Updated April 30, 2025 at 3:00 AM MDT
SAM NEUA, Laos — Rick Holland was in the third grade and remembers exactly when his dad shipped off to the Vietnam War in 1967.
"I said goodbye to my dad on my 8th birthday," he said.
The next morning, Air Force Tech. Sgt. Melvin Holland left home in Woodland, Wash., on a secret mission halfway around the world — part of an operation that aimed to change the course of the war.
Instead, Holland's deployment would change the lives of his family, and come to play a role in pushing the U.S. government to be more transparent about service members who are unaccounted for.
April 30 marks the 50th anniversary of the day the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon fell to Communist forces. According to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, an arm of the Pentagon, there are more than 1,570 service members still unaccounted-for from that war — including Melvin Holland.
Holland, however, did not serve in Vietnam.
He and several dozen other U.S. service members split their time between an Air Force base in Thailand and a classified radar station atop a stark karst mountain in a northeastern corner of Laos, a country that was ostensibly neutral. The military called it Lima Site 85.
"They were up there on the mountaintop operating, and they worked in two crews," Rick Holland recounted. "One crew would be up on the mountain for 10 to 14 days, depending on the weather, and then the other crew would come up to replace them."
The radar post became an integral part of Operation Rolling Thunder, 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 pressure the North Vietnamese leadership to negotiate an early end to the war. The radar at Lima Site 85 was a game changer; it could guide bombers to targets, day and night, in all weather.
The North Vietnamese quickly caught on, though, and carved a road through the jungle to bring in battalions of troops. In conjunction with Lao Communist forces centered in the area, they attacked the hill several times in early 1968. On the night of March 10, 1968, after pounding it with artillery, a sapper team that had scaled the sheer side of the mountain came over the top.
By morning, following a fierce battle, Lima Site 85 was overrun.
Seven of the 19 men at the site made it off the mountain alive. An eighth man was hit by fatal gunfire while loading into a rescue helicopter. (He was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor by President Barack Obama for his actions in the fight.)
Eleven men were unaccounted for.
"We're not sure the status of the men"
On the other side of the world, Rick Holland's mom, Ann Holland, was hosting a Cub Scout meeting when the phone rang. It was the Air Force.
Rick Holland recounted the call: "Mrs. Holland, something's happened up at the site. We're not sure exactly what. We're not sure the status of the men. So we just want to let you know and we'll call you back in a couple days when we find out more information."
The mission was clandestine. Before deploying, the handpicked men were required to resign from the military and sign on with Lockheed Air Corp as cover – a process known as "sheep dipping". It allowed the U.S. to maintain the fiction that it recognized Laos' neutrality.
In reality, Laos was heavily involved in the war. The Ho Chi Minh Trail, down which North Vietnam supplied Communist insurgents in the South, snaked through Laos. And between 1964 and 1973, Americans flew 580,000 bombing runs over Laos, dropping nearly 2.1 million tons of ordnance, according to Defense Department figures.
The wives of the men were also sworn to secrecy. Talking about the mission with anybody — the other wives, their own children — was forbidden.
Rick Holland says it was weeks before his mother told him and his four siblings that something had happened to their dad. It was another two years before the military would declare her husband, and the others, dead. But she wasn't satisfied; she wanted proof.
She pressed Air Force officers for information. The Air Force stonewalled. She sued the government and Lockheed in 1975, but the case dragged on for years, and was eventually dismissed for passing the statute of limitations. She filed Freedom of Information Act requests.
The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency says "both friendly and enemy eyewitnesses state that all 11 [men] were killed during the attack."
But there were rumors and conflicting accounts of what happened in the battle on the mountain. Unsubstantiated reports circulated of sightings of possible Americans alive after the fight, and of U.S. men taken prisoner in the days that followed.
Rick Holland says the radar mission was finally declassified in the early 1980s.
"For the first 15 years, as far as our government cared, those men did not exist," he says.
In 1985, the U.S. and Laos began to cooperate in the search for unaccounted-for U.S. service members across the landlocked country. And in the early 1990s, efforts to recover remains from Lima Site 85 got underway.
It's unclear what impact U.S. cutbacks could have
The main search area at the mountain — known locally as Phou Pha Thi — is not at the peak, where the radar equipment and the men stayed. It's partway down the side, on a sloped ledge at the bottom of a 600-foot cliff. The accounting agency believes the North Vietnamese and Lao Communist forces that overran the site threw the men's bodies off the top after the battle.
In the early 2000s, Rick Holland says the Defense Department declared the cliffside site too dangerous to continue the investigation, and halted recovery efforts.
