‘The Final Salute’: Giving ‘voice to these ghosts’ - Entertainment, Books - Army Times

‘The Final Salute’: Giving ‘voice to these ghosts’

Kathleen Rodgers dates her initiation into the supposedly glamorous fighter pilot community to a day in Tucson, Ariz., three weeks after her wedding. Her husband, an F-111 pilot transitioning to the A-10, had just been stationed at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base; she was alone in a dingy motel room when the 6 o’clock news reported that a jet had crashed.

The pilot who died that day was one of many colleagues killed during her husband’s 20-year career, and every one had an impact, she says. “Every time a plane went down ... I filed it away in my heart.” It wasn’t until a few years after her husband retired in 1991 that she began to unpack the memories and channel them into a book, “The Final Salute.”

Rodgers, a freelance writer, wanted to create a portal into the fighter pilot community, and she decided fiction was the best way to do that.

“I think with fiction, you can get to the truth,” she said. “It sounds backward, [but] instead of ... writing about all the times we lost a friend, you take all those stories and mix them up in a big pot and one story comes out.”

The story that came out is of a pilot navigating battles at home in the shadow of an impending conflict overseas. Many elements are inspired by the time her family spent at England Air Force Base, La., in the run-up to the Persian Gulf War. The air base has since closed.

It took Rodgers years to write and publish, but “The Final Salute: Together, We Live On” finally appeared in 2008 and won the Military Writers Society of America’s Silver Medal for Historical Fiction in 2009. But nothing has pleased her more than hearing from pilots who say she captured the excitement and fears of the profession.

“I wanted to show the other side of military aviation. It’s not just about air shows,” Rodgers said. “I wanted to give a voice to these ghosts.”

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“The Final Salute: Together We Live On” is available at www.amazon.com.