The old soldiers urge me not to go looking. They'd prefer to think that the road they hacked across India's steep Patkai Range and down through the jungles of Burma to China during World War II is gone. That its two stringy lanes—now six decades old—have been devoured by time and landslides, jungle monsoons and swampy earth.
But right now, step after step, I'm crossing a steel bridge near the northeastern Indian village of Jairampur: a dilapidated span the old soldiers laid above the muddy Khatang Nalla in early 1943, the first true bridge of the Burma Road's 1,100-mile (1,800-kilometer) length.
I leave the bridge's far end, walking between walls of rain forest that rise like green tapestries a hundred feet (30 meters) high. As I walk, I'm thinking of Mitchell Opas, now 86, who served as a U.S. Army medic during World War II and whom I've interviewed at reunions from Massachusetts to Texas. "If that road's still there," Opas has instructed me, his finger pointed in my direction for emphasis, "then you send pictures of it."
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