Seventy-eight years ago today, on February 28, 1943, the 76th Fighter Squadron reported Capt Jesse R. Carney missing when he failed to return from an offensive reconnaissance mission over southwest China. Hurtling 500 feet above the ground near Datang, Yunnan Province, when surface-to-air fire crippled His P-40K, Carney realized he would be unable to reach an altitude from which he could safely bail out and elected to crash-land in a rice paddy instead. The tail and propeller flew off as the fighter skidded to a halt. Carney lost consciousness. When he finally came to sometime later, he found himself a considerable distance from the wreck, bleeding profusely from cuts to his face and head.

Dodging Japanese patrols, Carney escaped to the northwest, finally contacting a Chinese farmer on March 2. The farmer guided him into the mountains and handed him over to a pair of guerillas, who brought him up into the Gaoligong Range. From March 4 to 14, he stayed at the house of Hu Sanfa. The home—high in the mountains—kept Carney out of enemy reach, but deep snow drifts blocked the mountain passes, making it impossible to make it through to friendly lines.

In 2017 I interviewed Hu Yaji, son of Hu Sanfa. The Hu’s are from a Tibeto-Burman ethnic group known as the Lisu people, who live throughout southwest China, north Burma, northwest Thailand, and northeast India. Yaji had not yet been born when Capt Carney stayed with his family, but as the keeper of his father’s legacy, he recounted the story as he recalled hearing it. He became emotional when he told me about his sisters going hungry so they could feed the big, injured American. After Sanfa killed and cooked all the chickens, all they had left to eat were bamboo rats—a rodent that looks like a muskrat and is about the size of a large rabbit. It just so happened that Yaji’s family still raised bamboo rats and he insisted on killing one right there in front of me and cooking it just as his father had for Carney! “Last time my family hosted an American, this is what we ate!” he said, laughing. It tasted pretty good!

The interview also taught me some of the hazards of oral history—especially one generation removed where memory collides with an imagined past. Yaji insisted Carney stayed with his family for three weeks when we know from the evasion report that it was ten days. He also claimed that a helicopter arrived to pick him up from the top of the mountain—conflating the stories his father had told him with what he imagined. It was a pleasure to hear his family’s story though, and an honor to enjoy their hospitality. I later sent them a framed print of Carney with a caption written in Chinese thanking them for their part in his rescue.

Once the mountain passes cleared enough for Carney to cross through, Hu Sanfa delivered him to Nationalist Chinese troops on the east bank of the Salween. He arrived at the Allied airbase at Yunnanyi on March 22.

You can preorder Fallen Tigers: The Fate of America’s Missing Airmen in China during World War II now from the University Press of Kentucky