The Repository Last Known Position

Lima Site 85: How 8 of 11 Airmen Left Behind Got Names

October 22, 2026 · Runtime 12:20 · Watch on YouTube

Lima Site 85 was a secret Air Force radar site on a 5,600-foot peak in Laos. In the early morning of 11 March 1968 it was overrun, and eleven of the nineteen Americans on the mountain were killed and could not be recovered. Between 2005 and June 2026, eight of those eleven were accounted for, most of them after a drone survey and two excavations on the cliff in 2025.

Chapters

  1. 0:00 Lima Site 85
  2. 0:46 Phou Pha Thi
  3. 2:15 January 1968
  4. 2:36 The night of 10 March
  5. 3:22 The ledge
  6. 4:17 The count
  7. 4:57 Missing, then killed in action
  8. 5:24 The 16 March photograph
  9. 5:58 Never retaken
  10. 6:34 1994 and 2003
  11. 7:43 The drone map
  12. 8:35 The 2025 excavations
  13. 9:20 No single method
  14. 10:56 Eight names
  15. 11:18 How high is the mountain?
  16. 11:59 Next: a ship in Subic Bay

Transcript

Lima Site 85 0:00

Lima Site 85, March 1968. Eleven American airmen were left behind on a cliff in Laos, and eight of them have names today. The mountain was never retaken.

We read the case through the government's own record: a secret radar, a night attack, a headcount that disagrees with itself, and a team on ropes on a cliff face.

A word on what you are seeing. The video is from the 2025 recovery mission on the mountain, released by the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, including the ceremony that ends it. The 1968 attack was never filmed. The two photographs of the site are the Air Force's. No human remains are shown.

Phou Pha Thi 0:46

Phou Pha Thi is a steep peak in Houaphan Province, in northeastern Laos. The agency puts its summit at five thousand six hundred feet. In 1968 the Air Force had a radar site on top. Its name was Lima Site 85.

It stood about fifteen miles from the North Vietnamese border. Air and Space Forces Magazine puts it a hundred and sixty miles west of Hanoi. From the coordinates on a 1968 photograph, we measure about a hundred and forty-five.

The site began as a navigation beacon, working by August 1966. In November 1967 a radar arrived that directed bombers onto their targets. In the eighteen weeks it ran, the Air Force relied on it for twenty-three percent of the air strikes in the north of North Vietnam.

Inside the Air Force the facility had a code name, Heavy Green. The operations run from the mountain were called Commando Club. The radar's range was a hundred and seventy-five miles, and the target had to lie inside it.

Nineteen Americans were on the mountain that month. Most were Air Force radar technicians, serving with Detachment One of the 1043rd Radar Evaluation Squadron.

The site was secret. The war in Laos was publicly disclosed in 1970, and that announcement, the magazine notes, revealed nothing about Lima Site 85.

January 1968 2:15

On the twelfth of January 1968, two Soviet-built biplanes dropped converted mortar rounds on the summit. The attack killed two Laotian civilians and two guerrillas. It did no damage to the radar.

One of the biplanes crashed and burned. The other crashed sixteen miles to the northwest.

The night of 10 March 2:36

The real attack came two months later. On the night of the tenth of March, a North Vietnamese force that the magazine puts at three thousand troops began shelling the mountain, from about six in the evening.

Before midnight, a small team of sappers climbed the western side of the mountain. The magazine says thirty-three. The Air Force's own report, written that August, says twenty. The record does not settle it.

In the early morning of the eleventh of March, the agency says, Vietnamese commandos overran the site. The Americans sought safety on a narrow ledge of the steep mountain.

The Hmong defenders around the site held the trail to the summit as late as seven thirty. They were badly outnumbered.

The ledge 3:22

On that ledge, Chief Master Sergeant Richard Etchberger kept the attackers at bay with a rifle. Because of him, the magazine says, his wounded companions lived to be rescued.

Etchberger was fatally wounded by ground fire as he was raised into a helicopter, and died minutes later. He received the Medal of Honor in 2010. His body was recovered, so he is not one of the eleven.

The first helicopter in, at seven thirty-five that morning, was an Air America Huey. The pilot pulled close to the cliff, and the flight engineer brought the survivors up by cable. The agency says helicopters rescued eight men, under cover of A-1 Skyraider aircraft.

