COEUR d’ALENE — Earl Hyde Jr. thinks he has a pretty good shot.

He has made a pact, and the pact will ensure, as best as he can gather, that in another seven years he will celebrate his 107th birthday.

Hyde made the pact with his caregiver, Kim King, to follow her guidance and do what is best for his well-being.

And he has taken measures of his own.

“Green tea,” Hyde said Tuesday at his birthday party at the Kroc Center. “I think green tea has contributed to my good health.”

Hyde, a World War II veteran whose encounter with a German soldier with a burp gun resulted in the tip of his nose being shot off and a Purple Heart pinned to his dress uniform, was the center of attention.

A color guard representing American Legion posts 143 and 154 from Post Falls and Rathdrum stood by to present Hyde with a plaque honoring his service and his age.

Seventy-three years ago, as a commissioned Army officer in an engineering company, he earned the Purple Heart as well as a Bronze Star for building a floating bridge across the Rhine River. The bridge helped the 7th Army advance into Germany. Hyde also received five battle stars for each large engagement, including the Battle of the Bulge, in which he took part.

He doesn’t remember celebrating a birthday during the war.

“I was too busy trying to stay alive,” he said.

It’s one of the reasons why these, the latter ones, are so sweet.

Anecdotes from the war, like the story of the German with the burp gun, are what he shares these days.

“Bullets zipped all around me,” he said. They knocked off large chunks of a rock wall and snipped the tip of his nose. “I was bleeding like a stuck pig.”

He tells the story with enthusiasm and fascination.

He thought he was blind because of the gushing blood, but when it was wiped away by a medic, he was left with good vision and that Purple Heart.

It seems a jaunty tale, but his brother, Gordon Hyde, 90, knows that his older brother has used his positive attitude to cover the dark spots.

“He told me after the war that he didn’t expect to live through it,” Gordon said. “He’s one of the most positive people I know, and he’s always been like that.”

Hyde’s favorite cake is pineapple upside-down cake.

It was served at the birthday celebration attended by 70 people, many of them veterans and all of them appreciative of Hyde’s standing as a 100-year-old former GI.

“It’s such an honor to be here with someone who fought in the Battle of the Bulge,” Coeur d’Alene Mayor Steve Widmyer said. “… who fought for our freedom.”

Hyde’s son, Skip, a former RF4C Phantom pilot, remembers his father’s eccentric side.

“He was always colorful,” he said. “He was always busy.”

As an engineer in the civil service working on Army aircraft designs, Hyde spent time with UH-1 helicopter crews in Vietnam.

“He promised mom he wouldn’t do anything dangerous,” Skip said.

Instead, Hyde regularly flew on combat missions into hot LZs.

“He liked it so much he kept going back,” Skip said.

After retirement, Hyde took a train from Europe to Vladivostok, the farthest eastern terminus in Russia. Before traveling, he sent then-Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev a letter.

“He told him he was coming,” Skip said.

Hyde wondered if the welcome he got at each train terminal was due in part to a presidential announcement.

Hyde leaped into the record book with a bungee jump in New Zealand. He was the oldest to do it at the time. He took up skiing at 68 to ski the Tazman Glacier, and he became a tap dance champion. After Jacqueline, his wife of 60 years, died, Hyde moved to Idaho to be near his son.

His next goal is to be the oldest living World War II veteran.

“I myself don’t think it will be a problem,” he said.

Especially if he keeps following measures he set long ago.

He doesn’t drink cold water, sticking instead to warm water because it’s easier on the insides, he said. And he doesn’t sweat the small stuff.

“Don’t let the little things bother you,” he said.

For men who seek one of his secrets of longevity:

“If you don’t have a good lady, find one,” he said. “They sure play an important part.”