 Well, my name is Alan Nuns, but better known by everybody in my life as Barney, and Barney Google was, I guess, one of the songs in those days, so that's what originated. So I was born in Cumberland, which is a coal mining town on Vancouver Island, and my dad was in charge of the railway there, and I used to hang around on weekends with the dad when they were still working on Sundays and Saturdays, and I would, you know, go out on the train and all the crews on the trains knew me as a kid growing up, so I had a good life there, and when the war came along, I took advantage of going overseas, and Cumberland was a coal mining town, as I mentioned earlier, and you know, the people were of all those town, black people, white people of every kind, every school in that town, those days. The normal day wasn't very good, I never didn't like high school very much, but as I say, I was a leader, we were being treated like children, so we decided to go out and strike all the pulleys, and we, like it was ordered, I was one of the instigators of it, I guess, and I remember after we got home that night, my dad came roaring to my house and to our house and said, what the hell have you been doing, and I said, well, I was doing nothing very much, I just had a little fun at school, so we ended up having a, he said, well you got a report to me to the people that run the city hall, in the city hall, I have a meeting, he says, and you're you're called to it, so I said, well I haven't done anything, and I just told him what it was, and he says, well the school board has asked that you come, I couldn't know what it was all about, so anyway we went in and they had this meeting, and they talked to me about it, and a couple of other people as well, and the next thing I know I was suspended from school for five days, I couldn't believe it, so I didn't, to worry too much about it, because I went down to the local farm, local hardware store, and I picked spices over the whole three days, or four days that I was off, but it was a ridiculous thing, and it could have been solved without any problems, but they treated us like kids, and after that they learned a lesson, I guess they didn't realize what they were doing, that we were old enough to look after ourselves and go up to school, and and be active without any interfering with the younger children, so that's my story so far there. Troublemaker, we had this problem at the school, but that was finally settled, and then I went through high school, of course, after that, and when I graduated the war had come along, and I had a choice of going to the Air Force, or the Navy, or whatever, and I, you know, I wasn't going to be told where to go, I wanted to go where I wanted, and so I joined the Air Force, and I went to Vancouver Technical School for about six months, and was taught to do how, to do code, and radio equipment, and that kind of stuff, and it turns out when the war was on, all the code we learned, never had to use it, because it was all more modern by the time we got finished. When the war came along, they were short of people working in the fire department, so I immediately joined the fire department, even though I was a youngster, and they were accepting us to go in and help, so whenever the fire whistle blew, usually at night when you're asleep, and you'd have to get up and run to the fire hall, and my dad would laugh at me after the first time, because we had to go to a sparm about five miles out of town, and it was the middle of winter, and we were layering on top of the hoses on the fire truck, trying to, when we got to the farm yard where the fire was, we stepped out, and I immediately got into a nice pack, and I went down to water up to my waist, which is something, then I got home that night, my dad was sitting there laughing at me, he says, I'll teach you to go when the fire whistle blows, you go later, and Cumberland was a great town, and we, you know, the kids of every, we had Japanese, of course, were all there for the time that they were allowed to, and then they were shipped out of Vancouver, and I remember going down to the, down to the station where they took them on the train and shipped them by boat. It was a terrible way they had, it was handled, and a lot of them did very well after that, someone went to Toronto, and someone went different places back east, and the ones in Toronto, two or three of them, became doctors, amazing how they survived, and they got along like that, and after the war, they were great, and then I, I haven't ever seen any of them again, they shipped off, and as I say, to different cities across Canada, where they've had their lives, so. Well, I went to school with all these kids down, and we, I remember going down there for, we enjoyed the Air Force, and having, see them go off on the train, but, you know, taking them, and you know, they were kids, they were great kids, they just didn't understand what we were going, a lot of them were young, and, but they all ended up, most of them, I have heard of, later, all ended up pretty good jobs, they got, a couple of them were doctors, went to Toronto, and they became doctors, I know they're down there now, but, you didn't know in those days, and the way, the way the government handled it, it was terrible, but, you know, that's politics in those days, but occasionally I've run into one or two of them, because the Chinese and the Japanese are, we have, they have associations here and now that we all sometimes get together with them, particularly the Hong Kong veterans who see them, some of them feel they're left. When the war came along, of course, I had the choice of deciding where I wanted to go, I could go in the Army or the Air Force or the Navy, and I wasn't happy about being on ships, and I thought, well, I'll go to the Air Force, so I became a wireless operator and a wireless mechanic, and during the war, of course, we found out that they were supposed to have, our planes were supposed to be all loaded with East Indians to unload the supplies that we were carrying, and they never showed up at our airport, they were busy fighting the floor, fighting the war below, I guess, and so we ended up, some of us became kickers, which was never known in the Air Force before. Our job was to tie a rope around our waist, and we flew with the door open, and you kicked the supplies out if we were parachuting stuff, it was supply and parachutes were on, they were on, patched the parachutes, or if we could land, we landed it on a load of stuff, so we became kickers and we got extra pay for all this, but it doesn't even exist today, you know, they have regular people that do this and look, unload all the planes, and as I mentioned earlier, I think we had a rope tied around our waist and flew the door out, and you got your feet up like this and you kicked, stuff was either parachuted out or went that