The artillery barrages terrified Alex Sim more than anything.
The small-arms fighting, the rifles, the rest of the Second World War, he could handle.
But, it was those nights when he sat crouched in a trench, sitting, waiting, hoping, as bombs and mortar exploded around him, that troubled him the most.
And, even after he came home, months after the war ended, those sounds still terrified him.
“I guess the worst part about coming home that I can remember, after World War II, was during Calgary Stampede,” Sim told KTW.
“We were down at the Stampede and it was Saturday night, which was the night of the end of the Stampede at that time.
“All of a sudden, the fireworks went off and, just for a minute or so, maybe two, the whole world exploded.
“You’re back in World War II. ‘What the hell is this?’
“I can remember, it was sort of a split decision. Do I go to ground in the ditch or do I just keep walking because everybody else kept walking?
“When the rockets and fireworks went off, it was just like an artillery barrage.”
It was like that for the first little while, Sim said.
He doesn’t remember having a problem adjusting to civilian life again, but it was far from simple and it didn’t happen overnight.
He doesn’t regret anything he did during the war, but he will never forget it either. He would never forget the friends he lost, the things he saw, the things other people did.
He remembers and, sometimes, it’s hard.
“You wondered, I guess, and sometimes I still wonder, how the hell was I so lucky and survived the whole thing and so many other people didn’t?” an emotional Sim asked.
“I can remember one night, I scooped up a little handful of sand and shoved it into a little bottle we had in our ration packs and the thought ran through my mind that I wasn’t going to survive World War II.
“I never thought that I would be killed. It had just been a long five or six months already and, actually, at that stage, in the back of my mind, I thought, ‘I’ll be too old to survive World War II. It will go on and on and on and I’ll never survive it.’ Just those dumb things that happened.”
It troubles Sim to remember the young stretcher bearer who died from blood loss, shot five times, but never seeking medical attention, instead continuing to cart the injured until his body gave out.
He remembers the Belgians and the French dragging women into town squares, those who had gone on dates with German soldiers, and shaving their heads bald as they sobbed into their hands.
He remembers when the door came down on D-Day, when he stormed out of the boat and onto the beaches of Normandy as hundreds died around him.
He remembers being unable to attend his father’s funeral, the anguish of finding out about it while he was overseas.
He remembers sailing into the Halifax harbour in 1946 and being greeted by hordes of people, family and well-wishers celebrating their return.
Sim also remembers returning from the Korean War, what he calls the “forgotten war,” to a single man, a fellow veteran, waiting for them on the tarmac.
Amongst all that, though, he also remembers rescuing a man from a plane that crashed near the Canadian front as the Germans closed in around him.
“We finally saved a guy,” Sim said.
He doesn’t remember coming home involving post-tramautic stress disorder or anything like it. He and his fellow vets have talked about it.
Maybe it was there, but they put it out of their minds.
Sim remembers it all, sometimes to the point of being overwhelmed.
But, he’ll take those memories and, if he had it to do over again, he’d live every one again.
Even the artillery exploding around him.
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