An Air Force Jolly Green helicopter lifted the last man off at nine forty-six that morning. Eleven Americans were still on the mountain.

The count 4:17

Nineteen on the mountain. Eight rescued. Eleven killed in action and not recovered.

That count is the agency's, and the magazine's. The Air Force's 1968 report gives two others: sixteen men and six evacuated in its foreword, and nineteen men and seven extracted in its body. The record disagrees with itself.

A 2024 report by Task and Purpose counts twelve airmen killed that morning. By our reading, that is the eleven plus Etchberger, who died in the helicopter. The agency's number, eleven, counts the men who could not be recovered.

Missing, then killed in action 4:57

On the sixteenth of March, the embassy reported that the families of the eleven had been told they were missing. On the twenty-fifth of March, their status changed to killed in action.

The embassy had already written that it no longer carried anyone as missing, and considered everyone who had not been extracted to be dead. The Defense Department held to that. It carried the eleven as killed in action, body not recovered.

The 16 March photograph 5:24

The Air Force began bombing the summit that same day, to destroy the equipment left behind. On the sixteenth, a reconnaissance jet photographed it. Hand labels on the print point to a large building, an antenna building, generators and a bunker.

The photograph's label gives the position: twenty degrees, twenty-six minutes, forty seconds north; a hundred and three degrees, forty-three minutes, eleven seconds east. That is the last known position of the site, as the Air Force wrote it that week.

Never retaken 5:58

The mountain was never retaken. That December, Hmong General Vang Pao's forces recaptured the landing strip, the helipad and the CIA area, but they could not take the summit.

So the eleven stayed. The record held them as killed in action, body not recovered, and the summit stayed in enemy hands.

One question the record could not close. A former Pathet Lao officer later told an investigator that prisoners had been taken. He had not been there. The North Vietnamese account published in 1996 reports none.

1994 and 2003 6:34

In 1994, a joint American and Lao team searched near the top of the mountain and found nothing. From 1994 to 2009, teams followed leads from dozens of witnesses.

In 2003, a second operation found remains. Two former North Vietnamese commandos had shown investigators three places where they said bodies were thrown over the cliff, and that pointed to a ledge five hundred and forty feet below. The remains were identified as Technical Sergeant Patrick Shannon, accounted for on the thirty-first of October 2005.

That same year, a Laotian citizen gave American officials an identification card with the name of another missing man, and human remains said to have been found at the base of the mountain. In 2012, the agency accounted for Lieutenant Colonel Clarence Blanton, the American commander of the site. Mitochondrial DNA matched his sister.

Then the agency stopped. It evaluated whether recoveries on the summit were possible, and its release says logistics and safety concerns precluded further attempts.

The drone map 7:43

In 2020, a partner at the University of Illinois Chicago began mapping the mountain with drones. The pandemic cut the survey short, and the team finished in the fall of 2022. They built a three-dimensional model with LiDAR, and a program trained on photographs of tropical forest flagged anything that looked different from the rest.

In 2023, a team acting on those recommendations found unexploded ordnance, wreckage from the site, and possible bone on the cliffside. The bone was later identified as Sergeant David Price. He was accounted for in June 2024.

To work there, team members were lowered down a cliff face of about a hundred and fifty meters. The team knew the area carried a very high burden of unexploded ordnance, and the risk of lethal rockfall.

The 2025 excavations 8:35

In 2025, joint American and Lao teams surveyed and excavated the cliff from the sixteenth of January to the sixteenth of February, and again from the second to the thirty-first of March.

The work is slow. Soil is dug by hand, carried out in buckets, and sifted through screens. Measuring tapes and notebooks fix where everything is found.

Everything the teams recovered, the release says, was accessioned into the agency's laboratory for scientific analysis.

The teams recovered possible human remains, possible material evidence, and other bone material. Possible is the agency's word, and it stays possible until the laboratory says otherwise.

No single method 9:20

There is no single method for the site. For Sergeant Price, circumstantial evidence and mitochondrial DNA. For Staff Sergeant Gish, anthropology and three kinds of DNA. For Master Sergeant Calfee, anthropology, circumstantial evidence, mitochondrial DNA, and a nuclear marker test.

