by Bryan Bender
Within a few minutes the two men were in radio contact with each other and sent distress signals. Their Mayday call and the homing beepers outfitted on their parachutes were picked up by an HC-130 search-and-rescue plane flying about sixty miles to the west, and several rescue helicopters were quickly scrambled to the scene from across the border in South Vietnam. The two fliers were continuing to report their position when two American attack aircraft arrived simultaneously at about 11:00 a.m. Twenty minutes later, more helicopters and fighter jets arrived. The rescue operation had begun. American aircraft fired rockets to beat back the enemy from the river and struck at the larger enemy guns to the north and in the direction of the limestone tower. But the enemy anti-aircraft guns on both sides of the river fired with greater intensity, and it became clear there were more enemy troops and weaponry in the surrounding jungle than the rescue force first realized. Rescue aircraft flying down the valley were caught in the cross fire. Especially nettlesome was a large-caliber machine gun located in a cave at the foot of the karst about three hundred yards behind Bergeron.
After about an hour, the ground fire died down enough to try to make a pickup. The rescuers went for Danielson first because the terrain was flatter and there seemed to be more enemy forces on his side of the river. The first try almost got to him, but the helicopter was driven away by ground fire. Another chopper made a rescue attempt and was driven away. As friendly aircraft continued to drop bombs and antipersonnel mines on the surrounding jungle, several more attempts were made to reach Danielson. They all failed. In one, a helicopter was hit in the rotor blades and had to return to base. In another, disaster struck. A para–rescue jumper, a young airman first class named David M. Davison, was hit by ground fire and killed.
By daybreak the rescue effort had begun again, and contact was made with Bergeron but not with Danielson. An hour later, Bergeron reported that he had heard excited voices across the river, a long burst of automatic weapons fire, and then a scream that sounded as if it came from Danielson. For the next five hours the Americans strafed and bombed the valley, with direction from Bergeron, who was using a compass and his best guess to pinpoint the enemy positions. The Americans dropped riot-control agents into the surrounding trees and built a wall of smoke on both sides of the river with special-purpose munitions—a pillar that looked from five thousand feet like a Texas sandstorm and was even detected by a satellite passing overhead.
But it wasn’t until the third day, after hundreds of sorties, that the valley became eerily quiet. One of the rescuers remarked of the enemy forces that “they were all either dead or had given up.” It was then that Bergeron was finally hoisted up to one of the helicopters and returned to safety. Ben Danielson was never heard from again.
Now, nearly four decades later, JPAC had new information strongly suggesting that Danielson was killed by the Vietnamese near where he had last been reported—including a bone fragment turned over to JPAC that was a DNA match with relatives, a set of dog tags recovered nearby, and the testimony of a former North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gunner. But George’s recovery team would need to be larger than most, Dr. Benedix explained, because the site of the potential burial covered a large swath of territory and was littered with hundreds of unexploded bombs dropped by American jets during the war. George would need eighteen soldiers, as well as local workers.
He set about identifying the right mix of personnel. Detachment 4’s watchword for building recovery teams was “task organized,” meaning each member’s skills needed to match the unique characteristics of the recovery site. The considerations ranged from the number of potential MIAs they would be searching for to the geography and the surrounding environment. Striking the right balance could spell the difference between success and failure.
“The teams are this organization’s main effort,” Colonel Hanson impressed upon his new recovery team leader.
One major challenge would be unexploded ordnance. A number of locals in the area had been maimed or killed by some of the thousands of small leftover bombs that had been dropped on Communist forces during the war. The JPAC team would therefore need several explosive-ordnance specialists to detect and dispose of any potentially dangerous material. George also identified a life-support specialist, a soldier steeped in the knowledge of what an F-4 Phantom pilot would be wearing at the time Danielson went down, along with any equipment he might have had with him when he ejected from his disabled fighter, such as signal flares, a survival kit, or a life jacket. This knowledge would be of paramount importance to correctly identify any evidence they might uncover and where to focus the excavation. After consulting with Dr. Benedix and some of Detachment 4’s more experienced members, George determined that the team would also need a supply sergeant, a medic, four communications specialists, a Lao linguist, and a photographer to chronicle the excavation.
George soon discovered that personnel shortages were as acute at JPAC as in the rest of the military, which was fighting two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. To round out the recovery teams, JPAC often had to request “augmentees” from other commands for temporary duty. Medics were especially in high demand, as were explosives experts, engineers, and soldiers with mountaineering experience or, for underwater recoveries, Navy divers. Meanwhile, additional enlisted soldiers would be needed as recovery specialists, the glorified description of what were more commonly referred to as diggers—the personnel whose main job would be to wield shovels, picks, trowels, and ultimately their hands to remove thousands of pounds of earth and carefully sift it through the “wet screens” that George planned to set up at the recovery site, which was near a riverbed. In the first week of February, George submitted his “manning matrix,” setting forth the assignments of his key team members.
