Inside the recovery of MIA Americans from a secret jungle base
A team trained at the U.S Marine Mountain Warfare Training Center to prepare for their search for missing Americans
Joshua Skovlund
Updated on Aug 2, 2024 5:19 PM EDT
DPAA investigation team traversing the mountain side of the former Lima Site 85.
The DPAA investigation team makes their way up a valley trail to get to the Lima 85 investigation site in Laos. (U.S. Army photo/Staff Sgt. Daniel Black.)
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.
https://taskandpurpose.com/military-life/cliffside-recovery-lima-site-85/
