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Action. They're just really chaos on the water at this point. Danger. She's
your captain and she's fearless and you gotta be fearless too. Adventure. Next
thing I know my sailor is diving into the ring and the crowd is getting louder.
You're listening to Sea Story.
Episode 21 "Lost."
I'm petty officer PR3 Reed, I'm from Georgetown, South Carolina and
this is my Sea Story. In 2015 I got selected to go on the AI which is the
individual augmentee to Laos to look for someone who was never found in the
Vietnam War. From that point, I had about two weeks to get everything prepared.
After my two weeks, I shipped out to Hawaii and that's where everything
started. When we went there we got our equipment and everything that we needed
to go and dig for the guy who we were looking for in Laos. His name is a
commander Deardon this is back in 1975. I believe it was he was flying over an
area in Vietnam from the observation of the people who observed it they said
that they saw a flash and all of a sudden the plane disappeared, ever since
then no one was able to find him. We got together in Hawaii as a group and we
went over to Laos to the area where they last saw his aircraft go down. Once we
left Hawaii we flew to Thailand and that was my first time leaving the United States.
After that, we went to Laos the next day [inaudible} is the name of the city that
we were in when we first got there. We were in the jungle and we had to take
these machetes and we had to cut down a lot of trees just to clear out the area
and where I really want to be digging. At times it got a little scary
we had two EODs, it was their jobs to go and sweep the area that we were
digging to make sure that they weren't any live mines or any bombs or anything
in the ground because apparently there still is a lot of bombs that are still
planted in the ground from that war. Once we already had the whole area cleared we
were able to dig and we found everything from scrap metal from the airplane that
guy was in - I think we found like a piece of metal that he was wearing. I was
what's called the LSI which it stands for life support investigator because my
rate in the Navy as a PR - a parachute rigger and I deal with a lot of life
support gear so it was my job to investigate whatever we found. A lot of
the things I couldn't identify. I had another senior PR there who
was the E8 from the Air Force and a lot of times I will go to him and ask him
what was his opinion. I was really only able to identify like four or five
pieces of things that we found. The guy was wearing red socks, he had on the
harness, he had on the G suit little pieces of I believe the inside of his
helmet he was wearing. We weren't able to find him
we was only able to find a lot of the things that he was wearing and a lot of
scrap metal from the actual airplane that he was flying in but we had two
other teams with us who was digging up in the mountains and fortunately they
were actually able to find pieces of bone from the guys that they were
looking for. At the end of the Lao trip we conducted a military-style funeral for
the two guys that they found the bone fragments that they found. I was in the
funeral ceremony for both of those guys, it was a great experience because at
that time I only had about five years in the military. I was only at my second
command and I hadn't done anything that I thought was really relative to real
life it was very heartwarming they were able to sign over the rights of the
remains to the US so we can bring the remains home and bring closure to the guy's families.
We packed up after about a month.
We went right back to where we started in Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. I take from it
a lot of great memories my only regret is that we didn't find the guy who was
looking for. Overall the experience it was awesome and I would definitely do it
again if I could.
Sea Stories brought to you by America's Navy. Learn more at Navy.com.
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