This is the last of a two-part story based on a conversation with Dr. Noel McKey of Utica, a retired chiropractor, mayor and county supervisor who will be 90 on April 22.

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Even before Dr. Noel McKey came face to face with a Japanese soldier in the jungles of the Philippines during World War II, he said he had already been cured of constipation just knowing the enemy was out there in the pitch, black darkness.

American troops had landed in a rice paddy, on an LST or something like that, and though Manila was called the Gem of the Orient, that night there was a typhoon and you couldn’t see anything except when the lightning flashed.

“And I was looking into the face of a Jap,” Dr. McKey recalled, “and I said, ‘Hey, Bud,’ and he said, ‘Cigarette, Joe?’ and I said, ‘Oh, yeah.”

He handed the enemy soldier his entire pack, saying “Keep ’em. I don’t need ’em. I’m quitting everything right now, and he got up and walked away.”

Dr. McKey’s accounts of his wartime adventures are not unlike those of Gomer Pyle and Sgt. Bilko from the Hollywood wars in later years. He remembers the events with a keen sense of humor and wit that sometimes borders on the ridiculously funny.

After high school in Utica, he graduated from Texas Chiropractic College and had a good practice in Kilgore, but the draft threatened to change all that in the fall of 1941.

He thought about joining the Army and getting his service over with because “I didn’t think those Japanese were going to be any trouble. That’s before they made their statement.” He was advised to join in Texas, because that state provided its veterans with good pensions. He signed on the dotted line in Dallas and was sent to San Antonio.

“We were all in line. I had my best suit on and my $2 hat,” he said. “A corporal came by. I didn’t know it at the time. I said, ‘Say, just a minute, soldier. I want to ask you a question.’”

“WHO TOLD YOU YOU COULD TALK TO ME?”

“Didn’t nobody tell me.”

“WHAT GAVE YOU THE IDEA THAT YOU COULD TALK TO ME?”

McKey thought, “There’s something wrong with this guy here.”

“YOU DON’T JUST WALK UP AND TALK TO A CORPORAL.”

“I said, ‘Well, how do you talk to him? I wanted to ask you how long we are going to be here.’”

The corporal said, “You’re going to leave right now. You’re going to the barber shop.”

McKey said, “Well, I just got a trim before I came down here,” and he said, “You’re going to get another one.” When McKey said he wasn’t going to pay for it, the officer said, “You won’t have to. We’re going to take it out of your pay.”

He decided they meant business and, when he sat in the chair, the barber asked where he was from, then said, “Oh, Lord, I suppose you want to just let it grow?” And, McKey told him he had just had it trimmed.

“He said, ‘Well, OK, BZZZZZZZZZZ.’ At that time, I had wavy hair. He sheared a big wad off one side, then off the other, and I said I didn’t want my hair cut that way.” The barber told him not to open his mouth again, and two MPs came and stood beside the chair “and he sheared me.”

“I got up and put my hat on and it fell plum down to my eyes,” he said. “By then I was getting scared,” for with all that cutting there was no telling what they would do next.

He remembers another episode when he was one of four recruits assigned to dig a latrine. He didn’t know what it was, what it looked like, or what it was used for — though a whiff from another one gave him a clue. He was handed a shovel and told it was to be 4 feet deep and a foot wide. When he asked what it was for, he was told it was for urinating and defecating, terms a country boy didn’t understand.

The next day the recruits were on the parade grounds, and the officer called, “ATTENTION!” As a young man, McKey had worked as an usher in the ritzy Majestic Theater in Dallas where he had learned about close order drills, right face, left face and about face, and as none of the others knew about such, McKey said, “I thought I was going to get promoted,” so he stopped, explaining why and adding that it would just wear out his shoes.

He was ordered to hold his rifle over his head, go to the other end of the parade grounds and see how fast he could come back. Then he was ordered to run both ways, “and I was give plum out and then the corporal said, ‘Fall down and give me 10.’”

Ten what? McKey thought. He had never heard of pushups, but another soldier showed him.

“I did one, and said, ‘Man, I can’t push myself up. What am I going to do next?’ and, he said, ‘Ten more,’ and I said, ‘I can’t do that,’ and he said, ‘Run to the other end of the parade grounds,’ and I said, ‘Just a minute. I think I can get another one here,’ and I did those pushups. And that was my basic training.”

His salvation came the day when the men were asked, “Is there anybody here who can type?” At Utica High, he had taken typing in order to get out of history, “and I could get 42 words a minute.”

He was sent to the company clerk where he sat “knocking those things out” and was then transferred to a hospital. Again, his schooling paid off. As a chiropractor, he had learned to develop X-rays. As a result of his two specialties, typing and developing X-rays, he spent four years in the Army and never pulled KP duty, was never in charge of quarters and was skipped over several grades to the rank of first sergeant.

During his army career — he was discharged in 1945 when the war ended — his assignments included Oklahoma, Texas, Michigan and California before being sent to the Philippines. After the war, he came back to Mississippi and lived in Natchez and Vicksburg before returning to his hometown of Utica.

Dr. McKey said he probably got his sense of humor from his father, for his mother was more serious: “She was 5 feet tall and could whip you in a minute, I guarantee you, and if she said don’t run, you better halt right in your tracks. My daddy was the kindest gentleman I ever knew. Daddy had a sense of humor, had to have that to stay around Mama.”

Dr. McKey is very much a part of Utica and said, “I’m getting to be the oldest person in town, though there are two older than me.”

Since he has outlived just about everybody and there won’t be anybody around to be his pallbearers, he said, he and Pinkey, his wife, have decided to give their bodies to science.

“Well, I thought there must be something in my body that would be worth somebody taking a look at: ‘Hey, I never saw a knot like that before. Let’s cut it open and see what it is. Maybe it’s a time capsule,’” he can imagine students saying.

If so, it will be a grand and fascinating one — with none other like it.

Gordon Cotton is an author and historian who lives in Vicksburg.