UIC researchers and collaborators on top of the mountain Phou Pha Thi in Laos. Work by UIC's Center for the Recovery and Identification of the Missing assisted in the recovery and identification of the remains of Airmen killed at this site during the Vietnam War. (Photo courtesy of the Center for the Recovery and Identification of the Missing)

In northeast Laos, close to the mountainous country's border with Vietnam, sits a sheer cliff nearly four times as tall as the Willis Tower. Known as Phou Pha Thi and considered sacred by local communities, it's where the most U.S. Air Force troops were lost in the Vietnam War.

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On March 10, 1968, a group of 19 Air Force technicians were manning a clandestine radar navigation system called Lima Site 85 atop the 5,600-foot cliff when they came under attack. North Vietnamese forces overran the radar installation, and 11 Americans were killed during the fight. Their bodies could not be recovered.

But in the past year, the remains of five of those men were returned to their families stateside, thanks in part to work by UIC's Center for the Recovery and Identification of the Missing, or CRIM. The program in the Department of Anthropology and the Office of Social Science Research partners with the U.S. military's Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency to search for service members missing in action from past conflicts. Their work led to the recovery and identification of the remains of Master Sgt. James Henry Calfee, Staff Sgt. Henry G. Gish, Tech. Sgt. Willis R. Hall, Sgt. David S. Price and Tech. Sgt. Donald Kennebunk Springsteadah, bringing answers to their families 57 years after they were lost.

"The cool thing about working on projects like this is that there's always a level of really immediate human connection," said Aldo Foe, an anthropology graduate student at UIC and archaeologist with CRIM. "Family members who are waiting for their dads, their uncles, their grandpas to be brought home - the motivation starts and stops with the families."

Bringing the missing home

The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency leads the effort to account for missing service members, but the unique complexity of many cases prompted the government to tap external organizations, including universities, for support.

UIC became involved in 2010, when Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin's office approached anthropology professor John Monaghan to ask if the university could help. The hope was that UIC researchers could apply interdisciplinary collaboration and innovative techniques to the solemn task.

"A university is a place that has broad access to diverse thinking about diverse approaches," said Keith Phillips, a research specialist at CRIM.

Faculty, students and staff on the CRIM team are involved in every step of the search, from archival research and technology development to on-the-ground searches in the field. They've searched for remains from World War II and the Vietnam War in places like Cambodia, Italy, the Philippines and Palau.

From Mount Rushmore to Laos

Every case is different, and Lima 85 presented a novel set of challenges. In the decades after the war, joint U.S., Laotian and Vietnamese teams mounted several expeditions to search the peak, recovering several of the men lost that day. But the dense vegetation, remote environs and possibility of unexploded munitions at the site, not to mention the sheer size of the mountain, complicated the search for the remaining missing Airmen.

"The cliff is dynamic and dangerous," said Monaghan. The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency asked CRIM to put their heads together and propose some creative solutions for locating remains on the rocky mountain. The team thought, "Let's think outside the box," Monaghan said.

An aha moment came during a cross-country drive Monaghan took with his daughter. At a stop at Mount Rushmore, he noticed a cadre of tiny figures dangling from ropes draped down the presidents' faces working to keep Abe Lincoln and George Washington free of cracks.

Monaghan recruited these geoengineers, National Park Service contractors named Eric Krantz and Matt Hudson, to better understand how to access the craggy locations on Phou Pha Thi.

The steep cliffside of Phou Pha Thi, pictured, presented serious challenges in the search for missing Airmen. (Photo courtesy of the Center for Recovery and Identification of the Missing) Foggy conditions at Phou Pha Thi. (Photo by Caleb Kestle/courtesy of Center for Recovery and Identification of the Missing)

Mapping the mountain

With the expertise of Russell Quick, a PhD graduate in anthropology from UIC and member of the CRIM team, the researchers scanned the mountain with drones to make a digital 3D model of the site. They used a remote sensing technology called LiDAR, which maps the terrain using laser beams aimed at the ground and measuring their reflection back to the aircraft.

"The cool thing about LiDAR is it can go through foliage, which is one of the top three problems with our site in Laos," said Foe.

The team presented their digital model to Ahmet Enis Cetin, professor in the College of Engineering, and his master's degree student Jake Zeisel, who had developed a computer program to detect anomalies in the laser measurements.

The program, trained on images of tropical forests, will ping when it detects an area that looks different from the rest.

"It will not give any alarms to rocks or trees or what you see in a tropical forest. But if you have a belt or something like that, it's an unusual object, and it'll create an alert," said Cetin.

The researchers homed in on several areas of interest and submitted their findings to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency. The government and their international partners then mounted on-the-ground fieldwork and excavations of the site, recovering materials related to the 1968 battle as well as human remains. These were brought to the organization's laboratory in Hawaii, where scientists and specialists use DNA testing, dental record analysis and other methods to identify the remains and notify the families.

"I can't stress this enough, this project is a massive collaboration," said Foe.

A legacy of service

The CRIM project continues to develop new strategies to recover remains of the missing from other conflicts around the world. Its mission is deeply intertwined with UIC's legacy of service to veterans, Monaghan and Phillips said.

After World War II, the university opened its Navy Pier campus to temporarily serve students on the G.I. Bill. The Navy Pier campus operated until 1965, when UIC became the full-fledged degree-granting institution it is today.

A spirit of practical service - of applying scientific rigor to such a high-impact, human-centered mission - is core to CRIM's work, Phillips said. "The idea of trying to achieve something tangible, that's very much in the UIC bones."

Listen to episode 4 of UIC's official podcast This is UIC, where professor of anthropology John Monaghan discusses CRIM's work recovering and honoring missing service members.

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Tess Joosse [email protected]

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