Rank: Junior Sergeant. Military branch: Aviation. My father, Vyacheslav Matveyevich Gerasimov, was born on March 10, 1921 in the village of Pavlovskoye, Rognedinsky district, Bryansk region. He was drafted into the Army on October 10, 1940. From November 1941, he was fighting in the 5th Air regiment on the Karelian Front. At first, he was a motorist, and then until December 1944, he flew as a Gunner-Bombardier. Their regiment performed dangerous missions to bomb enemy military installations, performed aerial reconnaissance, landed troops behind enemy lines, and flew to the partisans. The 5th Air Regiment liberated Petrozavodsk and Arkhangelsk and V.Gerasimov was awarded the Medal ""For the liberation of the Arctic"". Also, my father was awarded the Order of the ""Red Star"" in 1944, for successfull bombing enemy trains with equipment. In 1945, he was awarded the Medal ""For the Victory over Germany"", and in 1985 received the Order of the ""Patriotic war of 2nd class"". My father devoted his entire life to aviation. After the war, he entered the Kurgan pilot school, graduated from it and became a Civil aviation instructor pilot. Almost the rest of his life, he worked at the Ulyanovsk school of higher flight training of Civil aviation as a commander of the Il-14, Tu-134, and trained many specialists in our country and the COMECON countries. Dad loved his job very much and, therefore, after retiring in 1972, he began working as an instructor pilot on the Tu-154 simulator and worked there until 1995. The grandchildren took his interest, and now one of them flies in Aeroflot as a ship commander, the other works as an air traffic controller in the air traffic control Center of the Moscow air zone, and the younger one became an aviation lifeguard. We are all very proud of our father and grandfather, and we always love and remember him."