Veteran Uncle

I had an uncle who was the worry of all moms and dads out there who had a daughter interested in that young man out of high school.
 

He rode a motorcycle too fast.
 

He flew planes too crazily.
 

He drank too much.
 

He smoked too much.

He cussed way too much.

But he was a six foot three man when men were only five foot ten.
 

He was lean and muscular and ruggedly handsome.
 

He was a blond, blue-eyed, reckless and carefree son of a gun who caught the eye of my dad's younger sister, and there was no stopping those two once they fell in love.
 

Who knew, the family said, that our young girl would take up with a boy like that.
 

They got married and had babies. He became an auto mechanic like my dad. He bought a piece of land with a house and a yard and a low cement building that used to be a piggery. In that building, he set himself up in business, fixing cars and trucks and farmers' tractors.
 

But his great love was airplanes, those little single-engine prop planes that could do tricks under his skillful hands.
 

He took my dad up to show him what the earth looked like upside-down and sideways, and what it felt like to swoop through the sky doing barrel-rolls, steep dives, and even worse plummets to earth before pulling the nose up and soaring again.
 

When World War II hit, my uncle became a pilot in the air force, a darned good one because he was a master of the cockpit.
 

But more importantly, he switched to being a tail gunner, a horrible job because you almost never came out of that alive.
 

A tail gunner's job was the most hazardous of all Air Force men, because sitting behind the guns back in the tail, you were the first one killed by enemy fire from enemy planes chasing you through the sky.
 

My uncle drew on a deep and everlasting hatred for the enemy and all the horrors they forced on the innocent world, to be able to do what he did all those years as a tail gunner in the Canadian Air Force.
 

I sat in a corner of our kitchen when I was a little girl, and listened to him talk, when asked, about what the war was like for him. He wasn't one to say much about it, but when he did, it was an eye-opener.
 

I heard him talk about it only three times in my young years, and it was always the same words, almost said with the same passion in his voice.
 

His face would flush, his blue eyes blazed, and the cigarette in his hand would tremble. This big man would shake when he relived that war.
 

He said he wanted to kill every d___ one of those sons of b_____s from the tail of whatever plane he was in, and he did.
 

He killed so many enemies that he was needed desperately to stay on as a tail gunner for far longer than an airman should have had to.
 

Because he was a spitfire of a man, he was fearless in his job in the war. His aim behind a machine gun was deadly, and he took great pleasure in blowing up planes and sending the enemy to their graves, because he had to.
 

But he was shot down more than once.
 

He was injured more than once, but he healed and went back up again and again to kill.
 

He ended up on a beach somewhere, scrambling like an animal to dig himself a hole to escape the bullets of the enemy strafing the soldiers on the sand, from the safety of their planes in the sky.
 

My uncle's description of this was was one of sheer terror.
 

“You never saw a man dig a hole as fast as we did. I thought my chest would explode, I was so d___ scared. We were down on our knees digging like dogs with our bare hands. They kept killing everyone around me, and I'm so d____ big I had to dig a hole twice as deep to get down.”
 

He tried to laugh in the telling of this, but he couldn't. It was so fresh in his memory.
 

He just suddenly clammed up and went still. And he smoked. Then he stood up and left the house. Alone.
 

The room went silent. I sat alone in the corner on a stool and watched the silence of my dad and my brothers looking at each other and saying nothing.