* * * * * At the end of May 1938 the monsoon at last arrived, bringing with it endless long weeks of solid rain. One dark, wet night, halfway through the shift they call “Morning Tower” (midnight to eight A.M.), my father found himself on an oil rig in the middle of the jungle. He had just come out of the tool pusher’s office; a one-room bamboo shack tacked onto the “doghouse,” another slightly longer shack where the coolies changed into working clothes and boiled their tea and rice. As he passed the opened doghouse doorway, Dad glanced inside and saw three coolies squatting around the miniature potbellied stove with mugs of tea. They all grinned at my dad; they were Burmese from the oilfields at Yenangyaung on the Irrawaddy. My father smiled and nodded at ...