He’s in his 60s.

And he’s been to war twice already.

But if he got called ...

“The next time I go to war,” he says, “they’ll give me permission to do whatever I need to do to kill as many of the enemy as I can with whatever it takes to win the battle with the least loss of American lives.

“And that was not the battle plan in Vietnam.”

One of his roommates was killed. Two others were on the first planeload of prisoners of war who were freed.

He’ll never forget what happened to them or so many others, just as he’ll never forget his first visit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, The Wall in Washington.

He thought that the memories, the pain, the tears were under control.

“You think you’ve gotten rid of that stuff,” he says. “In war you’re in a defensive mood. Your emotions don’t come back at you.

“But you go to that Wall. You rub your fingers over those names of the guys who were your friends, and ... ”

He hesitates.

“That’s when the emotion comes at you.”

But it’s not with him every day.

No more than he thinks daily about those 125 missions he flew in a Phantom jet delivering bombs and rockets to targets in enemy territory.

It’s been a quarter of a century since Saigon fell to the communists and became Ho Chi Minh City, and he’s busy every day running Salisbury Lumber and Supply Co., restoring the home where his wife, Kay, grew up on Maupin Avenue and thinking about his children and a grandchild on the way and all the other things that cram life full.

But Vietnam embittered him, made him distrust politicians, changed his priorities.

He lost his parents in his mid-teens and worked his way through high school. He was drafted at 19 during the Korean conflict and served for two years in an honor guard at Third Army Headquarters in Atlanta. He came out, worked his way to an economics degree at Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio, and got a good job.

“All that left me with little stomach for people who complain and want something given to them,” he says.

And it left him 28 years old and restless.

“I had no family. I wanted to fly. So I volunteered for the Navy. It was 1962. Vietnam had been going on. We were advisers. President Johnson was trying to get us in but couldn’t find a reason.”

Until the incident in the Tonkin Gulf.

“It was 1964. We were on the aircraft carrier Ranger out of San Diego on our way to Hawaii for a stop and a friendly visit and some fun and games when we got word to continue to the Philippines. We were going to bomb North Vietnam. Now many people believe the Tonkin Gulf incident was a contrivance to give Johnson an excuse to involve us in the situation in Vietnam.

“We were fighters. That’s what they’re geared for. We kind of looked forward to it. We didn’t like the communists any more than they liked us.”

The aircraft carrier launched missions at Point Yankee, the 17th parallel, the latitude between North and South Vietnam.

“I flew as many as two missions every day for a while. Once we got enough people, that gradually diminished.”

They returned to the States and he reconnected with Salisbury native Kay Goodman whom he had met in San Diego.

“She was a school teacher. I was a Navy flier. I thought she was the most naive woman I’d ever met. She thought I was too cocky.”

But they were married in August of 1965, and a month later he flew to Norfolk to leave for Vietnam with the Enterprise, the nation’s first nuclear carrier.

“I hugged Kay goodbye in the living room and left for another nine months.

“We were trained to do high level supersonic intercepts on aircraft coming in at supersonic speeds. Evidently that’s what the high command thought war was going to be. They weren’t thinking guerrilla warfare.

“But there were no high level supersonic intercepts. It was all World War II dog fighting. They’d sneak up behind us because they had radar coverage. We were over their country so we didn’t have any radar control on the ground. The only radar we had was on the aircraft carrier in the Tonkin Gulf.”

He became bitter, he says, because Washington “wouldn’t give us a chance to win the thing.” The crews knew they had what they needed to win, so they didn’t understand what was going on.

They’d be told, “You can’t shoot at that plane until it shoots at you. You can’t shoot at those convoys on that road.”

No civilian, he says, should be allowed to make those decisions unless he’s been to war.

“They had no concept, no understanding ... It made me aware of the incompetence of politicians ... and it embittered me against government because we would be flying over a missile site or a place where we knew they were building a missile site, and we’d wire Washington for permission to bomb it, and the response would be no.”

He remembers that happened once, “and within a month, we had two planes shot down by their missiles, and then McNamara came on the news like he didn’t know anything about it and said, ‘We’re going to wipe that site out. We’re going to wipe it out.’ ”

The politicians, he says, “let it drag on, drag on, and drag on, let the communists get to the young people.

“Washington was afraid the Chinese were going to get into it. We knew on that aircraft carrier that the Chinese weren’t coming in. They couldn’t wage nuclear war at that time. The disappointment was not being allowed to do what we could have done.”

He had planned to go to law school when he got out of service, but marrying Kay changed that.

“I didn’t have a family. We wanted to be near her family — and have our family here.”

So he joined her father, Ree Goodman, in his business and soon had established the home he’d always wanted.

Did Vietnam shape his life?

He met Kay because Vietnam put him in San Diego.

“And it gave me experiences very few men encounter. I’m not saying it’s good for you, but it makes a better man out of you if you live through it. Your priorities change. The little things that bothered you don’t bother you any more.”

Larry Spencer, a friend, was a prisoner for seven years in the same camp with John McCain.

“When he got back, I asked him what he wanted to do. He said, ‘I just want to sit on a park bench and watch the people go by.’ ... It took all the excitement out of Larry. He just wanted quiet and stillness.”

Wilson survived, launching from or landing on a carrier 325 times — and that experience gave him determination.

“Even though it embittered me, it was still an adventure. I didn’t get up every morning and take it personally.

“When they throw you off of that deck at sunrise, you leave with some trepidation, and that’s why it’s so good to get back to a good meal and a Marilyn Monroe movie.”