way, if we could land, we landed, you know, depending. So we got extra pay for that, of course, and that went on, of course, we were stationed in England, and then we went from England to, we knew we were going to a tropical place because we were given tropical shots, and we were then ordered, there was two, seven aircraft taking us, and we were told, we were there to get on the planes, and we're taking off with three other fellows and told to go back to London for the weekend and come back on Monday, and out of those planes that were there, one of them was shot down with a full load of our guys in it. We never did it here until after the war or where they found them, in summer in Germany, but why they were there, we don't know. In Germany, you know, our planes were supposed to both to fly south of, go around by Spain in that way, but somehow they got lost and flew over Germany, and that's, as I say, where it was found, they were found. It was an interesting life, and Burma then, we went trained in Northern, Northern India, so we had to learn which squadron we were going to be attached to, so we did a lot of night flying and that kind of stuff, and I was picked to go to 436 squadron, so there was two squadrons all together, 435 and 436, and then in the war, we ended up being about 500 miles apart, so we never saw one another very often, and India was very interesting, and we trained, as I say, in Northern India, and then we were shipped off to Burma. When we were, we flew there, I was with the first group that flying there, and we landed on what was to be our airport, when we got there, there was nothing, it was just an empty field, and so we had to unload all our supplies, and we took us about three days, four days to set up tents, and we just did anything, everybody, even this commanding officer, and everybody was working, so I have some photographs of this, and it really looks stupid, but anyway, we survived that, and started flying after three days, and we were carrying supplies, and that was, we became these kickers, because nobody showed up to unload the planes, and that's how we ended up in the war with, as a kicker and a wireless operator, so it was quite different than what the rest of the Air Force did, but they, you know, they were in bomber command, we were, had no guns on our planes, we were carrying supplies, and that's all we did was drop supplies, or landed, and unloaded the supplies, so no armaments, we all had pistols, and that kind of thing, but stand guns, that was all you carried on your, you had a strap to you. DC-3 Dakota, yeah, that's aircraft they ever made, I'd go anywhere on it, and I'd run everywhere, we flew all the way back, you know, we flew from England over, and we flew back with them to, you know, so it took us four days to get back to England, and we were picking up the, picking up, going to the telegraph office, and sending a cable to my mother, to say we were back in England, they, we couldn't tell them where we were, but they, they've triggered it out to some of the letters we wrote, of course every letter we wrote had to be checked out by somebody else before it went, but life was interesting, and you saw a lot of the country, and you were flying all the time, so you had lots of hours, extra money, but it was interesting, and with the two squadrons so far apart, we just occasionally mapped up, and had some leaves together, different times, going to Calcutta, or we'd go into other places like that, for proper leave, and have a place where we could swim, but the office was quite interesting because they had a big, big place there where the officers could go, but I wasn't an officer, I was just an ordinary airman, so I had to sit outside and watch the guys eating all their food, but we were well looked after, stayed in all the old hotels, and then after the war, we took our wives back there, and visited all these places that we had been in, you know, we flew, and then we moved several, three or four times to different islands, or wherever the ships could come in with supplies, and we would unload them and fly them from there, and of course we had several nights at different places where we, the Japanese came over and paid us a tune, dropped a few supplies at Seuss Armour, I hope you're cutting some of this up, you know, it was interesting for a young guy, it was 18 years of age, and I was with the Air Force for three and a half years, and Burma for four years, for two years, two and a half years, it was nice to know come back to England, and then we flew back from Burma to India, back to England, I should say, and we ended up having a couple of weeks off in England, and then we went on, came across the Atlantic, as we did at the beginning, we went over on a cruise ship, and came back on a ship, so happy to land in Canada, and see the walk of it, we got it all over various cities, or so we were coming home, and particularly one in Vancouver, where we landed here, my family was all there, you know, the thing you don't, you know, you forget them now, but a lot of things you remember about them, but trying to put them all together is not easy anymore, we landed in Halifax, and we had trained right across the country, and that was interesting too, but people were out at every place we came to see the guys and wave them, and that's like when we went to England, you know, we had gum and cigarettes, and Alice and the kids are in Scotland, we're standing there waiting for us, you know, we're throwing the candy out and everything, cigarettes, any gum chum, but that's our life, and it was it was very very primitive in a lot of ways, we always slept in tents, we never got out of tents the whole time, we're out there, four guys to a tent, we became great friends, and I guess of all the guys, we had a reunion, I started the instigator of having reunions after the war in Canada, and with some fellows from Toronto, we had Vancouver, I organized a starting reunion after we got home, first year we were back, we came to Vancouver and started, had a reunion, and we found out those guys in Toronto were doing the same thing, so we ended up after two years, we merged it, so we go to Toronto one year, or Halifax the next, or British Columbia the next, and we went a number of times, we went up to the Harrison Lake, Vancouver area, and always had some great reunions there, they come from right across Canada, and we guess we did it for nearly 50 years, but suddenly there's very few of us left, so you know, I can't tell you how many, but I would say part of my squadron is concerned probably the most of the 25 that are left, and some of them aren't able to get out even, you know, but we all slept four to a ten, but the COO was right across the next ten to me, a couple of times, you know, he was, and they had a, they had no, very little entertainment out there, and one of the things our guys