Lt. A. William Amundson Jr. has stared down Hitler, killer thunderstorms and Japanese fighter pilots.
On Monday he stared down a different challenge — 450 boisterous eighth-graders at Lake Middle School in Woodbury.
The 95-year-old retired Navy pilot from Cottage Grove was a special guest at the school for Veteran’s Day. He shared a few life lessons from his time in the Pacific Theater.
“War is horrible. It’s terrible,” he said. “I’ve been there. I’ve seen it. You don’t want to see it. I’m a Christian man and the Bible says we ought to love each other. That’s the message I want to leave with you.”
Amundson, an heir to the now defunct Amundson Boat Works in White Bear Lake, joined the service on March 10, 1943, hoping to become a pilot, even though he’d never even been on an airplane.
The first leg of his journey was training, which took him from Minneapolis to Texas to California to Kansas and to Florida before he got his wings in 1944.
“I absolutely loved it,” he said, describing the loops and snap rolls of acrobatics. He didn’t love the three months of boot camp, though, in which he said he “was hungry and tired all the time.”
Flying in fog was frightening, as was flying without lights, using only instruments in the dark and navigating by the stars, he said.
He described one incident where the instructor rolled the aircraft before Amundson was ready. He wasn’t strapped in and had to cling to the seat to keep from falling out.
“That was the last time I forgot to buckle my seat belt,” he said laughing.
When approaching bad weather, his instructor told him to find the saddle, or the clear area between the thunderheads. The planes didn’t have oxygen, so they couldn’t fly over the storm. Once, finding no saddle, they flew through the storm. He said it took both of them to keep the plane upright. Another time, they opted to fly under the storm.
“It rained like the dickens,” he said. “But at least it was smooth.”
He ended up flying C54 cargo planes to the Pacific. He would bring supplies in and wounded soldiers out.
“We saved a lot of lives,” he said.
He may have had a hand in delivering the atomic bombs that were dropped over Japan, something that still bothers him.
“They didn’t tell us what we were carrying,” he said. “They tell us we may have delivered parts of the atomic bomb. As human beings we’ve gotten very good at killing each other.”
In 1946 he was given the option of re-enlisting or getting out. He chose to go back to civilian life and to Margaret, his high school sweetheart.
“I got out Jan. 1, 1946, and was married three days later. She didn’t let me look around!” Together they had four children and now have 21 great-grandchildren. Margaret died four years ago.
Amundson served on the Cottage Grove City Council for 10 years, is currently an elder at Woodbury Baptist Church and had a business called Century Circuits by the St. Paul airport that has since been sold.