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My dad, also WW2 vet, had Charles Bonet syndrome for the last 8 years of his life. It came on after he suddenly had complete and permanent vision loss from retinal hemorrhage in his remaining eye. He did not even have light perception. I understood it as brain activity making up for the sudden lack of sensory input from the eyes. More common in elderly persons who experience sudden loss of vision. Dad never completely adjusted to it. You could ask him anytime whether he was seeing things, and he would describe in detail that he could see up ahead a field of rabbits, or horses, or people or some kind of vegetation or landscape...or whatever his brain was visualizing. He would never interact with the hallucinations except that it sometimes interfered with his sense of spatial orientation, and you had to reassure him the next step he took was indeed on solid ground and not onto a boggy marsh or puddle of water. A little reassurance would do the trick and he could walk with assistance. It is written about this syndrome that people usually do figure out the hallucination is not real, and they can carry on with otherwise normal mental status; this is a difference from other kinds of hallucinations where the person is convinced the hallucination is real and they start talking with it. There is no reliable treatment for this syndrome, at least none was available up until the time of Dad’s passing in 2014.