On the twenty-third of June 2025, three men were accounted for: Staff Sergeant Henry Gish, Technical Sergeant Willis Hall, and Technical Sergeant Donald Springsteadah. The date for Springsteadah comes from Stars and Stripes. We did not find the agency's own release for him.

On the eighth of August, Master Sergeant James Calfee. The agency's first release on his case came that month. The complete one came on the twenty-ninth of December.

Calfee is memorialized on the Courts of the Missing at the National Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, and on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington. His name stays on both.

In January 2026, a recovery team went back. The agency's own question-and-answer page says it would work through the twenty-third of February, and that a mission in 2027 depends on what it finds. We could not find the result.

In June 2026 came an eighth name: Staff Sergeant Don Worley, accounted for on the twenty-second of June. The release is marked initial. The complete accounting will be published once his family receives a full briefing.

Eight names 10:56

Here is the count. One name in 2005. A second in 2012. A third in 2024. Then four in 2025, and one more in 2026.

Three men are still without names: James Davis, Melvin Holland and Herbert Kirk. We found no announcement for them.

How high is the mountain? 11:18

Even the height of the mountain is in dispute. The Air Force's 1968 report says fifty-five hundred feet. The magazine says fifty-five eighty. The agency says fifty-six hundred.

So here is the account. Nineteen Americans on a mountain. Eight lifted off. Eleven killed and left. Eight named, over twenty-one years. Three still waiting.

For fifty-eight years, the last known position of those men was a ledge on a cliff in Laos. What moved it was a drone map, ropes, buckets, and a laboratory that could match what the team carried down to samples from their families.

Next: a ship in Subic Bay 11:59

Next, a ship. In December 1944, a Japanese transport carrying American prisoners of war was sunk in Subic Bay, in the Philippines. In 2026, the Navy and the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency sent divers back down to it. That is the next episode.

Description and sources

We read the case through the record: the radar site on Phou Pha Thi and what the Air Force relied on it for; the biplane raid of 12 January 1968; the attack of 10-11 March, with the number of sappers (33 or 20) and the headcount (19 on the mountain, 8 rescued, 11 not recovered; or 16 and 6, or 19 and 7, in the Air Force's own 1968 report) that the record does not settle; Chief Master Sergeant Richard Etchberger and the Medal of Honor; the status changes of 16 and 25 March 1968; the bombing of the summit, and the reconnaissance photograph of 16 March with its hand label and coordinates; and why the eleven stayed. Then the recovery: the 1994 and 2003 operations, Patrick Shannon (2005) and Clarence Blanton (2012), the University of Illinois Chicago drone and LiDAR survey of 2020-2022, the 2023 find that became David Price (2024), the 2025 excavations (16 Jan-16 Feb and 2-31 Mar) that led to Henry Gish, Willis Hall, Donald Springsteadah and James Calfee, and the June 2026 initial release for Don Worley. The method differs from case to case. Three men, James Davis, Melvin Holland and Herbert Kirk, were still without a public announcement when we checked. The record also disagrees about the height of the mountain: 5,500, 5,580 or 5,600 feet.

PRIMARY SOURCES

ARCHIVE PLATES — public-domain documents, with author, date, archive and licence.

  • US Air Force (2 images) | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain

Last Known Position reads a missing-in-action case through the record that closed it: the loss report, the excavation and the laboratory.

About the material. Video: Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency recovery missions on Phou Pha Thi, Laos, 2025 (via DVIDS). Photographs: U.S. Air Force, 30 January 1968 and 16 March 1968, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain. The 1968 attack was never filmed and nothing here reconstructs it. Diagrams are drawn in code. Nothing here is AI-generated imagery. No human remains are shown.

About the count. Whether Don Worley has been accounted for rests on the agency's initial release of 26 June 2026; the agency says the complete accounting will follow. The date of Donald Springsteadah's identification comes from Stars and Stripes (27 June 2025).

The appearance of U.S. Department of Defense visual information does not imply or constitute endorsement. This channel is independent and not affiliated with the U.S. Air Force or the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency.

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