Airman may get MoH for secret Laos mission - Air Force News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Air Force Times

Airman may get MoH for secret Laos mission

Pentagon officials told Cory Etchberger that his father died in a helicopter accident in Southeast Asia on March 11, 1968.

But even at 9 years old, Cory said he felt something was missing in the story when his family was secretly whisked into the Pentagon to accept his father’s Air Force Cross.

Turned out Chief Master Sgt. Richard Etchberger died saving three Americans fighting off waves of North Vietnamese commandos advancing on a top-secret U.S. radar station in the Laotian mountains, but those details were omitted.

Four decades later, Air Force Secretary Michael Donley has recommended Etchberger’s Air Force Cross be upgraded to the Medal of Honor. It’s now up to Defense Secretary Robert Gates and President Bush for final approval, said an Air Force official.

Etchberger was nominated for the Medal of Honor in 1968, but President Lyndon B. Johnson didn’t approve it. Military officials instead awarded Etchberger the Air Force Cross.

This is where the story gets complicated.

Johnson didn’t sign off on the award because the U.S. wasn’t supposed to have troops in Laos, and at the time of his death, Etchberger wasn’t technically in the Air Force.

Before he was deployed to Lima Site 85 — a radar station used to locate bombing targets in North Vietnam and Laos — Etchberger and his wife went to Washington, D.C., along with the other airmen about to go on the secret mission and their wives. There they were told they would be made into civilian employees who worked for Lockheed Aircraft Services as a cover, said Col. Gerald H. Clayton, then the commander of 1043rd Radar Evaluation Squadron, Detachment 1.

“The site was established and operated by American technicians in a manner designed not to violate the 1962 Geneva Agreements and to ‘guarantee’ the ‘neutrality’ of Laos,” according to declassified top secret Air Force report, “The Fall of Site 85.”

Clayton hand-picked the airmen in the secret unit and now says Etchberger was one of the first on his list. Detachment 1 was made up of 40 airmen-turned-civilians deployed to radar stations in Laos.

“I watched him from the time he was a two striper and I was a captain. He was one of the finest men I’ve known,” he told Air Force Times.

From November 1967 to March 1968, Lima Site 85 — nicknamed Commando Club — directed 507 strike missions in North Vietnam and Laos, 27 percent of all the strike missions in those two areas.

Sixteen of Clayton’s former airmen joined two CIA operatives and one forward air controller at the radar station.

They knew they would be discovered, though.

“The North Vietnamese realized when we were bombing them through overcast skies that they must be coming from somewhere,” Clayton said. “It was just a matter of time.”

North Vietnamese soldiers mounted attacks over three months against the radar station.

On Jan. 13, 1968, two AN-2 Colts rocketed and strafed Lima Site 85, killing some of the local guerillas the CIA paid to help protect it, according to the Air Force’s report.

The radar station’s location on a steep 5,500-foot ridge made it a tough target to attack, especially with U.S. bombing missions attempting to push the North Vietnamese back.

But by early March, hundreds of North Vietnamese troops had surrounded the radar site.

Plans were made to evacuate the 19 Americans and destroy the facility. But in the early-morning hours of March 11, heavily armed North Vietnamese soldiers infiltrated the site by scaling massive cliffs.

Only seven Americans survived past 3 a.m., and they were backed up against a ledge.

With rescue helicopters en route, records show Etchberger tended to the wounded while also trying to fight off the advancing enemy soldiers.

When the helicopters arrived, Clayton said Etchberger loaded the wounded Americans onto the rescue sling as the helicopter hovered over the station. He refused to leave until everyone else was on board.

Those who survived say Etchberger saved at least four airmen before he rushed onto the helicopter. But moments later, an armor-piercing round ripped through the helicopter’s underbelly, hitting Etchberger. He bled to death en route to an air base in Thailand.

For 14 years Etchberger’s sons didn’t know the truth of their father’s death, Cory Etchberger said.

His mother was briefed on the mission when she went to D.C. with her husband, but was sworn to secrecy. Not until the mission was declassified did she tell her sons about what their father did in Laos.

Two decades later, a group of 1st Combat Evaluation Group veterans called their congressmen and tried to get Congress to upgrade Etchberger’s Air Force Cross to a Medal of Honor. But there’s a law on the books requiring a nomination for the Medal of Honor be made within two years of the act of heroism.

The group needed a waiver and got one inserted into the 2009 Defense Authorization Act signed into law by Bush this year.

Congressman Earl Pomeroy, who governs the same district in North Dakota where Etchberger and his family used to be stationed, was one of the first to support its inclusion into the act.

“In my view, the Medal of Honor is determined by the heroic deeds performed, not the geographic area where they occur,” he said.

Etchberger’s family and the veterans he served with now wait to see if Gates and Bush will OK Etchberger’s Medal of Honor.

On Sept. 17, Gates denied the last nomination he received for the Medal of Honor, deciding to award Marine Sgt. Rafael Peralta the Navy Cross for his heroic actions in Iraq. However, one nomination holds no bearing on the other.

The veterans who support Etchberger said they remain optimistic.

A memorial was dedicated in September to Etchberger at Barksdale Air Force Base, La., but it’s unfinished. Instead of engraving an Air Force Cross on the memorial’s face, it was left blank in case he does receive the Medal of Honor.

Etchberger’s family continues to wait, which is something Cory Etchberger said they’ve gotten used to over the years.

“We’ve waited 41 years,” he told Air Force Times. “What’s another couple of months?”