"That broke my mom," he says. "That's when I decided that I was not ready to give up."
He took up the banner and continued to put pressure on the Defense Department to get back to the mountain and search for remains of the men who were missing after what was the largest single ground-combat loss of U.S. Air Force personnel during the Vietnam War.
POW/MIA accounting agency members often repeat two things about their work. First, that the mission is to provide "the fullest possible accounting" of the more than 81,000 missing service members who fought in conflicts going back to World War II. That is distinct from a complete accounting.
Second, they talk about a big obstacle to the mission.
"Time is our greatest challenge," says Joshua Maskovich, a casualty resolution specialist with the agency in Laos.
"People who were alive at the time that these incidents occurred who may have information that can lead us to a burial site or crash site, or knowledge about what happened to an American — that generation of people are passing away," he says.
In Laos, also, the earth is acidic. Acid breaks down bones. Maskovich says there have been cases where they have only found teeth.
"Teeth last longer than osseous remains, or bones," he says.
Fresh challenges to the work may also be on the horizon.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wants to cut 8% of the Pentagon's annual budget in each of the next five years. In late March, Hegseth visited the POW/MIA accounting agency's headquarters in Hawaii, and said accounting for missing personnel was "our nation's sacred duty." Still, the agency does not appear to have been exempted from the budget cuts.
In addition to the search for remains, one of the oldest links between the United States and Laos since the full restoration of ties in 1992 has been the effort to clear unexploded ordnance. By some accounts, there are more than 80 million unexploded cluster bombs littering the countryside.
The U.S. has historically been the largest donor of aid for unexploded ordnance clearance, putting in some $335 million since 1995. Trump administration cuts to overseas aid have brought the flow of funds to a halt.
Lt. Cmdr. Brendan Dziama, a Navy foreign area officer who was with the POW/MIA accounting agency in Laos when NPR visited, said its work is not directly linked to efforts to dispose of unexploded ordnance.
But he added: "In the eyes of partner nations, the overall efforts to address the legacies of war often get linked."
The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency did not respond to emailed questions about the expected impact of the budget and aid cuts, which were announced after NPR visited Laos.
The Lao Embassy in Washington also did not respond to an emailed request for comments.
Complex terrain makes it hard to investigate
In the race against time, the agency is leveraging technology to accelerate its work. In March, it used a new DNA matching technique for the first time to identify a World War II service member.
And in Laos, the stalled search at Lima Site 85 was restarted in earnest after a September 2022 aerial LiDAR survey allowed scientists to narrow the search and identify seven areas of interest.
The effort bore fruit the next year when anthropologist Katie Ruben recognized a tiny bone fragment at her feet.
"It was actually about 2 feet from a very large cliff edge, so it was fortunate that we were able to see it when we did and get it before it went over the cliff edge," she says.
The fragment was later identified as belonging to Sgt. David Price, one of Melvin Holland's colleagues. (Remains of two others recovered from the hill in previous years have also been positively identified, leaving eight unaccounted for.)
The search area on the mountain is hard to access. On rainy or foggy days, it's a two-hour drive from the town of Sam Neua, followed by a hike. On clear days, accounting agency teams take helicopters run by a Lao contractor to a landing site.
"It's pretty complex terrain, so it takes us another 30 to 45 minutes from where we're landing to the actual investigation or excavation area," said Weston Iannone, an Army captain with the agency who was in charge of the site when NPR visited Laos in January.
"It's a series of rappels, ascents, and then, like, hand-over-hand 'via ferrata' guide lines," said Iannone.
On the hill, there is no flat land. Team members wear helmets, climbing harnesses, and are clipped into fixed lines. Buckets of excavated dirt are passed to a collection point by ropes and pulleys.
A son calls out for his missing father
In January, Rick Holland traveled to Laos for the first time.
His goal was to meet the defense department excavation team to "put a face to the Holland name they are looking for." He also wanted to reach the top of Phou Pha Thi, where his dad was last seen.
It's a tourist site now — albeit a remote one — and there's a trail with steps that leads to the peak, more than a mile up in the Lao sky. The government of Laos would not let NPR accompany Holland to the top, so a member of the accounting agency recorded the hike.
At the pinnacle, silent hills unfolded around him — a vista that his father took in many times more than half a century earlier.
Holland phoned his 85-year-old mother to tell her he'd made it. And he sat by the edge, draped in a black POW/MIA flag.
"Pha Thi! I'm here! I'm here to ask your forgiveness. Please. Let the men come home. It's time!" Holland bellowed to the mountain spirit.
Bringing them back is his life's mission, he says.
"Dad! I'm here. I want you home, dad. We miss you. We want you back so bad."
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