My father could handle every situation — except one

My father was a career Air Force pilot who was stubbornly independent, hard-working and intense, characteristics that marked survivors of world war and the Great Depression.

He could handle just about anything that was thrown his way with aplomb, if not outright nonchalance.

Nothing was a big deal to him so he rarely talked about his experiences. To this day I don't know why he won two Distinguished Flying Crosses and a long list of other medals.

He simply handled difficult situations and led men and flew planes and that was that; it was his job.

It was only later in life that we realized there was finally something he couldn't handle, and this fact was both surprising and baffling to him. It wasn't until the funeral that it all came clear to me.

Until then, there seemed to be nothing he couldn't deal with. He coped with the nightly air raids in Vietnam — in fact, slept through them. In the beginning of his year-long tour, he and the other pilots would run to a bunker to wait out the attacks, but he soon reasoned that he would never get any sleep this way, so he remained in his cot and slept through the shellings. With a few weeks left in his tour, he decided to return to the shelter — "I thought that it would be a real shame to get killed just before I was to leave," he wrote in his journal.

He could handle being shot at while flying 100 feet above the jungle. It was a strange thing to see men on the ground aiming at his plane, he said, but he wasn't much bothered by it. He and the other pilots painted targets on the bottom of their planes for the enemy, whom they considered to be poor marksmen.

He could handle having a cannon shell blast through the floor of the cockpit and exit the ceiling. The thing that really annoyed him was the horrific noise it made.

He could handle emergencies. Early in his military career, he flew bombers tasked to drop the atomic bomb. He practiced dropping dummy A-bombs over the Pacific, banking sharply after each "drop" to avoid the bomb blast. One afternoon he and the rest of the crew felt a terrific shudder after performing this maneuver. A small jet was dispatched to check the exterior of the plane and reported that the rudder – the vertical flap on the back of the tail that turns the plane – had blown off, and the elevator was damaged and barely hanging on. The crew was told they could parachute. They said, no, thanks. They dumped their fuel and made an emergency landing with fire trucks lined up alongside the runway, then posed for photos with the bomber afterward.