11 Mar 2008 REMEMBERED by Selena Benally pooreve006@yahoo.com

 

Notes from The Virtual Wall NVA and VC elements in South Vietnam were absolutely dependent on men and materiel transported down the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos ... if these supplies could be cut off, the enemy forces in South Vietnam would wither in place. Accordingly, the Trail was of considerable interest throughout the war. One method of intelligence gathering involved the emplacement of acoustic and seismic sensors along the trail; these sensors transmitted data by radio to a processing facility at Nakon Phanom RTAFB in Thailand, where the "take" was used to direct strike missions. Navy Observation Squadron 67 (VO-67) was formed to provide a highly accurate method of delivering the sensors. VO-67 flew modified SP-2E Neptune aircraft, designated the OP-2E, and took up residence at Nakon Phanom in November 1967. VO-67's first loss occurred on 11 January 1968, when OP-2E BuNo 131436 failed to return from a sensor seeding mission conducted in Laos during a period of bad weather. Since search-and-rescue operations failed to locate either aircraft or crew, the crewmen were classed as Missing in Action. On 23 January a USAF A-1 pilot spotted aircraft wreckage on a mountainside near Ban Napoung. An O-2 from the 23rd TASS took handheld photography of the crash site, which was on a sheer cliffside about 200 feet below the top of a 4600' peak. Topography and enemy presence made a ground search impractical, but it was determined that the aircraft was indeed the missing OP-2E and that the crash was not survivable. On 23 Feb 1968 the crew's status was changed from MIA to Killed in Action, Body not Recovered. The crew consisted of CDR Delbert Austin Olson, pilot LTJG Denis Leon Anderson, copilot LTJG Arthur Charles Buck, navigator LTJG Philip Paul Stevens, copilot Aviation Electrician 2nd Class Richard Michael Mancini Aviation Ordnanceman 2nd Class Michael Land Roberts Aviation Machinist's Mate 2nd Class Donald Nellis Thoresen Photographer's Mate 2nd Class Kenneth Harry Widon Aviation Electronics Technician 3rd Class Gale Robert Siow In addition to the nine men, the squadron's mascot, a small dog named Snoopy, was aboard the aircraft. So matters stood for some 25 years. Beginning in 1993, JTF-FA teams attempted to locate and excavate the wreckage. After three failures, a fourth team located the wreckage in 1996 and retrieved human remains, two dogtags, and one ID card. Additional excavations were carried out in March 2001 and February/March 2002; these excavations recovered additional remains. Although a large proportion of the remains could not be individually identified, there were identifiable remains from each of the nine men. Three bone fragments came from a small-to-medium-sized domestic dog ... Snoopy too had come home.

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