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At 90, Bella Vistan Don Burri can now reflect on the fact that he darn near didn’t get to celebrate any Veterans Days, let alone this weekend’s.

A Marine Corps aviator, he was a spanking new fighter pilot flying one of the Marine’s hottest planes - a brand new FG1 Corsair made by Goodyear, noted for its gull-shaped wings and 16-foot-long nose.

Leading a flight of seven Corsairs in from a gunnery training mission off the Florida coast at approximately 11 a.m. April 28,

1944, Burri took the group up to 13,000 feet to avoid an incoming storm. He found a hole in the skyand dived, followed by the other planes.

Leveling off at under 1,000 feet, Burri’s wingman acted as if he were smoking. Burri thought it meant they were moving fast. It turned out the wingman was telling Burri his plane was on fire under the fuselage.

He struggled to make it to a lake, where he could ditch, southwest of an airfield in Palatka, Fla. Shortly after that, the plane’s propeller froze. Burri thought he had the plane level as he exited, but it pitched to the left as he jumped out, and he found himself sitting on the bottom of the wing. He then cleared the aircraft.

By the time he jumped, he was at 300 feet. He pulled the cord on his parachute, made one turn and hit the ground. He later learned from a rescuer that he formed a crater three and a half feet long and 18 inches deep.

“It knocked me silly and then some,” Burri said.

His wingman, Lt. Nelson E. Brown, circled overhead, directing the rescue effort until his fuel ran low and he had to head home. On the ground, Burri kept passing in and out of consciousness, and thoughts of his family kept coming to him.

His burning plane was less than 80 feet away, the flames inching toward him until they lapped at the soles of his feet. Regainingconsciousness, he stomped out the fire and crawled out of the hole. He finally had to get up and move away, holding his back with one arm and his stomach area with the other.

The rescue team arrived at about 2:20 p.m. They had no idea where Burri was, and he could not yell because of his injuries. Eventually, he was able to walk to the rescuers and asked, “Who are you looking for?”

“Some (expletive) pilot out here who can’t fly these things,” came the reply from the chief petty officer in charge. Calling the other rescuers over, they made a makeshift stretcher out of a couple of tree branches and Burri’s parachute shrouds, wrapped the chute tightly around him and headed for the airfield at Palatka.

They laid Burri on a slab and the flight doctor, a Naval commander, came into the room, Burri said. A fellow at his feet gave the doctor some of Burri’s personal information, such as his name and serial number as well as his next of kin’s contact information.

Burri heard the doctor ask where he was born.

“St. Joseph, Mo.,” came the reply in a squeaky voice.

“Who said that?” the doctor asked. The guy standing at Burri’s feet was laughing.

“The doctor came over to me and started rolling me out of the chute,” Burri said. “I looked at him and said, ‘Sir, what was the paper you were filling out?’

“He said, ‘Son, that was your first death certificate.’ I ‘thanked’ him in no uncertain terms. It ticked me off that he thought Ihad died,” Burri said.

The doctor gave him a shot, and they headed to a hospital in Jacksonville, Fla. After several days, Burri’s back was X-rayed and compression fractures were found in the sixth, seventh, eighth and 10th thoracic vertebrae. He was in a body cast until October.

Burri was transferred to Great Lakes Naval Hospital in Chicago, where he refused surgery to fuse his back. He said he was feeling well at that point, so he returned to duty in December 1944 and was sent to Cherry Point, N.C.

Before reporting, he went home on leave to Omaha, Neb. His girlfriend, Norma, whom he had been in contact with since before entering the service, was there for Christmas Eve. He asked her to marry him. They were married June 14, 1945.

He tried flying once again, but after sitting on a four- or five-hour flight in a B-25, he was paralyzed in his seat.

“They had a heck of a time getting me out,” Burri said.

He spent the next year recuperating until he officially retired from the Navy on Feb. 1, 1946. But he remained in a back brace until 1955, when he made up his mind that he was going to get rid of it.

He did just that through hard work and physical therapy.

Burri said he had a “hell of a time” getting a job after the war. He worked for an insurance company, a glass company and then in sales for a door company.

Burri said when the troops came home from World War II, no one cared.

“We had trouble finding a job,” he said. “It wastough.”

In 1955, he was reading the Wall Street Journal about “piggybacking” truck trailers onto railcars for transport across country. He asked his dad, who was the assistant treasurer for Union Pacific Railroad, if they were going to be doing that. No, his dad said, but they were thinking about something like it.

Union Pacific started a motor freight company in June 1955, and without his dad’s help, Burri got a job there. He called his dad and told him he’d better behave because his office was right under his dad’s.

Burri eventually worked up to be chief clerk to the general manager of the motor freight company until 1971, when it was merged with the railroad’s trailer container company. He and Norma retired in 1984 to Bella Vista.

Their son, William, resides in Omaha with his family. Their daughter, Marsha, died in 2009.

Veterans Day means a lot to Burri because his father was a World War I Army veteran. Burri is the oldest life member of the Benson American Legion Post in Omaha, where he was post commander in 1947.

He came to appreciate his time in the service when he made a trip on an Honor Flight last year to Washington, D.C. The oneday trip involved touring the memorials in the area.

On the return flight, the ramp wouldn’t work after the plane landed at Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport. They deplaned an hour and a half late.

“We got to the head of the escalator, and the entrance foyer (below) was packed with people waiting to welcome them home,” he said.

The crowd cleared a path for them, he said.

“I was absolutely pooped,” Burri recalled. “But we got walking down that path, and the kids were reaching out and thanking us for saving the United States of America for our kids. I cried.

“I’ll never forget that as long as I live,” said the veteran, who can still fit in his Marine Corps dress uniform 66 years after he retired from the service.

Burri said he would have stayed in the service after the war, if it wasn’t for his nearly fatal fall to earth.

News, Pages 1 on 11/07/2012