did, and included myself, we decided to have a party, so the guys, a lot of the guys got dressed up in women's clothes, and we had a wonderful time, I got some photographs of that, somewhere there, I don't know if you've seen them or not, but I think they were in that book that I showed you, the guys dressed up, and that was our entertainment most of the time, very primitive, but you know, anytime we get a chance for a party, we'd have it, because we got very little to drink, occasionally we had the beer rations, but that was it, anyway, you know, it's a life you can't forget, you know, so many things I could say, but like, you know, they just, my mind doesn't work the way it used to, and anyway, I enjoyed it, I'm glad I didn't join the Navy or the Army, you know, I felt the Air Force was what I wanted, certainly it worked out that way, and I think the big thing was the friendship, we will, you know, when you're, most of the time, was saving four guys to attend, but we moved, I guess, 25 or 30 times, so you're always sleeping in tents. The biggest problem was the living, that was really rough, and you know, you had a lot of bugs caught, and different things, and you had to be in a medical office quite regularly, and you know, back, and what, it was great, you know, you think it was, but sometimes you wouldn't believe that, particularly when we moved, the first moved into India, or into Burma was, it was something, you know, we were out of, we're in India, and then we had to move into Burma, and we got the first place, and of course to get there and find it, there was, none of the facilities were built at all, they were just a werefield there, and we had to build our own facility, so, you know, it was good, anyway, big experience, but you know, most of the guys are gone, I'm lucky to still be here, I guess I was known as the kid in our squadron, so I guess I was the youngest in the group to start with, but it's a memory that you'll never forget, but trying to explain it to somebody to make sense of doesn't probably dig over as well as you want, but anyway, we hear from one another occasionally, there's a few that are left, and Bob Farkas is for a good friend of mine in Toronto, or outside of Toronto, and he has written this book that I gave you a copy of earlier, and so one of the books says my picture happens to be on the front of it, how come I don't know, I remember the day, and that incident that occurred that day after we had, the guy took our pictures, we were sitting, standing on the side of a pagoda, and there was a bunch of buildings nearby, and they were all burned, it looked like they'd been fired badly, but anyway, we were wandering around, and I looked into the one little place there on the floor, and I found this ornament here, which is out of one of the native, not churches, but, and this was sitting on a burned out floor, burned out house, and this was sitting there with a, so I picked it up and threw it in my pocket, and that's where I ended up bringing it home, and it sits in my room, where every day I look at it, wonder about it, or who it might have belonged to, or what religion it was, but here this was sitting on the floor right where I stand, no people, none of the natives around, just the whole place had been abandoned, you know, and here it was sitting there, so I just picked it up, put it in my pocket, and I can't get it ever since, and it sits in my room right now. As far as the Burma Campaign, there were very few Canadians that served in it, just the two big squatters and then individual members of different parts of the Army or Navy that were serving with others, you know, as well, but we didn't see many of them, but we did have them, but we got these medals after the war, they didn't, but these were different medals that were awarded to us, the Burma Star right here, which we honor very much, and this is the 2935, well, can't remember the year, anyway, and these were the British Columbia medal, and the federal medal, I got the first and second medals for one of the things that we didn't, we were never honored about, we served in Burma, well, so few Canadians served, we all got the regular medal that were entitled, and this came along three or four years ago, they realized that they hadn't given any to the Burma veterans, especially, so this is the medal that was presented in the nightly order of St. George, which I'd never heard about when it was about 50 or 60 of us all received it in the Ottawa, we were down there for a special part, and there it is, so I can wear that if I want, when I'm parade or whatever it is, but very few of them around, and of course these are the regular medals that we got, and this medal is, you know, a different field altogether, and that I've been a free mason on the last month, they had a big do for me, 70 years I've been a mason in British Columbia, the oldest there, still alive in BC, so this is a medal that I was presented for the 70 years, I'm now 71 years actually, so anyway, I'm proud of it, and happy to have it, although it still says 60, they haven't given me a new, well it's supposedly a secret society, but it's not, so it's really a secret, you can find out about it anywhere you want to read, you know, you're invited to belong, and you're certainly investigated by other members to make sure you're the person that they want, and you have a ritual you go through, and you have to remember a lot of it, you have memory work, and my, well my grandfather was a minister, but also a mason in Ireland, and my dad was a mason in Cumberland on Vancouver Island when they moved out to Canada, and my uncle was a minister in Victoria, Archdeacon in the Angle Concerts, and he was a mason, so it was all in gratitude in my family, and then I got to know a lot of them here in Vancouver, and I decided, and I'm now, I'm with us here, I've got an award that says 70, well 71 years, mostly they kick off at this age, but I'm still here, so I don't know how much time I've got, but hopefully a little bit. Back in the school days, of course, I have this photograph here of our Cumberland High School, and this was in 1939, and we won the Dominion Championship for St. John's Ambulance, first aid, and actually this photograph was our instructor here, he's a local gentleman that lived in the town, and these were kids that I grew up with, so I'm trying to remember all of them, but Bill Nicholas is one, and Jackie Short, and he was shot down overseas, I saw him in Montreal on the way through, he was going over, and I met him, and we had lunch together in Montreal, and then he took off, and they went over, and he was shot down in the first month, he was over there, and knew all this family very well, and this is my friend Tom Scott, who's father and mother were great friends of mine, and Trevor Jones here, and as I say, our instructor, and the medals we won for the Dominion