News-Info-Alerts

Re: Family Meets with MIA Office

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Date: December 07, 2002

"Holm's widow invited to meet with MIA office

By Robert A. Hamilton

After 30 years and only sporadic contact with the Pentagon, Margarete Holm was invited to a briefing on Wednesday where about 20 top civilian and uniformed officials explained how they hope to finally recover the remains of her husband, Waterford native Arnold E. Holm.

And despite three earlier attempts to find the crash site where her husband died, Mrs. Holm said she is now convinced they know the approximate location.

“If there is anything at all that can be found, they will definitely find it this time,” Mrs. Holm said.

Mrs. Holm said the officials from the Department of Defense POW/MIA Office, or DPMO, told her a team would return to Vietnam in April and her husband's case is one of the priorities for investigation.

In addition, they told her that a team from the DPMO would go to Waterford in the spring to provide a briefing to her husband's former friends and neighbors about the recovery effort.

“They probably realize that they made a mistake, and now people are watching, and people are very interested,” Mrs. Holm said of the high-level interest in her case. “They wanted to put the point across that they are very serious.”

U.S. Rep. Rob Simmons, R-2nd District, set up the meeting between Mrs. Holm and the Defense Department officials who in the last few weeks have placed a renewed emphasis on the case of Holm, who was an Army captain when he died.

“Over the years no other nation has done as much as the United States to get a full accounting of the members of our armed forces who were lost while serving our nation,” Simmons said. “It is right that these efforts are made. We owe it to the families who continue to await final word about a loved one and we owe it to the soldiers themselves who answered the call of duty on behalf of all of us.”

Capt. Holm's helicopter was shot down June 11, 1972. A second helicopter, which flew in to attempt a rescue, was shot down in the immediate vicinity. Three previous efforts to locate the crash scene have failed because the recovery teams have relied on the coordinates that were recorded during combat.

But in 1993, the companion case was closed when the site where that helicopter was shot down was found. No one ever cross-referenced the case against the Holm case, however, and so the immediate area was not searched for a second downed aircraft.

The case came to light again starting when William Cavalieri of Florida, who was a classmate and co-captain of the football team with Holm at Waterford High School in the class of 1962, began poring over old military records in an attempt to find out what had happened to his old friend.

Cavalieri also started a letter-writing campaign to Congress and the Defense Department, urging people who knew Holm to put pressure on officials to reopen the case. That campaign has generated responses from all over the country.

While it has been more than 30 years since her husband was shot down over Vietnam and lost to the jungle, Mrs. Holm said she never gave up hope that one day she would be able to bury his remains at Arlington National Cemetery.

“Every time I heard on the television or read in the newspaper that they had brought home more remains, I would hope,” Mrs. Holm said. “That's why I never put up a memorial marker anywhere. That would have been too final, it would have meant I had stopped hoping, and I could never bring myself to do that.”

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