He flew transport planes behind enemy lines throughout World War II, but Stan Sinclair has a quick response if you ask him why he didn't want to be a glamorous fighter pilot.
"I didn't want to get shot at any more than I had to," he says.
Not that his plane never took fire from enemy guns. Once on a flight over Romania, his C-47 transport was perforated in a barrage of anti-aircraft fire after it got blown off course over Romania and passed too close to a well-protected German position.
Flak exploded around the plane, but it wasn't until after he cleared the area that Sinclair realized shrapnel had penetrated the cockpit and sliced off the tip of his middle left finger.
Despite a raft of medals for his service, including the Distinguished Flying Cross, Sinclair didn't get a Purple Heart for an injury he will take to his grave. He says he doesn't care.
"You don't get a Purple Heart for that, not in those days, anyway," he says, sounding a little embarrassed for having even mentioned it.
Born in Missouri but raised in Selah from the age of 4, Sinclair joined the Army Air Corps in January 1941, nearly a year before the Japanese surprise attack at Pearl Harbor propelled America into the war.
Before he joined, Sinclair had been making apple boxes for a living. It wasn't a bad job for a farm boy just a few years out of high school, but it wasn't a career.
Lacking the required college experience to get into flight school, Sinclair found his growing interest in becoming a pilot blocked before he successfully "challenged the course" by passing a series of tests.
By the end of the war, he was Capt. Sinclair, farm boy turned flyboy who had flown out of exotic places he never dreamed of, often over enemy territory.
Out of hundreds of flights moving cargo and troops, 76 qualified as combat missions. Coming over an intense six-month period in 1944, all but three of those flights were at night, mostly in support of partisans fighting the Nazis in the Balkans.
"No lights, no nothin'" is how Sinclair describes most of those flights, airlifting wounded Allied airmen and guerrilla fighters in and out of mountainous terrain that would challenge fliers even in daytime. Once he hauled a load of mules. Another time he dropped British paratroopers over Greece, one of the few times he had benefit of fighter cover.
By the end of the war, he was flying air-sea rescue missions out of Brazil, which sounds more exotic than it was, he says.
Mustered out five days after Japan surrendered, Sinclair returned to Selah and took a crack at a couple of careers before finally settling on a long career in real estate. He retired in 1980.
One of those early missteps -- it was about 1948 -- was a crop-dusting business that lasted about a year before it went belly-up. After that, he never flew a plane again.
"Been a passenger a few times" on commercial flights, he says, adding quickly, "That's not the same thing, of course. It really isn't."
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