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Japanese invaded, joined the Alaska Scouts, also known as Castner's Cutthroats, although as the second Peter Heiman was fond of saying after the war was over, Lieutenant Castner had disliked the name. They took the islands of Attu and Kiska back from the Japanese, during which action the second Peter Heiman was wounded and for which he was later awarded a Purple Heart by no less than Major General Simon Bolivar Buckner, Jr., Alaska Defense Commander, Himself. There was a grainy black and white photograph ( Alaska Magazine, “Forty Years After,” May/ June 1984) with the second Peter Heiman looking gaunt and tired, standing in a line of other soldiers, and trying his best to throw out a negligible chest for General Buckner to pin his decoration on. He had the same narrow face, the same lantern jaw, and the same thick thatch of coarse dark hair as his father did in the sepia photograph of his parent's wedding ( Alaska Life Magazine, “Centennial Tales,” September 1967).
    After the war, the second Peter Heiman left Fairbanks for the Park and homesteaded eighty acres of land, established a profitable truck farm, and started a hauling business on the Kanuyaq River Highway, moving freight between the port of Valdez and the interior market town of Ahtna. Eventually he expanded operations to include Fairbanks and Anchorage.
    It was to Ahtna he brought his bride in 1946, an Isabella Chapman, daughter of a Fairbanks merchant. They had two sons, a third Peter in 1947 and then Charles in 1949.
    Peter was the first of the Peter Heimans to go to college, the University of Alaska. He was a National Merit Scholar (UAF student newspaper Polar Star , February 1969), and then he left school to join the U.S. Army and do one tour in Vietnam. He was back in Alaska by Christmas 1972, back in school in 1974, and had his bachelor's degree in May 1975 (list of UAF graduates in May twentieth issue of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner).
    Charles followed his brother to Vietnam and didn't come back. Obituary, November 24, 1971, Ahtna Tribune , Anchorage Times , Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. Two generations of war heroes and one war tragedy, Paula thought. Bad luck on the parents, and on Peter the Third, too, if he and Charles had been close.
    It seemed they had been. The third Peter Heiman went into business with his father's backing, formed a trucking company, and made out like a bandit during the last half of the '70s and the first half of the '80s, back when oil was king. Every other load into Prudhoe Bay was a Heiman Trucking Kenilworth tractor-trailer (“Teamsters in Alaska,” CBS 60 Minutes , 1976). The third Peter had expanded into services, a sort of Kelly Girls for contract employees like plumbers, welders, carpenters, and electricians, so that he was sitting pretty when the bust came in the mid-'80s and the oil companies started looking around for contract employees who worked by the hour and didn't come with all those expensive benefits attached, like health and retirement and investment plans.
    In the fullness of time Peter Heiman married, a roustabout he met overnighting at Galbraith Lake on a trip to Prudhoe. She was a big woman, big-haired and big-hipped and big-busted, and she lasted nearly two years (notice of divorce of Peter A. and Shirley F. Heiman, Ahtna Tribune , Anchorage Times , Anchorage Daily News , Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, October 1977). The third Peter married again, a flight attendant with Wien Air Alaska he met on a trip to Anchorage to pick up a new rig. Another blonde, shorter, skinnier, and more fertile, Cindy F. Heiman divorced her husband when she caught him in bed with a third blonde in 1980, and when she left she took his son, the fourth Peter, and a good half of the business with her. (A delicious series of articles reporting the very juicy trial in the Anchorage Daily News , March and April 1981. The Times seemed to have stayed away from the story.) The third Peter then married the third blonde, a Bush pilot