Lee Kuang-fu (李匡復), a 94-year-old veteran pilot, said on Saturday last week that he hopes Taiwanese cherish the democracy he risked his life to defend.
Lee was born into a family of doctors in China’s Guangdong Province in 1925.
His grandfather practiced traditional Chinese medicine, his mother was a dentist and his father was a doctor, he said, adding that because he showed early signs of intelligence, his family planned for him to also become a doctor.
Photo: Weng Yu-huang, Taipei Times
However, after the Second Sino-Japanese War began, Lee’s father urged him to join a military academy, he said.
Lee, who was just a teenager at the time, left home with his friends to join an air force youth academy in the city of Chengdu.
He never saw his parents again.
When the war ended, Lee moved to an air force officer training school in Hangzhou.
As the Chinese Civil War progressed, Lee moved with his school across the Taiwan Strait to Kaohsiung’s Gangshan District (岡山).
After he graduated, he was assigned to a transport aircraft unit.
In the 1950s, when the two sides of the Strait were still in a standoff and the air force was collecting intelligence for the US, he flew a four-engine electronic reconnaissance aircraft over China three times, Lee said.
He would leave from a base in Hsinchu on nights when the clouds covered the moon and stars, and enter China’s airspace off the coast of Fujian Province under the cover of the darkness, he said.
At the time, aircraft had rudimentary navigation equipment and no night vision, so to avoid being discovered, he had to fly around mountains at low altitudes, he said.
“The Americans gave [us] secondhand equipment, yet wanted us to risk our lives for them,” Lee said.
The chances of the air force pilots returning safely from a mission were 50-50, he said.
Since he was single, he was not as stressed as some of his teammates who had families, Lee said, adding that only at the crack of dawn, when they had left Chinese airspace, were they all able to relax.
As he displayed excellent skill as a pilot, he was later assigned to fly military transport aircraft, he said.
On multiple occasions he was assigned to transport former presidents Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國) and Yen Chia-kan (嚴家淦), as well as the air force commander, to outlying islands or foreign countries, Lee said.
In 1982, he retired as a colonel and immigrated to the US with his wife and son, he said.
More than a decade ago, when his wife passed away, he returned to Taiwan alone and now lives in a retirement home, Lee said.
Many soldiers and officers defended a free and democratic Taiwan with their lives, he said.
Today, in the face of the possibility of unification by force, younger generations must learn to cherish and protect Taiwan, he said.
Lee is still healthy and creates miniature models of musical instruments and the military aircraft he once flew.
He has “no regrets, only gratitude,” he added.
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