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Mr. Johnson shakes his head in disbelief, gives his 13-year-old Husky, Yukon — although he calls him “Tom” — a good scratch behind the ears. We are sitting in the living room of the white bungalow. There are crossword puzzles piled beside the war veteran, and a dictionary within reach on the floor.

Mr. Johnson was liberated from a German POW camp six weeks after the nice German lady cleaned him up. He tried to find her after the war, to say thanks, but never did, and so he just went on living.

Looking back now all he sees are the dead.

“I am only really proud of one thing I did during the war,” he says.

He was flying patrol when his air traffic controller said there was a German plane above their airstrip.

“I was up about 4,000 feet and I look down and I see this guy,” Mr. Johnson says.

“Anybody who was an experienced fighter pilot would never be flying over an enemy airstrip and would never be flying in a straight line. But this guy was. He was obviously a rookie. Maybe it was his first flight in that goddamn aircraft and maybe he had gotten lost, and so I pulled out from behind him and came alongside and I looked over at him.

“He was just a boy. A kid. And I thought to myself, why the hell would I kill this kid? The war is almost over. He doesn’t know what the hell he is doing. So I [waved at him] and flew off. Back at the base they were all, ‘Did you get him? Did you get him? I said I let him go.

“It is the only thing that I did in that whole goddamn war that I am really pleased about. We had to kill, see? I remember destroying a ferry where I must have killed 50 or 60 people. And it is human life, and you could say, ‘Well, what the hell, it is war.’ But it just shows you how stupid war is when a guy like me looks back at things and feels the way I do.”