Service members and military officials gathered Friday morning at Hickam Airfield to welcome a Hawaii National Guard C-17 airplane arriving with precious cargo.
The plane was flying in from Laos with what the military believes could be the remains of Americans killed in a secret battle during the Vietnam War. Service members wearing white gloves carefully carried small boxes from the plane that were topped with folded American flags. The boxes containing bones retrieved from the area where the battle took place were then transported to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency’s forensic lab at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, where researchers will try to identify them.
“This is the largest forensic skeleton lab in the world, and I don’t think a lot of people in Hawaii know that,” said John M. Figuerres, the agency’s acting deputy director for operations.
To retrieve the remains, a team from the DPAA searched the highlands of Laos, working in difficult and sometimes dangerous conditions.
“This was an extremely difficult site because the battle took place on top of a mountain in Laos,” Figuerres said. “After the battle, the remains were scattered. The Vietnamese forces actually threw the American bodies off the side of the cliff.”
Members of the recovery team trained at the U.S Marine Mountain Warfare Training Center to prepare for the mission.
“The conditions (in Laos) were extremely difficult,” Figuerres said. “In January, the route that they were taking, even though we had previously cleared it, we discovered had mines on it from the war … . I am so proud of these youngsters and these individuals who actually execute the mission to bring back these fallen warriors.”
Currently, 1,573 personnel remain missing from the Vietnam War, and some 280 are believed to be in Laos. During the war Laos was, at least on paper, a neutral country, according to the International Agreement on the Neutrality of Laos signed July 23, 1962. That meant both U.S. and North Vietnamese forces were prohibited from openly conducting military operations in the kingdom.
But in practice, the North Vietnamese Army and South Vietnamese Viet Cong guerillas supported by the North used areas of Laos as part of the Ho Chi Minh Trail to move fighters and equipment in and out of South Vietnam. They also provided weapons and other assistance to the communist Pathet Lao insurgency that was fighting to overthrow the Laotian government.
Likewise, the U.S. military conducted bombing operations and occasional raids against communist Vietnamese forces, and the CIA fought both them and the Pathet Lao using an army of Indigenous Hmong tribal fighters. Since neither the U.S. military nor the North Vietnamese forces were supposed to be in Laos, neither side publicly discussed the fighting, which came to be known as the “Secret War.”
The DPAA is hoping the remains recovered in Laos belong to Americans killed during the fierce Battle of Lima Site 85, until relatively recently a forgotten battle. Lima Site 85 was a clandestine base used by the U.S. military and the CIA to covertly support air operations against communist forces in Laos. A small team of American airmen and civilian technicians worked there operating radar and weather equipment.
In 1968, North Vietnamese troops backed by Pathet Lao fighters launched several attacks against the base, which was defended by CIA-backed Hmong tribal fighters, and Thai troops and border police. In March of that year they encircled the small base and pounded it with artillery before eventually overrunning the facility with their combined forces. Of the 19 Americans there, 13 were killed along with 42 Thai and Hmong fighters.
Among those killed were Air Force Master Sgt. Richard Etchberger, who aided the wounded survivors and was fatally wounded himself when an enemy soldier on the ground fired a bullet into the underside of an evacuation helicopter as it was leaving.
The operation remained classified and Etchberger’s actions were not publicly acknowledged until 1998. After the declassification of the base and the operations around them, the military reevaluated Etchberger’s actions and posthumously awarded him the Medal of Honor in 2010.
The DPAA has spent more than two decades searching for the men who died in the battle for Lima Site 85, so far successfully recovering and identifying the remains of three.
Senior Airman Layne Fitzpatrick of Kapolei, who was a member of the flight crew that brought the most recent remains to Hawaii, said, “It’s really cool to see how many people are involved … with operations around Asia, just to all the hard work they’re doing, just to recover all the human remains for dignified transfer.”
Over the past 17 years, Hawaii Air National Guard Senior Master Sgt. Joleen Morse has flown several repatriation missions of American war dead. She’s flown remains from the Philippines, the South Pacific and now Laos.
“Every mission is special,” Morse said, but the most emotional experience for her was bringing back 22 fallen Marines from the island of Tarawa in the South Pacific nation of Kiribati.
“That was the first time we had to see the pictures of everyone that we moved, and they’d been there for 75 years, so they had no family when we came back,” Morse said. “Everybody we moved was 21 and under.”
“We’re bringing them home. It may take a while for us to ID them, but if you really think about it, the Vietnam War ended over 50 years ago,” Figuerres said. “Our warriors need to know that if something happens to them, there is an organization that will look out for them and bring them home.”
