The Unauthorized Autobiography: Chapter 2A

My father’s Christian name was Gunnar. Can you put “Gunnar” and “Christian” together in the same sentence? You might think Gunnar would be worshipping at the altar of Odin, wailing with the Valkyries, or thundering through the skies at the heels of Thor.

In a way, that’s just what he did.

At the age of eighteen, 1943, Gunnar enlisted in the RCAF, possibly to avoid a paternity suit. After a short, sharp basic training he was assigned to Bomber Command.

Is it possible for your name to affect the course of your life? Listen to this.

It seems the generals couldn’t resist the delicious irony of my father’s name. They made him a tail gunner. And so it was that a few short weeks after his eighteenth birthday, Gunnar Keiler found himself hurtling over the English Channel, hanging on for dear life out the ass end of a Lancaster bomber.

The Lancasters had a rear turret, the kind that rotated to let the gunner swing his four 303 machine guns in a wide arc. God forgive me, I can’t help it, but the turret looked like a turd squeezing out the bird’s rear end. And for the next year or so my father climbed into the belly of the old Lanc, stumbled to the rear, folded himself into the cramped perspex cage, and spent the rest of the night squeezing his own cheeks together for fear of fouling his nest while the Allies defecated on the interior of Europe.

And my mother always said how she was attracted to his tight buns.

So. Lancaster. Lanc, for short. The crew even gave their plane a name, Blankity-Lanc, and painted a growling mouth on the nose with symbols representing cusswords pouring out of it. Like this: ♯★ ‼&*. The Commander was unhappy about it ... too much American influence ... and put them on bread and stale water for a week, but he let them keep it.

As my dad used to say, “A good thing never lasts.” Neither tight buns nor the ecstasies of war. Gunnar’s tightly-clenched career came to a crashing end one morning over the North Sea.