My grandfather fought Nazis in WWII and I'm afraid of talking to a stranger
Which use of Past Simple would you attribute this sentence to?
Is it a longer, repeated action in the past like "he fought Nazis every day for 5 years" (Geofrey Leech calls similar usages "past habit or state" actions that are repetitive or last without interruption like "he lived in Japan for 5 years")
or is it more like a complete action, "event" so to say, like "He got drafted, he fought Nazis, and then they tranferred him to Japan where he met my grandma" (Geofrey Leech calls this usage "event" in the past)
Geofrey Leech in his book states that in the past there isn't often a clear distinction between "event" and "state/habit/repeated action", and he also implies that there's no real practical need for such distinction. But I still want to draw the line of distinction as clear as possible, because I have trouble distinguishing between repeated actions in Past Simple and repeated actions in Past Continuous.
What are you thoughts on this? Do you perceive "fought" is that sentence as an event? or more like like a regular, longer action? I understand that in reality "fighting" actually took him a few years, but I'm more interested in how you perceive that sentence rather than how this action actually looked in real life, since human languages aren't complex enough to give a full picture of reality and a great deal of approximation is always involved.