Championship says, provincial championship, I'm sorry, Cumberland Junior High School, first aid St. John's Ambulance, so I keep that close by. You know, you all learned in Cumberland, a coal mining town, first aid was one of the important things in town. We weren't fighting the Japanese in the sense that we didn't have any guns, but we were making sure that our army down below was getting food and ammunition, and if we could land, we landed. If we couldn't land, it went out by parachute, and as I say, we did this door that we, you got your kicker with a rope around your neck and earned your waist, and you got your, your stuff was all in boxes, and a parachute or whatever, they'd open after you kicked them out, and if you could land, you landed and unloaded the stuff, so it depended. If there was an airfield available or somewhere where you could, you had to be able to land, if you don't, it went out by parachute. You know, Japanese got as many, much, much of it as we did. You know, they were on one side, and we were on the other, shooting ducks really, because we didn't carry any, any guns other than pistols. You know, we had no ammunition on the planes, so we're just lucky that we, we lost quite a few, but, and we found some of the bodies later, and that's all history now, but, but we were a tight-knit bunch of fellas. We were stuck together like glue. We was derighted till three years ago. We were stuck together like glue, because we know there were no other, there was an individual Canadian serving in the RAF, but we were RCAAF, and we didn't do much flying with the RAF. They were mostly, a lot of them were in Europe, and a lot of them were on various other places in the world, but we were only, only sent to Burma, and that was the representative of our good friend that's, they're talking about shooting the Mackenzie, not Mackenzie King, what's his name, picture of him in my room there, Sir John A. McDonald, who's talking about getting rid of his picture here, I've got him sitting in my living room. He was, you know, a lot of old history too. I just don't, this was a medal that didn't give us anything for a lot, and then they suddenly, four years ago or so, we were presented with this, there's very few of them, there's very few of us left at the time, but that's what it is, and anybody I know around here has never seen it before, because I'm probably one of the few that, you know, I suppose 50 of us altogether from across Canada got it, that's all there left of us, there was at that time, it's nightly order of St. George, it's called, and when I was in parade here for the veterans' day, I had it around my neck, and of course the Burma, I worked very hard on the reunions after the war, and two of those medals, you know, for the work, number of those got them for the work we did. Well, they found out that they hadn't given anything to the Hong Kong veterans, you know, they didn't get any proper awards, and we happened to be the only Canadians that had anything in touch with their survival, as we were parachuting food to help them and feed the army that was fighting, so because of that, I guess they decided they better put this out, we didn't know anything about it, as they say, we went to Ottawa, and suddenly we were all in the elastic, a big dining room, and they called us all, and we thought we were going, you know, for it was a great party, we had enjoyed ourselves, and then you get presented with that, and at the same time, they paid our way down and back, I had to take somebody to help, or every one of us had to take a, my cousin, he went with me, you know, as you get older, they want to make sure your health is okay. Thanks to you guys and the government, the only way we knew we were going is we went to England, and before we left, we were giving tropical shots, so we knew that that was, we weren't going to be staying in England very long, and so we didn't, you know, and it was part of the British Empire those days, so we were the only Canadians unit serving, there was an individual Canadian serving, the RAF, and with the, you know, the RAF and RCAF were quite different, that's why we're concerned. If you were RCAF, you were under British command, we were under all Canadian commands. Well, Burma wasn't so bad, because we were, we were set up in tents right away, but once we left Burma into, or left India into Burma, I said, I won't reverse it all. You know, we, we had to set up our own tents, and I think one of the photographs I got, I don't, it's not there. It shows us setting up one of the tents. My picture's in there, and a picture on here. Well, this is a picture of all, most of our ground crew, guys, an air crew, but some of them were flying, and when this was taken, but this is one of our squadron, one of our aircraft, and as a matter of fact, I pointed out where I happened to be, and to see how huge clothes we were. We were just called in to make a picture one day. These are some of the officers in charge, and these three of us, three of these, followed a bailout one night. They just didn't know they were going to get them back, but they got them back the next day. This is the kind of aircraft we flew, and the decoders, DC-3s, flew with the door out, not in this case, but, and that's a picture of us parachuting. We parachuted food or ammunition if we couldn't land, or we could land, and we unloaded this stuff just like anybody we all pitched in, and this is where we first went, got into Burma. This is our first week we got there, and we landed in there, and there was no people to unload our planes or do anything. So the photograph here of us starting to assemble everything out of the aircraft, and get ready to take, that happens to be a picture of me right there. And we ended up building, you know, fixing up tents and spending about three or four days doing that before we were able to do any flying. And this is one of the jobs I had as a kicker. You flew with the door out, you had a rope tied around your, on a static line down the center of the plane, and you were attached to it, and you had the door out. That's not a very good picture of the door at the moment. You can see the supplies below, and you kicked the stuff out if you didn't go with it. This is interesting, it gives us an idea. These first week we were there, the commanding officer and three of his men got lost, and they had to bail out. And you see always the last to bail out. This is him in the center, and this is the guys that they all landed in the river. They found one another in the next day, and the commanding, well the head general was down to present them, to welcome them and look after them. And the commanding officer of the airfield was right there. And one of the things we do, we had a lot, we didn't have very good facilities for washing and everything, so we usually ended up by a river or something, and we