News-Info-Alerts

Re: Search Is On For MIAs

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Date: December 06, 2002

"Search is on again for local MIAs

By KATHERINE HUTT SCOTT
Gannett News Service

WASHINGTON -- For 30 years, Margarete Holm has declined to place a memorial stone in honor of her husband, Army Capt. Arnold E. Holm Jr., a helicopter pilot who was shot down over Vietnam in 1972 but whose remains have never been recovered.

"If I did that, there wouldn't be any more expectation or hope," Holm, 58, said.

She has fresh reason to hope. Pentagon officials told her and U.S. Rep. Rob Simmons, R-2nd District, at a briefing in the Washington area Wednesday that they will send another team to Vietnam next spring to try to locate the Waterford native's helicopter crash site and recover any remains.

At the same briefing, Pentagon officials updated Simmons on the status of Army Cpl. Roger A. Dumas of Plainfield, a machine gunner in the 19th Infantry Regiment of the 24th Division during the Korean War. He was captured in 1950 by communist forces in what now is North Korea and was taken to a prisoner of war camp along the border with China. He was never accounted for when the war ended.

"There's been no change in the status of his case," Simmons said after the briefing. A Vietnam veteran himself, he asked for the update on behalf of Dumas' brother, Roger Dumas of Canterbury.

Holm, an accountant who now lives in Lebanon, Pa., said she had confidence in the Pentagon's efforts.

"If there's anything that can be found, they will find it," she said after the briefing. "These people really care."

Arnold Holm was a star athlete at Waterford High School in the 1950s and 1960s, serving as captain of its football, baseball and basketball teams.

After his helicopter was shot down on June 11, 1972, a second helicopter piloted by 1st Lt. James McQuade, sent to look for survivors, was shot down nearby, Larry Greer, a spokesman for the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office, said.

The Pentagon unsuccessfully searched the area identified by eyewitness accounts as the crash sites.

Years later, Vietnamese in an area eight miles from what originally was believed to be the crash site found a medal with McQuade's name and turned it over to authorities. The information reached the Pentagon, which in 1993 located McQuade's helicopter and remains.

However, it took the Pentagon until 2000 to realize that it should look for Holm's remains in the area where McQuade was found.

A Pentagon team unsuccessfully searched for Holm's crash site in June. The team couldn't find witnesses to the crash and decided that the difficult terrain prevented it from completing the mission in the time it had been given, Greer said.

The Pentagon will set aside enough time for next year's team to thoroughly search the site, located in a dense jungle, Greer said. It also will send a team to Waterford in April to explain its recovery efforts to residents.

"A further review of the evidence connecting the dots between the McQuade site and the Holm site leads us to believe we've got a better chance today to find it than we did several years ago," Greer said.


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