KENT, Wash. — On June 3, 1963, a 17-year-old Army private named Bruce Barrowman bid farewell to his little brother, Greg, on the tarmac at McChord Air Force Base.
"He reached out, shook my hand and said, 'Remember, Greg, be a man,'" Barrowman said, choking back tears. "And he gave me a little nod and wink and that was the last I saw of him."
The Douglas DC-7 carrying Bruce and 100 other servicemen, families and crew disappeared on its way to Alaska.
A few weeks later, an honor guard raised a flag outside the family's home in Renton as a young bugler played.
"My brother, Bruce, was a role model. He was athletic, a kind person," Barrowman said.
Historian Feliks Banel has been piecing together the mystery of Flight 293 and its aftermath for much of the past decade. With help from surviving family members, he's put together a podcast series exploring the unique nature of the tragedy.
"They have no idea what happened to this plane," Banel said. "And it's been forgotten for 60 years."
No bodies were ever recovered. Only some drifting debris and a few personal items, the scattered remnants of lives cut short.
"At that time, everybody held out hope," said Barrowman. "And hope lasted for years and years and years."
The military had contracted the plane and crew from a civilian airline, Northwest Orient.
"But it didn't take off from a civilian airport," Banel explained. "It took off from an Air Force base. And you couldn't buy a ticket on this flight. You had to be assigned to this flight as part of your military duty."
Because it wasn't, technically, a military plane, the Department of Defense never kept in touch with survivors and never officially memorialized the dead.
"For 60 years, the government has done nothing," Banel said. "There's no monument, there's no marker anywhere."
After decades of government inaction, Barrowman, himself, rallied the relatives of the missing.
"There's a great number of us out there," he said.
Together, they funded and built a memorial on the grounds of Tahoma National Cemetery in Kent.
"From being invisible to visible is an act of God," Barrowman said.
At the dedication ceremony, the bugler who had played for the bereaved Barrowman family 60 years earlier sounded "Taps" once again.
We may never know what brought down Flight 293 all those years ago.
"What made a perfectly good plane drop from 14,000 feet into the Gulf of Alaska?" Banel said.
But the heroes on that ill-fated journey are finally, fittingly remembered.
"It'll never be forgotten as long as this monument is still standing at Tahoma Cemetery," Banel said.
Barrowman stood over the memorial to Flight 293 and read its inscription aloud: "To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under heaven."
He soaked in the silence of this place that has, finally, acknowledged his family's loss and grief. He continued to read:
"Missing, but not forgotten."
Felks Banel's podcast series, "Unsolved Histories: What Happened to Flight 293?" is now streaming.