Locating people in general, I'm not an expert at.
But if it's someone in the military, I'm your guy, hands down.
You can talk to me (even though I am newbie as hell) in PM or email if you'd like, but here's some general thoughts I have:
If (s)he joined the Marines, just give me a name. The Outlook global address list on USMC.MIL domain workstations lists everyone in the Corps with an email account. I can track down base, unit, phone number, and quite possibly even the barracks where a Marine lives within about 5 minutes of getting the name.
Yeah, I'm scary sometimes.
As far as any other branch of service, use army.mil, af.mil, or navy.mil websites. Use the search function to look for "worldwide locator". That will generally give you either an official address or phone number where you can call or write to ask for infor about your friends whereabouts and contact info. Usually, they'll only give you the current mailing address of someone who's on active duty.
Alternately, if you know someone military, they can usually call up the locator and get more than just an address. Better still, if you know what base the person is at, you can go to the base website (goodfellow.af.mil for Goodfellow AFB TX, sill.army.mil, for FT. Sill, OK, etc) and use the main switchboard/base operator number to call the base locator. 99% of the time base locator will cough up a unit & phone number for ya.
Again, I'm more than willing to help, so long as this is as innocuous as it seems.
Speaking of which, I really hope none of you bastards reading this are little al Qaeda fuckers...