always, this is a picture of our guys swimming in a chong, what we call a chong on the Acab Island. You can see how well we were dressed, and this is over over Mandalay, the road to Mandalay as we called it in those days. Anyway, this is our big supply drop over there, and these are the army below, and some of our guys are after we could fly, and we dropped this stuff, and then we ended up having our pictures taken, some of us. I wasn't in on that drop. This is a Japanese flag, one of the guys got a hold of my buddy Johnny Cleaves, no longer alive, but he and I were great buddies, and we found a Japanese flag, so, and you can see the tents in the background, that's how we lived. This is some of the officers, they had a dig of slat, slat trench beside your tents as well. So this is, I'm watching to see what's going to happen. This is when the airfields, we were in second airfield, we were in Ramri Island. You see all the water in the runway, since we're in the middle of the monsoons in those days, and one of the guys was quite a cartoonist, so he picked your shoulders with the aircraft, and with a plane we had to call Watchbird, and it used to go out every morning early, check the weather conditions. This is just a cartoon they made of a boy in the Watchbirds, and then our entertainment was terrible, we never had any movies, it's all very seldom, so the guys decided to have a group, they all dressed up as ladies and everything else, and it was called Monsoon Follies, and this is a picture of some of the fellas. They're all dressed as women. Great, great life in those days. We had a big victory long day, and we collected 130,000 dollars in those days, you know we were being paid, nobody had had the use of money, we know where to spend it, so you can see our tents in the background, and that's a picture or a thing we put up to show what we'd won, and this is on BJ Day when we heard the war was over, you can see we're in the church, one of the small churches they had there. We always had a church of different religions, and this is when we heard the war was over, they had a nice service after, which I'm in there somewhere, and I guess that's it. Well they had a band, we always had a band, and they they just played different songs that we all knew in those days, like you know, and the fellas, you know that's only a few of them, a lot of them were, you know, we did it two or three nights to show guys what there was all about, it was two of them that I went to school with, yeah, and Cumberland Colmox, there were three or four of us, we all, we didn't know, we didn't know until we formed up these squadrons, and I was a Cumberland boy and there was a couple of Courtney boys in it, in that picture, I could have gone back to Cumberland and Colmining Town, and they had a job for me working in the coal mine, but I had worked for a few months, and my dad ran the railway, so I had a job there to go back to, attached to the coal mine, but I didn't want to go back to life, you know, something happened, you had to go down below in the mine and get the motor out of it or whatever was going on, because I was in electrical in at that time, but we fitted in damn well in a hurry, you know, coming back to Vancouver and getting off the train, the train was all Canadians on the train, and you know, you came across Canada and everybody was out of every train, so it was quite a welcome, we landed in Scotland, and when we were back to England, and the kids, thousands of kids, any gum chum we were throwing, this is when we went over, throwing stuff to them, nothing really, well, I shouldn't say that, but we were drawing supplies to feed people as well as army, but we never had much connection with them, you know, we had our own airfields and the army was, we fly over them or with them, but where they were, if we could land, we landed, if we couldn't land, so that was your contact with them, you don't have much choice, I mean, you know, I didn't know whether I was going to be in Europe or going to be, you know, the only thing that made me realize it when I was stationed, I, you know, I went to wireless school in Vancouver and I went to Montreal and at it, and I was shipped back to Vancouver again, and that's when I met, oh, that's another story, I'm losing track of what I was saying, we came back to when we sent home on leaves and then we knew we were going to go somewhere because we had had tropical shots, but they were very, we wouldn't tell you anything about where you were going or what you were going to do, but we assumed that we were going to be more than England because of the shots we had, and other than that, you know, some of my buddies were killed, quite a few of them were killed overseas, not with my squadron, but with it, and one of the guys is not in that picture, but he joined the Air Force and we went to school together and he came going through Montreal, he knew that I was going to be on the plane or on the train, I should say, and I got a hold of him, we stopped and had lunch, the train stopped in Montreal and we had lunch together, and I said goodbye to him, and that's, I was the last guy of the family, you know, I saw him and he was shot down shortly after. Anyway, we were very lucky, we didn't lose too many people, we had a number of crashes, lots of crashes, but you know, it could land or somewhere, and people, you know, people were hospitalized, but I stayed on the good planes, I guess, you know, I wasn't, I was only a mechanic really, that's my job, but you had all the flying, you were sitting on your butt when the planes were all out, unless there's some maintenance to do, and we had a full maintenance crew, so you could always find somebody who would take your shift or something if you wanted to go off with one of the guys, which was very unusual, they never did that before, but they had to have people to, we got to the airfield expecting to see people come in and help unload the planes, nobody, just the crew that we were with, we did all the loading and unloading of our own equipment, put up our own tents, and of course we never, we never were out of tents the whole time we were there, except when we got to Lee, who went into Calcutta, or something like that, as far as I'm concerned, first class, I'm glad they did, you know, what the hell, I'm sure we killed thousands of people with the Japanese, asked for it, I mean, and they're certainly a thriving company now, our group, moral that way, you know, and you know, they weren't going to hold anything back to us, if we, you know, we lost a number of planes and they weren't from, they weren't from anything, but Japanese, you know, or sometimes crashes occurred caused by yourself sometimes, you know, airport, right on the airstrips, you know, sometimes landing, or you never knew where you might go to land, if you could land, you landed, but if you couldn't, you