Myanmar's Thura Tin Oo, an officer and a gentleman from another age

BANGKOK -- The death from old age on June 1 of Tin Oo, Myanmar's most respected soldier and politician, was so widely mourned that even Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing was reported to have sent a wreath. The incumbent military regime chief visited his former commander in December 2021 with an offer of superior military hospital care that was firmly declined.

While the old soldier's death at 97 will have no impact on the bloody impasse between Min Aung Hlaing's military government and most of the fractured country's 55 million people, the meditative Tin Oo was the last from a generation of officers and gentlemen who evidently left no heirs today.