In 1944, just shortly before Christmas, my father’s parents received a telegram that their son, Lt. George Clifton Myers, was missing in action. He was my father’s older brother, and later my brother was named for him.
But eventually word came that George and his B24 bomber crew had been shot down over Hanow, Germany, and buried together by Dutch resistance fighters.
The men were reburied together at Arlington National Cemetery. Their parents gathered, and as a final prayer was offered, “a flight of military aircraft flew overhead and tipped their wings as one broke from formation and flew off apart.”
For my father’s parents, it was a moment of “healing and pride and finality [in] this great symbolic moment in the military liturgy.”
Many years later, my father had a church on Capitol Hill. He visited Arlington and “at the registration desk, [he] told the sergeant how much that final flight had meant to [his] parents. ‘Just a moment,’ [the sergeant] said, and disappeared into the records room.
He returned and said, ‘That flight was not for your brother and his crew. A general officer was being buried at the same time, over the hill from your bother’s grave. The flight was for him. Don’t you dare tell your parents.’ “
– From my father’s book, A Curmudgeon’s Notebook, by Henry Lee Hobart Myers
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