A Lost World War II Airman Lived On in Letters. Now He Has Been Found.

Sergeant Rogers writes of the hot Texas weather during training, of missing the family dog, of snow and hockey, of slow mail service and an aching wisdom tooth. In later letters, he suggests a disdain for and willingness to fight the Japanese and Germans.

“Dear folks,” he wrote on Oct. 22, 1942, shortly after his induction. “Everything is hunky dorey. Boy, they really keep you hoppin’.”

“Don’t know when I will be shipped out,” he continued. “Soon, I hope.”

With earnest good nature, Sergeant Rogers tells his parents of being given a “choice” to be trained as a radio operator, a parachute rigger or a welder — all trades that he jokes he knows nothing about.

On April 27, 1943, from Harlingen Army Gunnery School in Texas, he was joyful about the air-conditioned barracks and relieved he had passed his physical.

Three months later, in July 1943, he referred to himself as a “slap-happy soldier” with some bad news. Writing from the latrine, the only place where lights were still on in the barracks, he said a few of his comrades had been killed in crashes. “They didn’t have a chance,” he wrote. They were expecting the “dubious honor” of a visiting general, he wrote.

On Nov. 8, 1943, by then doing bombing runs over Tarawa, Sergeant Rogers asks about his parents’ new house, and said he was bitten up by mosquitoes during nighttime guard duty. He said he had been put in a gunner post, and observed that the Japanese were not as “suicidal as they’d like you to believe.”

“They like life just like you or I,” he wrote.

On a final letter home, dated Jan. 16, 1944, Sergeant Rogers wrote to his parents again.