With only a town name and the girl's name on a piece of paper, Wineholt said he managed to find the girl. She fed him dinner and showed him photos from the 8th Air Force's time in Belgium.

Solibrex wanted to come to the U.S. and be a concert pianist, he said. He put her in contact with Ethel Strailman, but they ended up losing contact with each other again.

Wineholt's term in the Army ended after he came back from Germany, but a friend persuaded him to join the Army Reserve.

His friend told him the reserve was a laid-back affair, where one could get paid, but people didn't even know what ranks everyone else in the room held.

For Wineholt, it became more, as over the next 30 years, he took postings at Fort Pickett, Fort Dix and Fort Benjamin Harrison, among others.

"In a roundabout way, they make you so disenchanted and so ornery ... when you look back on it, it was fun," he said.