HOLLAND, MELVIN ARNOLD

Name: Melvin Arnold Holland
Rank/Branch: E6/US Air Force
Unit: (See text)
Date of Birth: 06 January 1936
Home City of Record: Toledo WA
Date of Loss: 11 March 1968
Country of Loss: Laos
Loss Coordinates: 202600N 1034400E (UH680600)
Status (in 1973): Killed In Action/Body Not Recovered
Category:
Aircraft/Vehicle/Ground: Ground
Refno: 2052

Other Personnel In Incident: Clarence Blanton; James Calfee; James Davis; Henry
Gish; Willis Hall; Herbert Kirk; David Price; Patrick Shannon; Donald
Springsteadah; Don Worley (all missing from Lima 85); Donald Westbrook (missing
from SAR 13 March)

Source: Compiled by Homecoming II Project 31 April 1990 from one or more of
the following: raw data from U.S. Government agency sources, correspondence
with POW/MIA families, published sources, interviews. Updated by the P.O.W.
NETWORK 2008.

REMARKS:

SYNOPSIS: When Melvin Holland volunteered for a sensitive assignment called
Project Heavy Green, his wife had to sign a secrecy agreement too. Holland,
an Air Force man, was to be temporarily relieved of duty to take a civilian
job with Lockheed Aircraft. He would be on the team running Lima 85, a radar
base in Laos, whose neutrality prohibited U.S. military presence, so it was
necessary for Holland to work as a civilian. No one was to know.

Lima 85 was on a peak in the Annam Highlands near the village of Sam Neua on
a 5860 ft. mountain called Phou Pha Thi. The mountain was protected by sheer
cliffs on three sides, and guarded by 300 tribesmen working for CIA. Unarmed
U.S. "civilians" operated the radar which swept across the Tonkin Delta to
Hanoi, guiding U.S. aircraft to their targets in North Vietnam.

For three months in early 1968, a steady stream of intelligence was received
which indicated that communist troops were about to launch a major attack on
Lima 85. Intelligence watched as enemy troops even built a road to the area
to facilitate moving heavy weapons, but the site was so important that
William H. Sullivan, U.S. Ambassador to Laos, made the decision to leave the
men in place. When the attack came March 11, some were rescued by
helicopter, but eleven men were missing. The President announced a halt in
the bombing of North Vietnam.

Donald Westbrook was flying one of four A1E's orbiting on stand-by to search
for survivors of the attack at Phou Pha Thi when his plane was shot down
March 13. Westbrook was never found. Finding no survivors, the Air Force
destroyed Lima 85 to prevent the equipment from falling into the hands of
the enemy.

In mid-March, Ann Holland was notified that Lima Site 85 had been overrun by
enemy forces, and that her husband and the others who had not escaped had
been killed. Many years later, she learned that was not the whole truth.

Two separate reports indicate that all the men missing at Phou Pha Thi did
not die. One report suggests that at least one of the 11 was captured, and
another indicates that 6 were captured. Information has been hard to get.
The fact that Lima Site 85 existed was only declassified in 1983, and
finally the wives could be believed when they said their husbands were
missing in Laos. Some of the men's files were shown to their families for
the first time in 1985. Officially, the U.S. Air Force "civilians" were
assigned to the 1043rd Radar Evaluation Squadron at Bolling AFB in
Washington D.C.

Ann Holland and the other wives have talked and compared notes. They still
feel there is a lot of information to be had. They think someone survived
the attack on Lima Site 85 that day in March 1968. They wonder if their
country will bring those men home.

=================
11/2003

Woman seeks return of husband who disappeared in Laos in 1968

SHEILA GARDNER - RENO GAZETTE-JOURNAL

Tears fill Ann Holland's eyes as she recalls the 35-year-old memory.

"I'll never forget hanging up the phone and leaning my head against the
wall," she said in a recent interview from her daughter's home in Carson
City.

On March 11, 1968, the young mother turned to face her own five children and
a kitchen full of Cub Scouts. Despite the devastating news she'd just
received -- that her husband, Mel, was missing in action in Laos -- she was
under instructions from the military not to tell anyone.

"I just prayed to God, `Get me through the next hour,'" Holland recalled.
"Then it was, `Help me make dinner.' Finally, `Let me get the kids to bed.'"

