Margaret Lawler lost her husband two years ago - and then, last fall, part of his past was discovered.

Murray Lawler, a Linton native, was a pilot during World War II. He was stationed in Great Britain and took part in D-Day on June 6, 1944.

Lawler enlisted in the Army Air Corps in about 1942 and, despite his family's doubts, he passed the corps' test with his eighth-grade education.

He met Margaret while in Great Britain. She was a resident of Nottingham and was invited to a dance at the American base with some of her girlfriends. She was introduced to her future husband at the dance.

Over the following weeks, they picnicked on food that had been rationed in England since the beginning of the war and even went to the opera, which was not the farm boy's standard form of entertainment. After the performance, the woman behind the couple leaned over and asked, "It wasn't that bad, was it?"

Lawler was part of the crew on the SNAFU Special for three missions before piloting the C-47 he named the Duchess of Dakota in reference to Margaret. She told the American who was enchanted by English royalty that she was just a plain miss.

"He said, 'If you can't be the Duchess of Nottingham, you'll have to be the Duchess of Dakota,'" Margaret recalled recently.

On D-Day, Lawler flew the Duchess of Dakota near St. Mere Eglise and dropped 18 paratroopers behind Nazi lines.

The SNAFU Special also took part in D-Day, during the Arnhem "Market Garden" operation and the final paratrooper drop in March 1945.

Lawler received the Air Medal with two oak leaf clusters for outstanding service in World War II. "I wouldn't want to do it again, but I don't regret that I was there," Lawler told the Emmons County Record in a 1994 interview.

The couple became engaged in October 1944, but had to postpone the wedding three times while they waited for permission from Washington, D.C.

After the war, Lawler returned to Linton, and when all the soldiers had safely arrived home, his wife followed him. She was the first war bride to arrive in North Dakota, and she was welcomed by a reporter who took her photograph and interviewed her at Bismarck's train station.

They settled down on a farm in Linton and had nine children. His wake-up call to his children was, "Rise and shine. Do you think I'm running a nursing home, here?"

Over the years, he served his communtiy. He was an Emmons County commissioner, a member of the welfare board and head elder of his church. He died at 85 on July 23, 2006, and is buried in the North Dakota Veterans Cemetery.

His wife and children remember him as a man of integrity, the same quality that his co-pilot told Margaret he believed made Lawler a good pilot in some of the more difficult situations they faced.

But Lawler's war story didn't end with his death.

After the war, the Duchess was flown to Florida and later destroyed.

The SNAFU, however, was sold to a Czechoslovakian airline, then to the French Air Force, then to the Yugoslavian military.

After its last flight in 1994, the SNAFU Special sat next to an airstrip in Bosnia until a United Nations peacekeeper noticed it and remembered Merville Battery Museum Administrator Beatrice Guillaume's search for a C-47 plane for the museum in Normandy, France.

The peacekeeper was able to secure a two-day truce to examine the plane, and then contacted Guillaume with the news.

While dissembling the plane in Bosnia, someone discovered a crew roster from World War II, to Guillaume's delight. She began corresponding with the pilots and their families, and sent a few of them, including Chris Buckner in Texas, pictures.

Buckner e-mailed Margaret Lawler, asking if it was indeed her husband in the picture he had received, and eventually Margaret heard from Guillaume as well, who began sending her updates of the number of rivets removed from the plane in the dissembling process each day.

Guillaume also expressed her gratitude to the troops who liberated France. "We never forget what the American young men did for us," said Guillaume in an e-mail to Margaret.

The plane reached France at the end of November. It has been reassembled and was unveiled today at the Merville Battery Museum in the presence of a few of the World War II pilots and their families. It was unveiled in the same colors it bore on June 6, 1944.

Although she's lost her lifelong love, through the plane's discovery Margaret has found another reason to brag about her husband's determination and integrity.

And, more importantly, another reason to reminisce about the first time she laid eyes on Murray Lawler in the midst of World War II.