parachuted stuff or unloaded it, but it was quite a heavy job, but that didn't mind me in those days, but, you know, I, you know, I had a lot of good Japanese friends at school, we went to Cumberland, it was a coal mining town on the island, and you know, the Japanese were there in the mines, and they had been originally, they were kicked out, but then my dad ran the well, and he hired a lot of these guys that couldn't work in the mines, the Chinese particularly, too. Well, it was interesting because I was not a commissioned officer, and we got to this Canada house, and they wouldn't let us in. Just officers, and I was not an officer, I was just an airman, sergeant, I ended up with a sergeant, but I would have if the war hadn't ended, but anyway, I ended up, so in Calcutta, we were, that brings me to another thing I'll tell you about, the Calcutta, you know, they had a big swimming pool there, and we had another area we could go and swim, but this was, you know, in those days, the officers learned a lesson in the later days, they kept up with us, because we were a very important part to them, you know, in the fight, the fact that we weren't commissioned officers. Oh, I remember going to a little store next to one of the places in Calcutta, and I saw a watch I wanted to buy, so I bought this watch and took it home with me, and I had the invoice that the guy had given me when I had had it, and so when I was going back to India for a trip where I've been three times back after the war with our wives, this little guy was right still in the shop at this place, so I walked in and handed him my bill that he didn't get, take away from me, and he looked at me, and he couldn't believe I was looking for my watch, and of course I had it ten years, five years before. He just was shocked, but anyway, he phoned out in a hurry, and he was still running this little shop with a tent over them, selling watches, and we used to went in to Calcutta on leave, and of course Calcutta is a big city in those days even, and we used to go, when during the war we went into this purple's restaurant, it was a beautiful place, you could sing and dance with the girls, you know, they had music and dancing, and this was all great for us, so we go back after the war with our wives, and we said now we're going to take you to all the purple's restaurant to see what, where we used to, you know, have a dancing in this, and we said we're going to have a dinner there too, so it was all set up, we walk into it, we get, well the hotel, and the natives were hanging on to the women and everything, trying to, you know, get money from us because it was only a block, a block away, but that's the way they are down there, or were it in those days, and we ended up going into the door of this restaurant, and my god, it was just a big beer hall, it was a beer bottle all over the place, and this was this beautiful purple's restaurant that we had gone dancing with, and we had to get out of there in a hurry again, so it was the way it was, oh yeah, well I met her, well she was a war where it was two kids, and we ended up, Mike found out she was, you know, she was on her own, her husband was killed, and I had been introduced to her, and I thought well she's very nice, and so we talked about different things, and I decided I'd come and help her, you know, so I put in a garden, and I put in trees, and I painted the house, and I put on a, built a garage, and after about two years, year and a half after we're going out with her and taking her out, we decided to get married, so we got married in this little hotel right down here, and now that's a big hotel right down the waterfront here in West Phad called St. Ma, we used to be called St. Ma's Hotel, but it's now the big restaurant where you walk out under the, of you being down to the waterfront here, onto that pier that's out there, well that was called the St. Ma's Hotel, and I married, and that's where we were married in there, and it was just a little tiny hotel, we lived, you know, she owned the house, I was helping her build it, I didn't, you know, when I'm at her, so I volunteered and put in the garden and ended up marrying her, but the unfortunate part was I never had any, she had two children, but she politely told me that night I got married to her that she couldn't have any more kids, kind of shocked me, but we went ahead with it, and we had a good life, but she had a lot of health problems after that, she ended up with Parkinson's disease, she was shaken and shivering, it's a terrible thing, anyway she passed away from that, then I remarried again after that, and of course it was too late, you know, I raised her kids, they went to school, high school, well I was still there, and then she died after that, and I remarried again, and of course it was kind of late to have any children for her, you know, my wife remarried, so when she was a little, I was older than her too, but anyway that's been my life, so I've had a odd girlfriend here and there, occasionally I'd go out with girls there, but we have dinner together, that kind of thing, when she was in the latter part of her health in the hospital, I met another lady, but I didn't marry her at the time, but they had two kids that I raised, I just decided they didn't want to see me anymore, you know, I've missed them, they're good kids, I raised them, I'd never give them any reason to feel, but because I had met somebody else at the time, and I knew she wasn't going to, she knew she wasn't coming out too, that's what happened, and those are things that, you know, healer you get them in a lot of ways, and you don't regret them, I mean I had a happy marriage afterwards, but it was not easy, and of course the daughter of the lady I married to, I mean she's my daughter as far as I'm concerned too, because I hadn't any kids from the first one, I wouldn't have any for this lady, but she has a daughter who's coming out, have Christmas with her, I mean she lives in Victoria, so I'm blank as far as family is concerned, I'm the end of the line, yet I still have lots of, well, cousins and that kind of stuff that I can acclaim through marriage, you know, all my health is pretty good, I got problems walking a bit, and I have a pacemaker in here which saved my life, if I had been in here I had 20 minutes to be worked on, and they didn't have the facility here, I had happened to be in the hospital for some minor thing that day, and they hooked me up to a machine, and that's, so I have a pacemaker right there, and I touch it every day to make sure it's still there, and I end up, every six months I go and I go in a couple of weeks to have it checked over, you just put you in a put a machine attached to you, and then go home, no, you finish it all right there, so I don't know, I'm lucky, you know I've been lucky most of my life, I never got hurt or injured in the Air