This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything

here on this show, including your

stories, send them to our American Stories.com. They're some of our favorites. And today, we have one of

our regular contributors, Joy Neal Kidney, and she's about to share her uncle's story. This piece is titled

Donald Wilson, The Humble Hero.

Most of the heroes among us are just ordinary people, like my Uncle Don.

I knew him as mom's brother, who lived way out in Washington State and who liked fishing.

When I was a kid growing up on an Iowa farm, the best part of getting a

fat letter from Aunt Rose was a picture of Uncle Don with a big salmon. Mom's older brother

had been a commercial fisherman. Even when he later took a job with the Washington Department of

Transportation, he's still headed out with the Washington Department of Transportation,

he still headed out with his boat on Willa Bay every chance he got.

So every fishing season, we get snapshots of him,

with a huge fish hanging from one hand and a fishing pole in the other.

Dressed in faded jeans and a plaid shirt, usually a vest with lots of pockets.

Sometimes a U.S. Navy cap, either the USS Hancock or the Yorktown.

Although mom rarely mentioned the war, World War II, she told us that her brother Don, who grew up in the small town of Dexter, Iowa, had been a sailor on the famous Yorktown, the one lost during a big battle in the Pacific Ocean, and that

he had had to tread water for an hour before being rescued.

Every few years, Uncle Don and Aunt Rose would drive back to Iowa to visit.

I was unaware of all the other combat he'd survived, all the heartache he'd been through,

...