Return From Exile, and Death
On 20 August 1973, as the communists were beginning to triumph in their war to conquer Laos, Thao Ma returned from exile heading a convoy of 60 trucks. The Thao Ma column quickly took over Wattay Air Base. Thao Ma and six other pilots launched a T-29 strike against army headquarters. However, while they were airborne, the Royal Lao Army retook the airfield in a counterattack. Thao Ma was shot down as he was landing. He survived the crash, and was executed after his surrender. He was 42 years of age.
Read more about this topic: Thao Ma
Famous quotes containing the words return and/or death:
“Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing—to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“For the bright side of the painting I had a limited sympathy. My visions were of shipwreck and famine; of death or captivity among barbarian hordes; of a lifetime dragged out in sorrow and tears, upon some gray and desolate rock, in an ocean unapproachable and unknown.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)