Force, I could have been the number of guys we lost, and you know, and I had my car for a year, but I just decided last month to give it up, you know, I was feeling I was comfortable driving, so I thought well, time to quit. I belong to the Legion, which I have, but I'm the only one of my squad, and it's in that Legion at the moment, the West Vancouver Legion, I belong, I belong to it ever since the war I guess, but I don't go very often, they gave me, it was a war, my picture is down there with a whole bunch of pictures of guys, and I'm on that veterans list, but you know I supposed to go tonight or tomorrow, I think it is, I don't venture, you know I've been through with the chairs and some of these things, I know what it's all about, and in my age I just, you know, I keep my membership out, pay my bills, you know whatever, I'm old every time, and go once in a while, and that's it. You know, Legion has changed a lot, most of the people in there are not veterans anymore, the people who want to party and that kind of stuff, well I think I might party in days, or not what they used to be. Oh, I like a drink, I usually have a good drink every night, a scotch, or if I'm having dinner with two or three people, I got a bottle of wine, you know. Well, think about where we were, and things that, well, I don't march anymore, I used to march up from the Legion, but I don't, my legs don't, I mean that well, and I end up, you know, getting a ride down there, and then they, we always put the veterans in a special place at the Senate Ave, and this year I carry, I was asked to present a wreath, which I did, and then had to walk back to my place in where everybody was, and there was a number of guys who were doing that, so we all ended up in the same, you know, doing the same thing to Legion of, well, you know, I honor the guys that are in it, but very few march anymore, so that's the story as far as the Legion, I like it, but I don't want to be bothered going down there, there's a lot of guys that are all they're doing is drinking down there, which is, it's an open bar, and I don't, you know, I like to drink at night, and that's it, so, and the COs out there, it didn't matter what your, what your, what your rank was, you're all buddies together, and I say the COs several times were just next door to me practically, you know, and he was out doing his laundry, the same as I was, and so those kind of things, we ended up running a great bunch of guys that got along so well, and after the war, call Maradi, we should sit and talk about it, and laugh about it, and not cry about it particularly, but it was something that, we all lost some friends, you know, I'm still here, hopefully after a little while longer, could have gone to university, I wasn't a student, you know, I've graduated from high school, and that was it, I went to work, and I went to work for the Vancouver first job I had the first day I was interviewed, I was hired by the Vancouver Sun newspaper, and I was in the business office, and at that time, shortly after there, I was there, I knew the top people were running it, I was in their business office there, and the province newspaper went on strike across the street, so I was in the cash cage at, working on the cash cage at the Sun office, and we had all this money, people wanted to buy newspapers, because this province was out in the street, so the money was coming there, and I was carrying it, packing it in meat packages, it looked like meat packages, and I was walking past all the strikers out in the street, if they ever knew what was in their packages, I'd walk up to the bank, I'd put gravel and hasty, it was amazing how nobody took down to what I was doing, but they didn't pay any attention, I mean they were too busy striking, so I worked at the Sun for, I guess, two or three years, and then somebody, you know, there wasn't much chance of more promotion, and I wasn't a newspaper guy particularly, so I ended up in front of mine, told me about an insurance and a job in the insurance business, and I would be boarding with his, he and his wife, and he was in an office downtown, and he told me about this job, and I, so I went to the bank of his son, well I told you about that part of it, son newspaper, but anyway, I ended up deciding to go into insurance business, and I ended up by buying a good friend of mine out, he was retiring, and he had a small business, so I took his, took his business over, and I had a lot of clients that were giving me business on the side, and I was putting it with, with his shape, chap, anyway, so I ended up owning a business, and getting licensed, and I had my own business, and I had a staff about, I guess, not very much, about eight, nine, and this young fella bought it out, and I wanted to retire after 50, I was about 50 years altogether, and different parts of the insurance business, I worked for an insurance company as such, and you were learning how to underwrite, and risk, risk management, and that kind of stuff, and I ended up, I could do this myself, so I ended up doing, buying this fella's insurance agency, which is selling insurance, and I ended up, he retired, and these people were working for you up to, as I say, a few people, and then I ended up getting out and selling the business to him, and I had a delayed payment, he was paying me back in two years or something, but I had an option to get out of, I wanted to, after he took it over, he got, I don't know, he had two yachts, he had big cars, he was not, you know, he was bringing business in, but he couldn't keep up with it, he couldn't pay it, and I could see it, I didn't like it, so I said I went out, so he went broke, and I said that's it, he couldn't handle it himself, and he had a much, a lot more business than I had, but he was another guy with him, and they were dead lost, as far as I'm concerned, and he disappeared, I have never seen him since, he owed over a million dollars to one of the insurance companies, and I ended up getting him, you know, I never, as I say, he took off, and I don't know if he's alive or not, but I enjoyed that business, I heard a lot of training in it, 70 odd years in it, so it'd be about ten years now, but we used to go, we went three or four times, three times anyway with our wives, you know, go to the different places where we'd been stationed, and we, you know, began to see life as it was, really before the war came along, and Burma is a very interesting country in those days, and it still is, I think, that's Neand Marano, that, you know, I know regrets about the war going over, and I know regrets from going back and forth to see them, you know, I always remember the first day Rangoon was liberated, there was a big hotel in there, and I have a week's leave, no, especially days leave, we were out somewhere off 50 miles away or so, and we knew the war was coming to an end, we sure