Bing Wong with his legion uniform at his home in Burnaby.

When Chinese-Canadian veteran Bing C. Wong thinks back to his days in World War II, his most vivid memories are of the times he stood at the shooting range during training, wondering what would happen when the real shooting started.

“The thing I remember most is saying to myself, ‘I hope I won’t be scared,’ ” he told China Daily. “That thought really bothered me. I told myself, ‘I hope I can go out there and fight, and I won’t be like a coward.’ ”

Born in Vancouver in 1924 and raised on an island off the coast of British Columbia, Wong was 18 years old when he joined the Canadian Army. He is one of the youngest Canadian veterans of the war. In a photo of him taken during guerilla training in Saskatchewan in central Canada, he is standing in uniform next to two older soldiers with a sunny, exuberant smile.

Wong wore a badge on his uniform for his excellence as a rifle marksman. In 1945, he became one of around 80,000 Canadians who volunteered to participate in the attack of the Japanese Home Islands, which was supposed to take place in November.

He was also scared of heights, Wong said, and didn’t know how the commanders would get him out of the airplane once he started parachute-training in the United States. He worried that he would fear the shooting and wasn’t even sure he wanted to go to war, but in the end there was one thing that gave him the necessary courage.

“It was the overwhelming feeling for most of the Chinese at the time,” he said. “Nobody wanted to go out there and get killed, but we had to go to show everybody that the Chinese weren’t cowards.”