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Most mornings, Russ Lakin bags up Milk-Bones and chicken jerky, leashes his yappy little Snuffy and sets out to make every dog in the neighborhood a happy pooch.
The dogs whimper and strain at their gates as Lakin greets them by name; if the dog's inside, he tosses bones and jerky onto the front porch for later.
A tall man, Lakin walks slowly on artificial knees. But in World War II, he served in the U.S. Army Air Corps, one of thousands of "flying sergeants," enlisted men who crewed transport planes across half the globe.
And at 88, he's among the last of his kind.
Lakin was married and working at Hill Field when he was drafted at 20, sent to navigation training and joined the crew of a C-46 Commando.
On the way back, his and hundreds of other C-46s would bring men wounded and starved on the battlefields of Indochina and Burma to Casablanca, where they'd be ferried to the Army's Walter Reed hospital in Washington, D.C.
"We saved a lot of guys," Lakin said.
He remembers every stop -- Dakar to Marrakesh and on to Casablanca, Oran, Algiers, El Alamein, Tripoli and Cairo. Then east to Karachi and over the hump.
I asked him what it looked
There were turbulent storms that would shake the plane like a dog does a bone and ocean squalls that sent water pouring in through rivet holes in the plane's skin.
And malfunctions: one night, the autopilot sent the plane into a nearly vertical dive and patients tumbled from their litters as the flight nurse screamed for help. The pilot finally gained control, Lakin says, and brought the plane level right over the treetops.
"I called my buddy and said, 'I just aged a thousand years.' But we made it, we made it."
So many didn't. Fliers called their Himalayan route "the aluminum trail," where for decades remains would be found, identified by dog tags, and coffee would still be frozen in mugs among the wreckage.
There were good times, too. Lakin was stationed at a base in Cairo that also housed about 40,000 Italian prisoners of war. They all ate the same rations, so Lakin and his buddies would sneak in among the POWs for the simple reason that "they had all the finest chefs from Rome, Florence, you know."
Between flights, Lakin played guitar for the Sahara Hotshots, a band that performed at officer's clubs all over North Africa. "We had some wonderful deals over there, in spite of the war," Lakin said.
And from the beginning, Lakin had tremendous respect for the German air war machine. ""They had everything under control over there. And they had great intelligence."
For Lakin, who navigated by radio waves, that meant the Germans would pick up the signals he'd send to ground control. "As soon as we'd start to call it, it'd start -- woooooooo -- they'd block us out."
Even German submarines could block them as they crossed over the Atlantic Ocean. "They were uncanny," Lakin says.
As the war ground on, though, American production inexorably ramped up to produce the bombers and fighter planes that would reign over the European and Pacific theaters until the war's end in 1945.
Lakin laughs when he recalls one of the Italians in Cairo telling him, "Mussolini never told us you guys had this many airplanes."
At war's end, a pilot buddy asked him to navigate them back to the States. They skirted a hurricane over Miami and flew on to -- where else? -- Hill Field, now Hill Air Force Base.
Lakin was discharged on Dec. 12, 1945. He settled in Salt Lake City to begin the rest of his life. Every Tuesday and Thursday, he goes to the Jordan River Temple. And most mornings, he's the Boneman, beloved of dogs.
My dad was at Normandy, and his brother marched across Europe until the Russian army overran Berlin. My mother's brothers served on American airfields in England. Most of them are gone now as, Lakin said, he will be one day too.
He needs us to remember, as he puts it, "the enormity of it."
