Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Author of Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince), airline pilot before the war. Flew a Bloch MB.174 against the Germans in 1940. Escaped to the US and Canada that same year, returning to fight in 1943. Disappeared in his P-38 over the Med, near Marseille, on a recon mission related to Operation Dragoon, never to be seen again. In 1998, a fisherman found his bracelet. In 2003, a luftwaffe pilot named Horst Rippert claimed responsibility.

Excerpt from The Men

>Bit by bit… it comes over us that we shall never again hear the laughter of our friend, that this one garden is forever locked against us. And at that moment begins our true mourning, which, though it may not be rending, is yet a little bitter. For nothing, in truth, can ever replace a lost companion. Old comrades cannot be created out of hand. Nothing can equal the treasure of so many shared memories, so many bad times endured together, so many quarrels, reconciliations, heartfelt impulses. Friendships like that cannot be reconstructed. If you plant an oak, you will hope in vain to sit soon under its shade.

>So life goes on. We grow rich as we plant through the early years, but then come the years when time undoes our work and cuts down our trees. One by one our comrades deprive us of their shade, and within our mourning we always feel now the secret grief of growing old.

>If I search among my memories for those whose taste is lasting, if I write the balance sheet of the moments that truly counted, I surely find those that no fortune could have bought me. You cannot buy the friendship of a companion bound to you forever by ordeals endured together.