Second Lt. Edward J. Lake had good reason to write his wife a letter in the event of his death.

Every mission over the cloud-covered mountains of New Guinea was dangerous. You could run into a Japanese fighter, hit a cliff or dive into the ocean.

On Oct. 27, 1943, Lake climbed aboard a B-24 from an airstrip in Port Moresby and never was heard from again. His plane and his crew of 12 were thought to have crashed into the sea, and the letter went into the mail.

Lake and his crewmates were gone but not forgotten. Sixty-one years later, a team of experts with the Joint POW/MIA Account Command found their remains and wreckage in the jungle.

In a war with many dead and wounded, there is a staggering number of missing -- 74,213 as of 2009, with just 453 troops identified since the late 1970s. But the command, which combs old battlefields, also found Lt. Dewey Foster, a P-47 pilot who vanished in what's now Papua New Guinea on April 11, 1944.

His body was recovered last August near his plane in a forested, uninhabited area a half-hour from base.

Over the past week, both men came home and were buried in Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery.

“My dearest one,” Lake wrote from Papua New Guinea, “when you have received this letter you shall have known that somewhere in the cold grey of another dawn I have died with your name on my lips and the love of you in my heart.”

Teams from the POW/MIA command discovered the planes after receiving tips. Foster's crash site was fairly well preserved, but Lake's B-24 flew into a jungle mountainside. Boots and dog tags were found, along with parts of bone and teeth.

DNA analysis matched those fragments to the crew. Some of the remains couldn't be linked to anyone.

Still, one mourner at Foster's burial called the recovery amazing.

“They can take such little bits of remains and make something of it,” said one-time Airman 1st Class James Holmes, 71, of San Antonio.

After this length of time, said Foster's sister, Mary Flowers, 81, of Castle Hills, “I was first of all numb. But then it began to sink in that we were finally bringing him home, and that has been absolutely wonderful.”

“To be able to have him home -- of course I know that he's with Mother and Dad now in heaven -- but to be able to have his remains here and he's going to be buried very close to my husband at Fort Sam, and I'll be able to go out and take my little flags to put there, and then to stand there,” she added. “It's wonderful to know where he is. All these years we knew he was dead but where, and what happened?”

The memories are a bit vague for the families of both men. Charmaine Lake Wade, 67, of Corpus Christi was born after her father deployed. The closest they came to each other was the burial.

“I just wish that I had known him,” she said, “and wish he had been here to share my life.” Flowers was nine years younger than Dewey Wingate Foster. She doesn't recall the sound of his voice or brother-sister conversations, but an image of him is close to mind.

He was [a] handsome man who looked a lot like actor Robert Taylor. Sometimes Flowers would tease him about that. A junior at Oklahoma State University when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, he traded his dreams of life in the theater for the chance to fly in the Army Air Forces.

His mother objected.

“She didn't want her boy going to war,” said Flowers, who was 14 when he died. “It was one of the few times he didn't do pretty much what mother wanted. He said, ‘No mother, I'm going.' That's what I was told by my parents.”

Lake shared that determination to fight for his country. In his last letter, he told his wife -- who he called “Mom” because she had had their only child -- not to think he died in vain.

“I had much to live for -- you, our child, our love and yet so much to die for -- our liberty -- the right to live and think as we pleased -- our right to the pursuit of happiness. I did not want to go, Mom. The young never want to die.

“I go willingly, dearest, knowing happily in my heart that our child will have the life we wanted it to have,” he continued. “She shall know freedom, education and peace as we have known.

That's worth having, Mom, and you will agree that things worth having are worth fighting for -- yes -- worth dying for.”

Foster's mission was to fly cover for bombers, but something went wrong and he turned back. When he didn't show up, search parties went out the following day.

The story was much the same for Lake's crew, sent on a reconnaissance mission as the Fifth Air Force began flying sorties to support an intense air offensive against Rabaul.

The Allies controlled the sky over New Guinea, but weather was a constant problem. After being told to land at another airfield due to weather, the crew and their bomber went missing.

Typically, troops brought to Fort Sam for burial were alive only the week before. The wounds are fresh and tears fall freely as folded U.S. flags are presented to spouses, parents and children.

But it was different for the families of Lake and Foster. Decades had passed and, so, too, had the sadness. In its place was gratitude, with the folded flag symbolic of a nation's commitment to its troops.

“It sounds sort of weird, I guess, to say we're excited because that makes it sounds terrible,” Foster's granddaughter, Sheri Burgin, said after the burial on a chilly morning.

“For the most part is we're just very excited for my mom. She has lived with this her whole life,” she said, adding that “she just always wanted to know. It's different now and I guess it really hit home Sunday when his coffin came off the plane, it was sort of like, he's really, finally home.”