are, and so we had this chance to get away for a few days, and we hitchhiked into Rangoon, but anyway, we had nowhere to, you know, we carried dapsacks with us, and we saw this old, big old building with the big statues on the front of it, and we went in and we, there was people everywhere, it's a day after the day after the city was liberated, and there was the army people, Navy people, people, everybody in the place, and they had no place to sleep, so they said you can sleep on the floor, so we rolled up in our blankets, and we stayed there for two nights, and we went back to camp, and then of course after the war ended, we decided to go over back to Burma and to the city of Rangoon, and we ended up driving, we got in there at night with our wives, and I couldn't see where we were going or what we were doing, and it was nighttime, and woke up in the morning, and it was the hotel, same place that we slept on the floor for a couple of nights, trying to find a place to sleep, and the wives were all there with us, and we couldn't believe that we'd been in this, but anyway, it was just a big cement floor, and people running around, and everywhere, we just rolled up in our blanket and slept there, and here it was a best hotel in town, but I didn't recognize it because when we first landed in there, we flew in, and we ended up going in a back door of a place, and we said sleep where you want, and then come back to this nice hotel later on, and then we traveled around Burma, there's various places with our wives, and did a lot of that kind of thing, and of course that's all gone now, but we stopped about, I guess three years ago, we had about three or four different reunions over, well more than that, three or four visits back to Burma, which we always enjoyed again, and you look at it now, it's a busy, busy, busy city, and I told you the story about going into the dance, which was a beautiful hotel, or Dirtle Dance place, where we would take a lady's to, it was nothing but a dump, and we thought it was magnificent, you know, it was great, beautiful music, and lots of girls to dance with, and we'd been in the bush for six months at that time or more, I could always remember living in Cumberland there at Christmastime, my dad would, you know, he was riding the railway, and he hired all these guys, there was a job there, he was in charge of it, and all of a sudden these Chinese would start walking down the street, coming to my house, and he came into a house, my dad said, we don't, didn't even know they were coming, he's a bossy man, you see, and they all bought, you know, nuts and candy, and got it, and turkeys, you know, couldn't even refrigerate turkeys, I've seen as many as 12 turkeys hanging up on our, in our basement, dad was giving them out to people, but this is the way the Chinese, they respected him, and they knew, he was a bossy man, but he treated them very well, and as a kid I used to go out with him on a Saturday, and when he was, they worked Saturdays in those days, and they all, everyone, one of these Chinese guys knew me, you know, probably 25 or 30 of them, and then there was a big Chinatown era anyway, from other people that worked in the coal mines earlier, but anyway, I went away, I got married, and went back when I got married to Cumberland to see my, you know, meet my parents, and have a visit with them right after I got married, and one, this evening, a doorknob came in, came three Chinese guys that knew me, and they presented me with a check for, I think it was $350, it's a gift to me, and my boy insisted I take it, I didn't want to take their money, I mean, because I was, they knew me as a kid, remarkable people, you know, I couldn't believe it, but anyway, I finally, I took it, but I didn't want it, and, you know, just to have them remember me as a kid, and that's, you know, from here on, I'd come back from the war, and it was, you know, but they still were living up there, and they have a pipeline, I guess, they knew I was coming up there, amazing. They used to bring us lychee nuts and all these damn things that were gifts, just for Christmas time, my dad was being the bossy man, and that's what they always did, but in those days, it'd be 10 or 12 or 15 of them come down to the house, turkeys, too, we couldn't eat turkey, didn't even have proper refrigeration in those days, so, you know, I'm here, and I'm trying to do my best to make it, but you know, 74 years of age, or I shouldn't say 70, 90, it's different than coming out of the Air Force and knowing everything that's going on in my life. I've had a good life, I'm very happy about it, you know, I lost my wife, I lost my first wife, really, the second, and piss on those kids, I've raised them, but they don't want to see me, that's their problem, I mean, mine, I shouldn't say that, but I'm bitter about it, because I think I give them every chance, they went to university, and that's the way they want it, so anyway, I'm still here, and my daughter, I raised this in North Vancouver, but I haven't seen her, I know where she exactly is, I have her own number, but I've tried it, she just doesn't want it, so that's fine. The rest of the family are all happy about it, so, you know, that's life. Anyway, I never regretted regretted being in the Air Force, I never was a pilot, but I was certainly a radio operator and knew a lot about it, and first repaired all the equipment as well, and I got up the line a little bit anyway, didn't become a Colonel or a tenet or anything like that, but, you know, my idea was to just get in and do what you have to do and get the hell out of there, you know, I wouldn't have wanted to go stay in the Air Force or anything like that after the war, sort of, I guess. No, the Air Force was good to me, I feel I was good to them for what I was doing, and I don't regret it, you know, had to land somewhere in the Army or the Navy or the Air Force, and my life was Air Force, as far as I was concerned, but I hadn't, you know, hadn't been equipped for it, I came right out of school, and while I wasn't a great student, I passed my grade 12, and I wasn't going to go back to university, I didn't want to go back to school after the war, I had the opportunity of going, but I went to the insurance, or started with a bank over the sun and ended up in insurance, but I've always treated people fairly, I try to be friends with everybody I meet, I have no regrets about some of the little things that have happened in my life, but I've always tried to be honest with everybody, and as far as I'm concerned, that's the important part, one of the important parts, anyway, you know, I have a daughter coming over, unfortunately, she's not my daughter, she's my stepdaughter for marriage, she's coming for Christmas, she comes every year, she politely brings three little dogs with us, so that's part of it, and so that's it, anyway, that's my life.