The long hours of preparations continued. A risk assessment of the recovery site had to be completed. All equipment that would be needed—from communications gear to medical supplies—had to be identified and cargo manifests submitted. Case folders had to be prepared and regular updates provided to the commanding general and senior JPAC staff. Meanwhile, all team personnel had to be prepped on their responsibilities, while orders had to be prepared for each of them, and their immunizations and passport information all brought up to date. George’s days were filled with a host of tasks that weren’t all that different from previous assignments that required him to plan operations. But there were constant reminders that this would be different, such as when he had to make preparations for a possible repatriation ceremony in Laos if they recovered the remains of Captain Danielson.
He was still waiting for all the augmentees from other military commands to complete his team when he unexpectedly got pulled into Colonel Hanson’s office. A highly sensitive issue had come up about the mission, he was told. They were both needed down at the headquarters on Hickam. When they arrived at Building 45, George was informed that JPAC was going to be doing something it never had before. It would give his mission higher profile and likely draw media attention, he was told. It would also put greater pressure on him to make sure everything was handled with the most extreme care. George was dumbfounded when he heard what it was. Ben Danielson’s son—a thirty-eight-year-old Navy officer who had been a year old when his father went missing—would be part of the recovery team.
“But is he going to be emotional?” was George’s first reaction.
Further complicating matters, in his view, was the fact that the son of the MIA was a lieutenant commander in the Navy. He was higher ranking than George. “How is this gonna work?” George thought.
He felt a little better when he learned that the son’s participation in the recovery was approved only after he agreed—even insisted—that he receive no special treatment. Still, George’s unease about bringing a family member along lingered when he saw the reactions of Dr. Benedix, Sergeant Baldeagle, and others with far more experience. JPAC just doesn’t do that, they told him gravely. Too many potential variables the command couldn’t control.
On February 27, 2006, the team’s augmentees reported for duty, including Commander Brian Danielson. Tall and lanky, Danielson had served four tours over Iraq as a navigator in the twin-engine prowler that was first introduced during the Vietnam War to jam enemy radars. When George met him for the first time, he almost immediately felt better about the situation. Danielson was a garrulous guy whose wisecracking demeanor quickly endeared him to George and other members of the team. He also seemed genuinely grateful for the unique opportunity he was being given and maintained that he was committed to working hard like every other team member and doing as he was told. He again promised to take orders from George and not cause any problems. He just wanted to bring his father home. George did, too, now more than he ever anticipated.
Even so, George was keenly aware that Brian’s presence would make his job harder. For one, Brian apparently had some of his own ideas about where JPAC should be searching, which injected more angst into the mission planning. He had done a ton of research on his own about his father’s case and had brought along stacks of research on where his father was lost, including maps and interviews with some of the men his father served with. George got the feeling Brian Danielson knew more about the case than JPAC, and he was worried about how he would maintain control of the recovery.
George was also disappointed that Sergeant Baldeagle, who had quickly become his right hand, was needed for other duties and would not be going on the mission. But the team’s departure was now approaching, and it made little sense to fret about it. Over the next few days the team augmentees received communications and bone-screening training, a flurry of briefings on Lao culture, and a slew of vaccinations, including for Japanese encephalitis, rabies, and typhoid. Anyone who had a history of heatstroke or heat exhaustion was disqualified.
On March 2, the full recovery team gathered in the Hickam Memorial Theater for a pre-deployment briefing, where George also assigned some of the younger soldiers to research what happened during the Vietnam War in the area of Laos where they would be working so they could report back to the team. He wanted to instill in them the gravity of what they would be doing.
“You are going to Laos,” he told them. “There is an opportunity to drink beer and get into trouble, but we will be there for a very honorable reason.”
The following morning, March 3, 2006, the team members packed their supply chests, known as tough boxes, with flashlights, leather gloves, mosquito nets, two pairs of boots each, eye protection, sleeping bags, and various other types of personal gear. They brought them down to the yard behind JPAC headquarters to be loaded onto pallets for storage in the belly of a C-17 transport plane. George was also issued six thousand dollars in cash.
On the morning of March 7, 2006, a white Mi-17 helicopter shuddered as it lifted off from the grounds of a vacant two-story guesthouse in the remote village of Boualapha in Khammouan Province in central Laos. The aging Russian aircraft and its crew had been contracted by JPAC from a private company to ferry George’s recovery team to a remote valley a few dozen miles away at a place called Ban Phanop. George rode in a separate chopper, a smaller red-and-white AS350, along with a Laotian government official assigned as the team’s minder.
The choppers soon banked north into the Truong Son mountain range and climbed high over the jagged outcroppings of rock poking out of the dense jungle. From a distance George thought the mountains looked like menacing teeth.
