Portraits Of A Farewell
"Flying through a monsoon is something you only want to do once in a lifetime. Honest, Don, they are grim. If it was just the rain it wouldn’t be too bad, but those damn clouds have so many winds and air currents going in about 80 different ways that it is only by the grace of God that the wings stay on."
Warrant Officer William Rogers was 22 when he wrote those words in a letter to his younger brother, Don. Seventeen days after writing the letter–on June 21, 1945–Rogers and five other Canadian airmen died when the military transport plane they were on crashed in the Burmese jungle, probably because of severe monsoon weather (Recovery In The Jungle, March/April).
Almost 52 years later–on March 5, 1997–the remains of the six airmen were buried together in a teak casket in the Taukkyan...