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behind our barn, adding a crude door and tin sheets
from a torn-down hen house for the roof. I sawed a few boards and two-by-fours and nailed in a couple of crude shelves. It was a perfectly serviceable memory room.
    I used the old egg crates we kept in the barn to store my memories. Three crates were labeled Family, Faith, and Fun. Soon I added another, for Friends. So much of my life involved airplanes that I added a fifth crate: Flying. Underlying every memory was the worry about what my wife and daughter were thinking. Had they heard yet? Are they busy constructing memory houses too?
    The image of Gaylee shimmered in my mind. I met her after graduating from Walnut Grove High School in the fall of 1950. Knowing I would have to put myself through college, I had enrolled at neighboring South Dakota State in Brookings. Right away I learned that my high school strengths—sports, girls, and hunting—wouldn’t help me academically. After finishing a quarter at Brookings, I made a wise decision: Join the military, grow up, decide what I wanted to do in life, and perhaps use the GI bill later on to help pay for college after I got some real-life experience.
    We Midwesterners thought of the military first when we were arranging our lives. My older cousin was killed in World War II, my future brothers-in-law all served in the war—one was killed in a B-17—and my brother was serving with distinction in Korea when I was serving without distinction in college. So in December 1950, I signed up for a four-year enlisted hitch in the U.S. Air Force.
    While I left South Dakota State with no degree or academic achievement, I didn’t come away empty-handed. I had made an excellent decision the first day during registration. The lines were alphabetical: A-F, G-L, M-R, and S-Z. I was a “T” and therefore in the fourth line. But I noticed the cutest girl there, Gaylee Anderson, was in the first line. I was smart enough to step to the end of the first line and stand behind her. By the time Gaylee finished registering, I had reserved a dance with her at the freshman ball that evening.
    I was immediately addicted to her effervescence and sense of humor. There was much in common between us: She was from South Dakota, of Swedish stock, and I was from Minnesota, of Norwegian stock. The “Scandinavian thing” would always be a subject of
banter. Shortly after I got home from my six years of imprisonment in Hanoi, we were at dinner with two couples from our church. As usual, there were many questions about the POW experience. In response to a question from one of our dinner partners, I said, “Without question, those were the most significant six years of my life.” He immediately looked at Gaylee and said mischievously, “What do you think about that? You were not with him during his most significant six years?” Gaylee thought a moment, and then responded, “Well, if Leo says those were the most significant years of his life, he means it.” Then she added, “Of course, he’s Norwegian. If he’d been a Swede, he could have done it in three.”
    After three months of dating and three years of letters from Air Force bases, we were married during Christmas leave in 1953. A year later we had a beautiful, healthy daughter who was 11 years old when I left for Vietnam in 1966.
    I wanted to savor memories of Gaylee, so instead of using them all up quickly in the mountain hut, I moved for a while to the box that held recollections of flying, the other passion of my life.
    It had taken me a while to become a flyer—two years as an enlisted man before the Aviation Cadet Program opened up because the Air Force needed pilots for Korea. I applied and was accepted and briefly entered a limbo where I was looked at with disdain by enlisted personnel who thought I was putting on airs by trying to become an officer—and by officers who thought the same thing.
    By January 1953, I was