Thanks to your dad for his service! It's sad that he has dementia now, I know how devastating it can be to have relatives not recognize you anymore - but he's also lived a long and honourable life and we're all thankful for his service
I'm of a different generation, and my dad's military service was mostly watching radios and radars near that same stretch of Arctic ocean where your dad served convoys (he was a Soviet radio operator on the Kola Peninsula while in conscripted service during the cold war). Years later, around '92, my dad got us our first foreign-built PC, a great little Atari machine with 1.5mb of RAM. One of the games on it that he got was Silent Service II, and it was a favourite of ours to play together, back when I was around 8 years old. He was the captain, I was the watch officer. I got very good at ship recognition in that game
Years passed, my dad stopped liking video games at all much to my dismay, but I never forgot the good times. I mostly got into flight sims in the late 90s, which became my favourite genre, and hadn't played any navy-related games in a long time, until late 2004 when previews of Silent Hunter III caught my imagination - precisely because looking at them, I got this strong nostalgia for SSII and was suddenly really fascinated by the gorgeous detail of submarines that the game seemed to promise. When SHIII came out, it almost immediately became my favourite game. For all its flaws, it delivered exactly what I missed about Silent Service II - with the exception of having my dad play it with me. But on the social side, I did find this amazing community to share the joy with, so it's even made up for that somewhat
