Fifty years after the end of the Vietnam War, one Seattle man embarks on a journey to a remote mountain in Laos where his father was last seen during a secret mission in the war.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
This Wednesday marks 50 years since the day that communist forces seized the city of Saigon, bringing an end to the Vietnam War. That conflict defined a generation and it continues to reverberate half a century later in countless ways, for countless people. For one Seattle man, the search for closure led to the top of one of the highest mountains in Laos. NPR’s John Ruwitch has the story.
JOHN RUWITCH, BYLINE: Rick Holland was in third grade when his dad was deployed to the war in the fall of 1967.
RICK HOLLAND: I said goodbye my dad on my eighth birthday.
RUWITCH: Air Force Technical Sergeant Melvin Holland was sent halfway across the world to play a top secret role in Operation Rolling Thunder.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: The attacks slashed at North Vietnam with renewed fury.
RUWITCH: It was a multiyear bombing campaign to try to stop the flow of troops and weapons from communist North Vietnam into the U.S.-allied South and force the North Vietnamese leadership to negotiate an end to the war.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Raids against oil stores in Hanoi marked a fresh escalation.
RUWITCH: Tiny Laos next door was ostensibly neutral, but that’s where Melvin Holland was sent with other men to man a secret radar station at the top of a steep karst mountain near the Laos-Vietnam border. The military called it Lima Site 85. It guided bombers to targets, day and night, in all weather. On the night of March 10, 1968, it came under attack.
HOLLAND: A sapper team, Vietnamese sapper team, scaled the cliff, spent overnight on the cliffs and came up from the cliff site and started the attack.
RUWITCH: By morning, Lima Site 85 was overrun.
UNIDENTIFIED FLIGHT ATTENDANT: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Nong Khang Airport. The local time is…
RUWITCH: The closest airport to the mountain is Nong Khang, outside Sam Neua, a remote town in northeastern Laos. Some 57 years after the attack, I’ve come here with Rick Holland on his first trip to Laos, and members of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, or DPAA.
UNIDENTIFIED FLIGHT ATTENDANT: Would like to thank you for flying with us and are looking forward to…
RUWITCH: DPAA is the arm of the Pentagon responsible for finding prisoners of war, POWs, and those missing in action, MIA. By their tally, there are more than 1,570 Americans still unaccounted for from the Vietnam War. That includes over 280 believed to be in Laos. Several are potentially near here.
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RUWITCH: On the edge of town, in a dry rice field by a river, members of a DPAA team dig small excavation pits. Others sift dirt through screens. They’re looking for the remains of a fighter pilot whose jet went down here in flames after a bombing run in the late 1960s.
ALLY CAMPO: The plane, we have a witness testimony that said it crashed into the river.
RUWITCH: Ally Campo is the scientific recovery expert on site.
CAMPO: But we have archaeological evidence showing that the debris field actually extends all the way up into these rice paddy fields.
RUWITCH: The remnants in the dirt are tiny.
CAMPO: And we go through it, and anything that is man-made, anything that looks weird, anything that could be possibly considered bone or a part of the incident will get put in evidence buckets.
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RUWITCH: It’s painstaking work, even on flat land near town with a big team. Lima Site 85, on Phou Pha Thi Mountain, is a different ball game. There were 19 men up top when the site was attacked. One man, Chief Master Sergeant Richard Etchberger, was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor in 2010 by President Obama for his role in the fight.
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BARACK OBAMA: When it looked like the ledge would be overrun, he called for airstrikes within yards of his own position, shaking the mountain and clearing the way for a rescue. And in the morning light, an American helicopter came into view.
RUWITCH: Etchberger helped other men onto the chopper. And then as he was loading on, he was struck by gunfire and died. Seven of the 19 men made it off the mountain alive. Holland was not one of them. A few days later, on the other side of the world, Rick Holland’s mom, Ann Holland, was hosting a Cub Scout meeting when the phone rang.
HOLLAND: And gets a call. Says, Mrs. Holland, something’s happened up at the site. We’re not sure exactly what. We’re not sure the status of the men.
RUWITCH: It would be two years before the military declared her husband and the others dead. Ann Holland wanted proof, though. She, and later Rick, have been pushing for information or confirmation of Melvin Holland’s death for the better part of six decades.
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RUWITCH: The main search area at Phou Pha Thi is not at the top of the mountain. It’s partway down the side on a sloped ledge at the bottom of a 600-foot cliff. DPAA believes the men’s bodies may have been thrown off the top after the battle. Getting to the site is an endeavor. When the weather is bad, it’s a two-hour drive from town, followed by a hike. On good days, the team takes helicopters to a landing zone nearby.
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WESTON IANNONE: It’s pretty complex terrain, so it takes us about another 30, 45 minutes to get from where we’re landing to the actual investigation or excavation area.
RUWITCH: Weston Iannone is an Army captain with DPAA. He was team leader at the site.
IANNONE: It’s a series of rappels, ascents and then, like, hand over hand.
RUWITCH: All the team members are trained in mountaineering. Lidar and terrain mapping have helped them zero in on places of interest where rolling or falling things might come to a stop on the steep slope.
IANNONE: Today, in a literal sense, it was putting on gloves and kind of just scraping the surface.
RUWITCH: So far, remains of three men have been identified. Eight remain unaccounted for. For Rick Holland, the goal of the trip was to simply reach the top of the mountain where his dad was last seen. There’s a trail that leads to the peak, more than a mile up in the Lao sky.
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RUWITCH: The Lao government would not let me go with him, so I gave a recorder to a member of the DPAA team that accompanied him.
HOLLAND: Oh, what a view.
RUWITCH: At the peak, with silent hills unfolding around him, Holland phoned his 85-year-old mother to tell her he had made it, and he sat by the edge, draped in a black POW/MIA flag.
HOLLAND: (Shouting) Pha Thi, I’m here.
RUWITCH: He spoke to the spirit of the mountain.
HOLLAND: (Shouting) I’m here to ask your forgiveness. Please let the men come home. It’s time.
RUWITCH: Bringing them back, he says, is his life’s mission.
HOLLAND: (Shouting) Dad, I’m here. I want you home, Dad. (Crying) We miss you. We want you back so bad.
RUWITCH: Neither the mountain nor the man answered his call that day, but Rick Holland says he’ll be back. John Ruwitch, NPR News, Sam Neua, Laos.
(SOUNDBITE OF VICTOR RAY SONG, “FALLING INTO PLACE”)
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