Walt Witt was a senior in high school near Hyannis when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

“It was a big surprise,” he said of the news flashed across the country on December 7, 1941. “Right then everybody wanted to go fight.”

His three brothers joined the service. But Witt was persuaded to finish school--it was the middle of basketball season, he recalls. So he enlisted in the Army Air Corps in 1942.

Instead of Europe or the South Pacific, Witt ended up in the less glamorous CBI, which stood for China-Burma-India, a theater of operations dominated by oddball personalities: “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, Merrill’s Marauders, Archibald Wavell, Claire Chenault and his Flying Tigers, Chiang Kai-Shek and the like.

Witt worked as a mechanic for C-47s and converted B-24s flying over “The Hump”--or over the Himalayas--supplying most of the materials that kept China active in the war. The job was dangerous for pilots, who often found their way back to base by following a trail of wrecked aircraft. But it could be deadly for ground crew, as well. Cargo planes loaded with fuel could explode at the spark of a faulty wire.

Of course, there was a war to be won--and adventure on the side.

“I got to see all of India,” he said. “Parts of it are as beautiful as can be.”

But for a kid from Nebraska’s sand hills, the local food was a little too exotic. Fortunately, he added, the army provided decent mess halls.

Witt still asks for the army’s iconic creamed chipped beef on toast, generally known by the acronym SOS.

He was discharged in February of 1946 and returned to the farm a greatly changed young man.

“Even civilian life was different,” he said. “Before, if you traveled 50 miles from the farm it was a long way.”

But he had cross the U.S. from coast to coast at least twice--not to mention the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Subcontinent. He had also seen the great Himalaya Mountains.

At the time he wanted to forget about army life, though. It was a decade before he thought to join the VFW.

“I didn’t have any idea what I’d done with my uniform,” he recalled. “But my sister had it tucked away.”

Now he supports veterans and the memory of their time in uniform by participating in poppy sales, as well as other events.

Of the men who served with him during World War Two, he observed “there aren’t many of us left.”