News-Info-Alerts

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Re: Remains Returned - SEA

Date: July 13, 2001

"Remains of Servicemen Returned
By JEAN CHRISTENSEN, Associated Press Writer

HICKAM AIR FORCE BASE, Hawaii (AP) - David Olson was 7 when his father's plane went down during the Vietnam War.

Among the few details relatives learned about the Jan. 11, 1968, crash, one struck Olson as particularly odd: His father was lost in Laos, where the United States supposedly wasn't involved.

Thirty years went by before Olson learned why. Newly declassified documents told him Navy Cmdr. Delbert Olson and his crew of eight were on a secret mission to drop eavesdropping devices, supposedly along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, when their Neptune OP-2E crashed 20 miles inside Laos.

On Tuesday, Olson began what he hopes will be the final stretch of his search for answers.

He watched from the tarmac at Hickam Air Force Base as an Air Force plane arrived with 17 sets of remains believed to be U.S. servicemen unaccounted for from the Vietnam and Korean wars.

Some of those remains were recovered on the same mountainside in Laos where Cmdr. Olson's plane went down. An earlier mission to the crash site had brought back remains of two of the Navy pilot's crewmates.

Olson hopes his father's remains are among those he saw Tuesday carried in flag-draped caskets by a military honor guard and taken to the Army's Central Identification Laboratory at Hickam for formal identification.

``It was everything I expected,'' said Olson, 40, of Prairie Village, Kan. ``Something we've waited for for 33-plus years.''

Olson's father was a member of Observation Squadron 67, which worked to build the eavesdropping network known as ``McNamara's Line.'' Then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara had devised the plan of dropping camouflaged sensors from low-flying planes to monitor enemy troop movement and trucks along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

``There's 300 other members of this squadron who are very thankful for all this,'' said Bob ``Dusty'' Reynolds, of San Jose, Calif., a squadron member who attended Tuesday's arrival ceremony. ``They need closure also.''

The remains that arrived Tuesday included five from Vietnam, eight from North Korea (news - web sites) and four from Laos.

The repatriations are part of ongoing efforts by the military's Joint Task Force-Full Accounting and the Central Identification Laboratory to account for U.S. servicemen missing in wars.

The remains from Laos were recovered in March at a crash site on the slopes of 4,600-foot Phoulouang Mountain.

A search party on the mountain in 1996 had found remains later identified as belonging to two men from Olson's crew, but the team deemed the jungle terrain too dangerous to continue that search.

The families of the crew pressured then-President Clinton (news - web sites) and Congress for another attempt.

The 30-day mission back to the mountain in March was not without challenges, said Johnie Webb Jr., deputy director of the Central Identification Laboratory. He said the recovery team camped out on the rugged mountain slope amid poisonous snakes. Food and drinking water had to be flown in while they worked.

Webb said a recovery team may return to the mountain for another sweep of the wreckage, which was scattered across four ledges.

The identification process is expected to take several months. When it is complete, Olson hopes his father's remains will be identified among those returned. He then hopes to return to Hawaii to escort his father's remains to Arlington National Cemetery in Washington.

``That's what he would have wanted,'' Olson said.

Since 1973, the remains of 619 American servicemen from the Vietnam War have been identified; 1,966 are still unaccounted for, including 417 in Laos."