Peter Bailey lives a humble life in Perth's northern suburbs.
He's 97, but has the firm handshake of a much younger man.
Mr Bailey doesn't drink alcohol, keeps active by walking around the local shops and doesn't mind getting on Facebook to stay in touch with his two daughters, six grandchildren and 14 great grandchildren.
But this is only a small part of his remarkable life.
He is one of only a handful of men still alive who fought in the Battle of Dunkirk, one of the most significant confrontations of World War II.
'I had never seen a dead body before'
It was 1940 and Mr Bailey was just 20.
"It wasn't very pleasant. It was no picnic, I can tell you that now," he said.
"When I first got on there and saw dead bodies I just spewed up. I had never seen a dead body before.
"Bodies just massacred. It was shocking."
The Battle of Dunkirk has recently returned to public consciousness after Christopher Nolan's film Dunkirk was released in July.
It tells the incredible story of how 400,000 Allied soldiers were cornered by Hitler's army on a beach on the north coast of France in 1940.
Mr Bailey was one of those soldiers.
He was there for two long, harrowing days.
"We were surrounded but we didn't know at the time that Hitler had stopped advancing because his tanks and everything were running out of fuel and the supplies didn't catch up to them," he said.
It was a grinding and excruciating wait as the Nazi planes continued to bomb and machine-gun the crowded beach.
Life saved by missed opportunity
The Royal Navy was evacuating troops, but capacity was limited.
"There was one ship I can remember until this day, the hospital ship," he said.
"There was a crowd of us trying to get on one boat. And I had got more or less near enough to get on the boat and the sailor there said: 'Right. That is full. No more'. And that boat pulled away.
"That boat got hit by a bomb and sunk, one of their Stuka's [German aircraft] came down and bombed it and blew it apart, so I was lucky."
Shallow water prevented the navy's large ships getting close to shore, so the then-British prime minister, Winston Churchill, came up with a plan code-named Operation Dynamo.
He commissioned civilian vessels to navigate the journey to France and help with the evacuation.
It was a resounding success.
About 300,000 of the 400,000 trapped troops made it back to Britain, including Mr Bailey.
"How I got on [a boat] I don't know, but I did," he said.
"And once I was on that boat I don't remember a thing until somebody woke me up and said: 'Come on, we are here'. I said: 'Where is here?' He said: 'We are in England'. I said: 'What beautiful words to hear'.
There was only a handful of survivors from Mr Bailey's battalion, the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers.
But he continued to serve, fighting in Tunisia in North Africa and then Salerno in Italy.
Mr Bailey had a decorated 27-year military career before moving to Australia in 1962 and working in the aviation industry.
It's been more than 77 years since the Battle of Dunkirk but many painful memories remain.
"A lot of things I like to forget because they were so upsetting," he said.
