Posted on: Tuesday, July 31, 2001

New crew joins search for war remains

By William Cole
Advertiser Military Writer

A military search team will depart Hickam Air Force Base for Laos Saturday as part of an ongoing mission to recover and identify remains of American servicemen still unaccounted for from the Vietnam War.

The three recovery teams and an investigation team consist of 50 mostly Hawai'i-based U.S. military specialists from Joint Task Force-Full Accounting, the U.S. Army's Central Identification Laboratory, Hawai'i; and the Joint Field Operations Base, Hawai'i.

Joint investigations with technical representatives from the Laos People's Democratic Republic will begin Aug. 9 in Savannakhet and Salavan provinces in southern Laos.

Up to 23 cases involving aircraft loss will be investigated during the 30-day operation. Three sites involving aircraft and ground losses are scheduled for excavation.

Joint Task Force-Full Accounting, based at Camp Smith, has conducted 53 recovery missions to Laos since it began in 1992.

In March, a team that included Army mountaineering soldiers used ropes to reach a remote mountain flank in Laos to recover remains from Crew 2 of Navy Observation Squadron 67. The nine-member crew was on a top-secret mission to drop listening devices along the Ho Chi Minh Trail on Jan. 11, 1968, when their Neptune OP-2E probably took ground fire and crashed into the mountainside.

U.S. involvement in Laos is called the "secret war" because of the government's early refusal to acknowledge fighting that took place in the neutral country.

The remains of 628 unaccounted-for American service members from the Vietnam War have been identified and returned to their families since 1973. Of 1,957 Americans still unaccounted for, 415 are listed as missing in Laos.