It was three months before Holland lined up her children and told them,
"Daddy wasn't coming home." Holland kept the military's secret about her
husband's mission for two years, advised that if she said anything and he
was alive, it could jeopardize his safety. Then, fearing that the government
had abandoned her husband, she started asking questions and demanding
answers.

For more than 30 years, the Washington state resident has been pestering the
military for information about her husband, who would be 67 now.

He has 11 grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren who know their
grandfather by his name on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington,
D.C., and the cartons of information Ann Holland has amassed over the years.

"When I think about what this has done to my kids," Holland said.

When her son Richard was 13, he and another boy ran away from home to meet
prisoners of war who were returning from Vietnam to Travis Air Force Base in
California. Richard was sure his father would be among them. The boys didn't
get very far before the police found them.

"He told his friend that he was going to wait for his dad," Holland said.

Doreen Holland Portch, who was 6 when her father disappeared, keeps a little
doll from Thailand, the last birthday gift she ever received from him.

"He was my best friend," said Portch, now 42 and the mother of four
children. "He always used to take me to the commissary and buy me Cracker
Jacks. When my Mom told us he was dead, we never believed her."

There has been no funeral or memorial service; today,
a tree will be planted in his honor at the Vietnam War Memorial in Mills
 Park.

"People say to me, `You've been trying to prove for 35 years your husband's
alive,'" Holland said. "My answer to that is, `You haven't proved to me that
he's dead.'"

If Air Force Tech. Sgt. Melvin Holland still is alive, his wife wants to
bring him home. "Who's going to bring him home if I don't?" she asked.

Teenage sweethearts Ann and Mel Holland met when she was 13 and he was 17.
When he returned from Korea, she was 16 and they married a year later. By
the time she was 23, they'd had five children.

"When I look back on everything, it's as if God knew what was in store, and
we had a lot of living to do in a short period of time," she said.

When Mel was 31 and Ann 27, he volunteered to be a civilian technician in
 Laos to staff a radar base on a mile-high mountain 15 miles from the border
 of North Vietnam. The mission was so sensitive, Holland said, that she and
 her husband had to sign secrecy agreements.

He and 49 other men were discharged from the Air Force and put on the
Lockheed Air Service payroll.

Initially, Ann Holland refused to sign the agreement. "I said, `I don't
trust this' and he said, `If you keep me from going on this assignment, I'm
not going to forgive you,'" she said.

That was their last conversation and Holland said she remembers thinking
when she left him in Washington, D.C., she wouldn't see her husband again.

The official story from the military was that the mountain was overrun March
11, 1968, and Holland did not survive.

On March 11, 1970, two years to the day that Mel Holland disappeared, she
heard then-President Richard Nixon claim that no Americans had been lost in
ground combat in Laos.

"I knew then that Nixon either did not know about my husband, in which case
he could not do anything to bring him home, or he did know about him and was
not going to do anything to bring him home,"

Holland said. "My greatest fear had come true," she said. "He was being
abandoned."

She called a newspaper editor and began a 30-year odyssey to learn the
truth. A $10 million lawsuit she filed against the federal government was
dismissed, but as a result, she was given documents that gave some clues as
to what happened.

Holland chased down veterans' war stories and filed federal Freedom of
Information Act requests for access to her husband's military records.

She kept hearing about three wounded Americans who had been captured off the
mountain and sent north.

In 1994, she obtained a copy of a so-called "Russian list" with her
husband's name on it that she believes proved he was taken from Laos to
Russia and might be living there today.

In 1999, Columbia University Press published "One Day Too Long," by Timothy
N. Castle, a researcher and senior Department of Defense POW/MIA
investigator for Laos. The book is dedicated to the families of those who
did not return from the mountaintop in Laos.

The Hollands' story figures prominently. "I just made up my mind it's not
over `til it's over," she said. "I don't know where it ends. When I die, I
will know the truth of what happened."

Holland, 63, spends most of her time traveling in a motor home visiting her
children, ages 40 through 46.

"I had to learn a long time ago how to live with this," she said. "It's kind
of like having a split personality. Most of the time, I am just `Ann
Holland, grandma.'"

Holland says she doesn't let herself picture a reunion with her husband. "It
hurts too much. I think about somebody else's husband or somebody else's
brother coming home," she said.

Sheila Gardner, Carson-Douglas bureau chief for the Reno-Gazette Journal,
can be reached at 885-5561 or sgardner@rgj.com. Her column appears on
Tuesdays.

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