Remains A Story of the Flying Tigers, Who Won Immortality Defending Burma and China from Japanese Invasion

When young Eddie Gillespie discovers a World War II airplane in the jungle, with a grinning skeleton at the controls, he sets a story in motion. Two American fighter pilots in the Chinese Air Force, with their English and Burmese girlfriends, and a Japanese suicide pilot whose name happens to mean ''tree of the sun''--they clash at Rangoon, while the British empire falls about their ears. Here is a story of the Flying Tigers, immortalized by their exploits in Southeast Asia in the opening months of the Pacific War, as told by a man uniquely qualified to write about those stirring times.

Ford's history of the Flying Tigers won the award of excellence from the Aviation-Space Writers Association, while his novel of the Vietnam war inspired the Burt Lancaster film Go Tell the Spartans, which the Cincinnati Enquirer called ''one of the noblest films, ever, about men in crisis.'' Here he deftly melds fact and fiction in an unforgettable wartime romance. ''You can't beat remains, kid,'' Lieutenant Atherton says in a beautifully limned conclusion. ''They'll tell the story every time.''