Stretching for more than six hundred miles through what is now Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand, the Truong Son range was steeped in myth. According to local legend, the terrain’s tortuous shape was carved when giants of yore carrying massive stones from peak to peak stumbled and fell, their heavy loads crashing down with them. It also had a history of resistance to outsiders; as early as the year 722, the Vietnamese erected a citadel along its spine to resist the Chinese invaders of the Tang dynasty. To the outside world, the Truong Son range was better known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
At the base of the stone formations snaked a forest of thick tree roots, long wooden vines, bamboo thickets, and hidden culverts and rivers—a perfect setting for transporting food, supplies, and weapons for a guerrilla army. For centuries the mountain range was traversed only on foot with the aid of bushwhackers or pickaxes. But after World War II, the Marxist revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam realized its strategic importance as a supply line for a long resistance war. By 1959 the trail was lengthened and widened so that a battalion of six hundred men carrying weapons and medicines on their backs could march more than a dozen miles in a day, almost without detection. By 1964 a system of roads had been completed through the valleys and mountains of Truong Son; one of them, just wide enough for a single truck, meandered for more than a thousand miles through perennial forests from North Vietnam, into Laos and Cambodia, ending in the combat zone in South Vietnam. Along the portions that crossed through thinner foliage, rocks were tied to branches to bend them and conceal the supply convoys. If the trail ran through a fully exposed area like a streambed, watchmen were posted to warn truck drivers with gunshots that the swirls of dust from their tires might assist enemy planes overhead seeking to strike them.
That is exactly what Brian Danielson’s father had been trying to do when he was piloting his F-4 Phantom on the morning of December 5, 1969, in what the Americans had come to call the “War Against Trucks.”
As the deafening whir of the rotor blades carried them to their destination, George’s mind raced. There were dozens of tasks to put in motion when they touched down. They would have to use metal detectors to find any unexploded bombs; clear the jungle around the coordinates where the lost pilot had been reported buried; rope off a network of grids to guide the excavation; build screening stations; and establish emergency evacuation routes, just to name a few. When the excavation began, George would take cues from Dr. Benedix, but he was responsible for the welfare of the entire team and about eighty locals who had been hired to help in the search. He had memorized the laundry list of potential hazards they faced, both natural and man-made. There were cobras, bamboo vipers, bats, and a host of other variations of unwelcome wildlife to contend with in Laos. But his greatest worry was what the intelligence briefings informed him were more than twenty different kinds of UXO, or unexploded ordnance, dotting the search area. The valley where Captain Benjamin Franklin Danielson was last heard from thirty-six years earlier was literally a minefield, littered with countless bomblets that had been dropped by American jets during the war. Even with the passage of more than three decades, the high percentage of duds could go off at any time. The team’s explosives-disposal specialists, George knew, would be working nearly nonstop.
Something else was also weighing heavily on everyone’s mind. It was not expressed in conversation, nor was it mentioned in any of the reams of reports on the case saved on George’s laptop. It was visible only by the glances the team stole at Brian Danielson. His mere presence instilled a deep sense of purpose in what they were doing. Everyone, from JPAC rookie to veteran, felt a halcyon-like awareness of what had happened here and why they had come all this way after so many years. Usually, recovery teams got to see how their efforts made a difference long after their work was done, in the photographs of families finally granted some measure of closure with the return of a long-lost loved one. For the first time in JPAC’s history, a loved one was here with them. Even the most seasoned members of George’s team, who had been on numerous recoveries, were seized by the feeling that they had a personal stake in this one. Like George’s team linguist, Sergeant First Class Sengchanh “Sammy” Vilaysane. Sammy, who came to the United States from Laos when he was ten and served nearly twenty years in the U.S. Army, felt a particularly strong emotional attachment to what they were doing. As they neared the recovery site, he tried to imagine what was going through the mind of the determined-looking Navy officer strapped in a few feet away who had come searching for the father he never knew. Dr. Benedix, who had been on mo
re than a dozen recoveries, had never felt such immediacy or so much pressure to succeed.
George was awed by the amount of effort being made, all these years later, for a single fighter pilot and his family. JPAC had literally occupied the village of Boualapha and erected tents on the grounds around it, even hiring a contractor who set up a mess tent to feed the team each morning and night. It had moved in a whole support network from the city of Savannakhet, where JPAC had a warehouse, and ferried loads of supplies by helicopter to the recovery site itself deep in the jungle.
“This is more than just a cool thing to do,” George thought of his new assignment.
Somewhere out ahead of them in the jungle below, Brian Danielson’s father had probably been captured and killed and then buried in a makeshift grave. George was determined to do everything he could to try to bring him home.
The helicopters passed over a ridge, about ten miles south of Mu Gia Pass, a key terminus where the Ho Chi Minh Trail had entered Laos from North Vietnam, and the aircraft descended swiftly toward the valley floor. The first thing George noticed as the pilots prepared to set the choppers down beside a small river was the huge columns of limestone hundreds of feet high, the karst formations that he had read about in the MIA file and, he knew, had probably spelled Ben Danielson’s doom that day nearly forty years before. The second thing George noticed was that the narrow valley, which was about two miles long and half a mile wide, was dotted with dozens of circular indentations. The landscape, he thought, looked as if someone had taken a golf ball and flattened it. The round depressions on the valley floor, he was told, were from the thousands of baseball-sized munitions that U.S. jets had dropped in the valley during the Vietnam War. Most were now filled with water and used by local villagers to raise fish.