Roger Richards grew up in an old Ohio railroad town. He would putter around on motor scooters. He worked on cars and built model boats.

But the place the Willard native really wanted to go was high above the clouds.

“I used to ride my bicycle out to the airport, watch them take off and land,” Richards, 84, recently remembered in his East Naples home.

“There was some local flying out of this little dirt strip, a mile out of town, and I bummed a ride once and after that (...) I spent all my lawn-mowing money going for airplane rides.”

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The first time, Richards went up with a female pilot. When they landed her husband chocked the plane’s wheels.

“She says, ‘I think we’ve got us a pilot here,’ ” Richards recalled with a chuckle. “And I thought, ‘Well, I’ll never be able to afford this. I can’t fly these expensive machines, you know.’ But I got exposed. That’s all it took.”

Richards was hooked.

He joined the Air Force after high school, finished his pilot training after the Korean War ended and eventually found himself flying F-100 Super Sabres in the Vietnam War.

Among his responsibilities during his tour from 1962 and 1965: Stand by for a week once a month at an “alert pad” in Taiwan in case the U.S. decided to go to war with China and elected to drop thermonuclear bombs on Chinese targets.

There, hidden in the shadows, a handful of planes with thundering weapons strapped to them sat and waited quietly.

“And if a war came, they’d ring the bell — we’d live nearby — then we’d run inside the tunnel, climb in the airplane, start it up,” Richards said. “And you had a war plan, so you got in the cockpit, you opened it up to see if you’re going to go to war.”

Richards knew that if that call ever came, chances were slim he’d make it back alive.

“Theoretically you could escape the bomb,” he said. “It was marginal, but you could escape the blast, because you’re going away as fast as you can.”

If a pilot successfully dodged the blast, he would go to the “safe area” and bail out, Richards said.

“And you wait,” he said. “You wait and you don’t go on your radio for two weeks.”

For Richards those orders never came. But he remembers hearing about one pilot who came close.

“I was told they made a mistake on the orders,” Richards said. “They screwed them up and they gave them to the crew, the ones in the cockpit, saying: 'Go.' ”

Sure enough, the orders matched and the pilot, still in disbelief, was directed to ready for takeoff, Richards said.

The chocks were pulled and the plane taxied out.

Then, at the last second, the error was discovered, Richards said.

“They ran a pickup truck into the nose of the airplane,” he said, “and stopped it.”

To be sure, Richards had close calls, too.

Twice he had to initiate emergency landings because of hydraulic failure.

“They didn’t sound like much,” Richards said. “You had two flight control hydraulic systems and you could lose one and you didn’t worry too much. But if you lost a second one, then the control stick in the cockpit seized wherever it was.”

The pilot then would pull a mechanical lever that would drop a wind-driven hydraulic pump, generating enough hydraulic power to at least control the plane and land it, he said.

During one of his emergency landings, Richards was flying in a type of airplane that — once it experienced hydraulic failure — only had three minutes of engine running time before it seized.

“And if the engine seized, you’re a streamline brick,” he said.

Fortunately for Richards, he was close enough to Edwards Air Force Base in Southern California to land safely on its nearby dry lake beds.

He still shrugs off the severity and seriousness of the impromptu landing.

“It’s part of the business. You might drink an extra beer at the bar,” he quipped.

When Richards wasn’t ferrying planes back and forth between the U.S. and Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines or standing by at the hidden airstrip in Taiwan, he was stationed at a different “alert pad,” this one in Thailand.

For one week each month, Richards was sent there to be on call for rescue missions involving downed pilots in the CIA’s secret war in Laos.

“We’d just fly air cover and try to keep the bad guys from getting to the wreck site,” Richards said. “Until they get a Jolly Green Giant in there — the chopper — and get them out. If they were alive.”

The fact that those missions often were not just shrouded in secrecy but also conducted under the cover of night did not make things any easier for Richards and his fellow soldiers.

“We never knew who was fighting what for who,” he said. “Really, you never knew. It was a hidden war.”

You had to be “discreet” during those missions, Richards said.

Other times you had to be fast on your feet. Literally.

After the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964 — a confrontation between U.S. destroyers and North Vietnamese forces that led to increased American military involvement in Southeast Asia — Richards received a call while back home in Alexandria, Louisiana.

“You got 45 minutes to get airborne,” Richards remembered he was told. “He said, ‘Just grab your toothbrush and bring yourself out. And you got a takeoff time. You’re already late.’ ”

Richards flew about five missions into Vietnam, providing air cover for choppers spraying Agent Orange, and logged close to 3,000 hours of flight during his service.

After 14 years in the military and rising to the rank of captain, Richards worked as a pilot for American Airlines for 27 years.

Fear never really crossed his mind during his service in Vietnam, Richards said.

“You didn’t worry,” he said. “I never worried until we had a briefing.”

Instead there were instances of retrospection.

When Richards took off for Southeast Asia after being called following the Gulf of Tonkin episode, a fellow soldier wished him “good hunting.”

Richards said he thinks the comment was just meant to be dramatic, but for him it led to a moment of pause.

“How’d I get into this position?” Richards remembered asking himself then. “I’m still this kid building model airplanes.”