Katie Rubin was on a rugged cliffside in a remote Laos jungle when she spotted the human bones.
“I was attached via a relatively short sewn runner to a fixed line that had been placed by one of our six-foot-something team members,” Rubin said. “I noticed what looked like possible skeletal material on the surface at the edge of a drop-off.”
Rubin was lowering down the face of a sheer mountain, the summit of which was once Lima Site 85, a top-secret Air Force radio site in the Vietnam War. The station was overrun in a fierce firefight in 1968, with 11 Americans who manned the site never recovered.
Teams from the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency had learned that the bodies of the Americans killed may have been thrown over the side of the cliffs after the battle.
In late 2023, a DPAA team arrived in Phou Pha Thi in Houaphan Province. The team was evaluating the area to see if they could safely send in a recovery team to search for the remains of those killed during the attack almost six decades before.
The old base is now a tourist destination where a paved road extends up to the base of the cliffs, and a staircase ascends the cliff side on the southeastern side of the mountain.
The bodies, the team knew, landed on ledges down the cliff’s face.
“These ledges are separated from the base of the mountain by additional cliff faces. We were aware that they contain a very high [unexploded ordinance] burden and are subject to potentially lethal rock fall,” Rubin said.
Some debris from the station infrastructure is still in place at the summit, but most of it was removed or destroyed after the U.S. conducted dozens of bombing runs shortly after the battle. Though tourists visit the mountain top via a cleared path, an extensive amount of unexploded ordinance remains along the steep cliffs and ledges to the west and southwest sides of the mountain.
Rubin and her team recovered the remains from the dangerous cliff sides and slopes — but they didn’t know who they belonged to.
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A secret, remote station with no way out
Lima Site 85 was an Air Force radar site located on top of the mountain known as Phou Pha Thi in Houaphan Province. The station served as a radar beacon that bombers used for navigation as they flew into North Vietnam. It also played a critical role in a secretive operation called “Project Heavy Green.” The operation was designed to cut off supplies the enemy forces were transporting via the Ho Chi Ming trail.
In March 1968, North Vietnamese commandoes overran the site. The early morning assault resulted in the deaths of 12 US Air Force personnel, as well as many Hmong and Thai soldiers. An Air Force Chief Master Sgt. Richard Etchberger earned a posthumous Medal of Honor, coordinating the station’s defense and evacuation of survivors.
Recovering those left behind
To prepare for their work at Lima Site 85, Rubin and the team underwent extensive conditioning and mountaineering training, including courses at the Marine Mountain Warfare Training Center in Bridgeport, California, and the Army Mountain Warfare School in Jericho, Vermont.
Rubin told Task & Purpose that their goal at the site was not to recover bodies but to scout out the ledges below the cliff. Were they even accessible with ropes? Was there unexploded ordinance to deal with? Finding remains, Rubin said, was supposed to come later.
The team included Rubin, a civilian forensic anthropologist/archaeologist, and several military personnel, including a team leader, two team sergeants, a communication specialist, a linguist, four dedicated mountaineers, two EOD technicians, and two medical personnel with extensive mountain casualty evacuation experience.
The group operated from helicopters, hiking, short rope ascents, rappels, and lowering or rappelling team members down the 150-meter cliff face. Before arriving at the site, Rubin handed out photos and profiles of all the missing so each team member could learn as much as possible about them.
Two of the 11 missing Americans at Lima Site 85 had been accounted for by recovery trips that began in 2003. Rubin spotted the new remains on the ledge during what was supposed to be an evaluation of the mountain that was once the site of Lima …..
The team carefully recovered the remains and repatriated them to the DPAA’s labs in Hawaii for identification.
Rubin and other members of the team were in Vietnam evaluating a different site when they heard that the lab had found a match: Sgt. David Price.
“I was ecstatic and couldn’t wait to share our excitement with the rest of the Lima Site 85 team and anyone who cared to listen, for that matter,” Rubin said. “The mountaineer and I started talking to everyone on our Vietnam site about Lima Site 85 and what happened there.”
“We had the Netflix Medal of Honor episode about the battle playing in our van. It is always exciting to bring home one of our missing. The investment every team member put into this particular site — physically and emotionally — made it all the more rewarding. We had trained for months for this, and even though we only had a few hours on the ledges in the end, we were able to bring Sergeant Price home.”
Correction: 8/2/2024: This story has been corrected to denote that Dr. Rubin was the only civilian on the search team and to clarify the number of Americans whose remains were not recovered from Lima Site 85 in 1968.
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