COEUR d’ALENE — Earl Hyde’s left leg is 2 inches shorter than his right leg.

It’s no secret, but Hyde wonders how the Army for 30 years didn’t know about it.

Hyde, who turns 99 Monday, became a second lieutenant in time for World War II and spent a combined three decades in the U.S. Army, retiring in 1974.

At a time when the military was rejecting men for having flat feet, Hyde wonders aloud how they admitted a young ROTC cadet who tilted hard left since a childhood accident damaged his hip and growth plate.

If the Army knew, Hyde has an inkling how it would react.

“They’d be mad,” the Coeur d’Alene resident said. “And I like a mad Army.”

Born and raised in a place he calls “Mizzourah” — the state of Missouri — Hyde set out to be an engineer, an endeavour he pursued for much of his life, but a few detours including three years spent rolling from North Africa to Germany during the Second World War dictated his future.

His goals are simpler these days.

“I want to become the oldest living World War II veteran,” Hyde said.

At the pace he’s going, he believes it’s possible.

“Another 10 or 12 years should do it,” he said.

Wearing a black baseball cap with a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star ribbon — like rectangular wings gracing each side of a silver first lieutenant’s bar — Hyde will celebrate his 99th birthday at the Coeur d’Alene Kroc Center where he attends three times a week for a regimen of exercises.

“I got about eight machines I work out on, for about an hour,” he said.

Otherwise, he lives in a small room at a Coeur d’Alene assisted living facility sharing stories with his caretaker, Kim King, and doing crossword puzzles.

“He’s just phenomenal,” King said.

He can’t walk because his legs, including the short one, finally gave out on him for good, he said.

Which brings him to the topic of legs.

An automobile accident when he was 10 sent him flying through the window of a 1928 Chevrolet Town Car, smashing his hip, knocking out his front teeth and generally leaving him with a permanent lean.

“My spine looked like a corkscrew,” he said.

He still wears the fake teeth he was fitted with.

“I can’t believe my head didn’t grow since then,” he said.

To prevent walking with a limp — he couldn’t bear being referred to as a cripple for the rest of his life — he spent hours forcing himself to stand straight.

“It hurt something fierce,” he said. “But I did that by myself.”

Hyde’s father was instrumental in developing the Ferris wheel, and designed and built the fanciful amusement features in small-town Illinois, not far from Hyde’s Missouri home. Wanting to follow in dad’s footsteps, Hyde set out for the University of Missouri to become a civil engineer. He joined the ROTC program — which promised some pay — and took up college jobs to pay for his education, but when the war broke out, he dropped his studies and went.

“In my fourth year of college, Pearl Harbor happened,” he said.

His 45th Infantry Division landed in Casablanca, trained in northern Africa and participated in battles as it pushed across Corsica and mainland Italy.

Gen. George Patton and his troops were nearby, Hyde recalled.

“We could always tell when we got close to Patton’s Army because all the GIs had polished boots,” he said.

Hyde shipped to France as part of an invasion at Sainte-Maxime and the 45th would eventually fight its way across Europe to southern Germany.

“I was losing so many of my buddies, I was afraid I was never going to get home,” Hyde said. “I was so grateful to be alive every day.”

Near the end of the war, Hyde was sent on a reconnaissance mission with a sergeant and another lieutenant to check if a bridge could be used as a tank crossing, he said. He noticed two Germans skirting the road ahead carrying a machine gun and ordered the sergeant to high ground where the three men watched the Germans waiting to ambush the Americans in the Jeep.

They killed one of the Germans with a long shot from a carbine, then checked on the other German soldier.

“He was very much alive,” Hyde said.

The soldier opened up with the machine gun.

“I almost got it,” he said.

Bullets smeared a rock wall and zinged past, “all around me,” he said. “I was bleeding like a stuck pig.”

A doctor at an aid station stemmed the bleeding and learned that Hyde was peppered with rock fragments.

“The only bullet that came near me took off the tip of my nose,” Hyde said. “The doctor said he could cover (the scar) with a Band-Aid.”

He laughs about it.

“That’s how I got my Purple Heart,” he said.

After the war he finished his bachelor’s degree in engineering and a master’s in business at the University of Missouri, married his wife Jacqueline — the couple was married 60 years — returned to the Army to develop gunship helicopters for its war in Vietnam, and retired with the rank equivalent of a major general.

Hyde traveled the world, became a tap dance champion, took up skiing in his 60s and after Jacqueline died, he moved west to be closer to his son, an Army Air National Guard pilot. His grandson too is in the Army.

“It’s become kind of a family tradition,” he said.

For a life as big as Hyde’s, his world is packed into a small room where he sleeps on a cot, the blankets tucked and ready to bounce a quarter. Jacqueline is in a photo surrounded by an ornate, lighted frame. The other photographs on his wall — there are many — are taped. He spends his time writing wonderful letters, King said, watching the news, listening to music and completing crossword puzzles.

“Some of these little box puzzles are difficult,” he said.

Much of what he does each day is feel grateful, just as he did each day during the war.

“I have never, ever been as happy with this part of my life as I am now,” Hyde said.

And there’s that goal of being the oldest veteran that looms ahead like a corolla.

“I keep telling Kim, I’m not going to die,” Hyde said. “I’m just going to keep going.”