It was a spot where Soviet troops were certain to attack if there was a conflict. And while that may sound like a very stressful place to serve, Carlson said it was anything but that.

“We had no fighting or anything like that,” he said. “We just had the periodic military drills.”

“I tell people it was like being on vacation, with the Army supplying the vacation,” he added.

Carlson, who now lives at Friendship Haven in Fort Dodge, drove a Jeep to complete various military tasks. He used his time off to tour West Germany, Holland and Belgium.

He grew up on his family’s 100 acre farm south of Otho. He said the farm was “kind of squished between” the Des Moines River and a highway. The family raised corn, soybeans and pigs.

“Pigs is what we made our money on,” he said

Carlson graduated from Fort Dodge Senior High School and Fort Dodge Junior College.

He was drafted into the Army in 1956 and was sent to Fort Hood in Texas for basic training. After basic training, he trained as a telegrapher.

With all of his training finally completed, he joined a large group of other soldiers which was being sent to West Germany as a single combat command.

The troops were sent to Europe in a slow, plodding ship.

Carlson recalled that as his ship left New York harbor, the passenger liner Queen Elizabeth was steaming into the port. Later, the Queen Elizabeth passed his ship in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean on its return trip to Britain.

Upon reaching West Germany, Carlson was assigned to the 66th Armored Field Artillery. He said the unit had 105 mm howitizers mounted on armored vehicles.

“I only saw them fire once,” he said. “That was when we were doing a demonstration for the NATO units.”

He recalled that the unit didn’t need a telegrapher, so he was assigned to drive a Jeep. His regular Jeep was left over from World War II, and had a big piece of steel welded to the front bumper that was designed to cut the trip wires of booby traps.

The Jeep, he said, was fun to drive.

Carlson drove his Jeep on a variety of tasks, including transporting supplies, food, laundry and even other soldiers who had been arrested by the Military Police.

“I did a lot of freelance work,” he said.

One summer, he spent a lot of time driving an archaeologist around as he searched for ancient Roman ruins in the mountains around Friedberg, which was the closest city to where his unit was based.

His time off was spent touring West Germany and other European countries.

The damage caused by World War II was being rapidly repaired by the time Carlson got to West Germany.

“You could see the bombed places, but they had rebuilt so much that you really had to look for the damaged areas,” he said. “They had rebuilt a great deal.”

Most of what he saw was very scenic.

“I saw many castles up and down the Rhine River,” Carlson said.

A highlight was visiting Neuschwanstein Castle, a very elaborate structure in far southern Germany. Carlson said he visited it in the winter and went there in a sleigh pulled by horses.

When it was time to return to the United States, Carlson took another slow boat across the Atlantic Ocean. He recalled that when the ship neared the United States, Hurricane Jenny was churning up the east coast, so the ship went back out to sea to avoid the storm.

As the ship finally headed into shore, it was directed back out to sea on a medical mission.

Carlson said at that time the Navy had a line of ships in the Atlantic Ocean on radar duty to provide advance warning of any Soviet ships or aircraft heading toward the United States. He said a sailor on one of those ships had appendicitis, but there was no doctor on board to take care of him. Carlson’s ship had a doctor, so it was sent to pick up the ailing sailor.

Carlson’s ship finally came into the Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York. He then took a train to Fort Sheridan in Illinois. He was discharged from the Army there in 1958.

He came back to the farm near Otho and farmed for about 50 years. He added pumpkins, gourds and squash to the farm products. Carving and painting gourds so that they transformed into artistic masks became his hobby.

The farm was sold to a neighbor when Carlson moved into Friendship Haven.