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This article appeared in
The Washington Post on June 26, 2003
Undercover Warrior
Finally Honored
Air America Pilot Buried 40 Years After a Death Shrouded in Secrecy
Gayle Herrick Holt, left, bids farewell to her father, Charles Herrick,
during ceremonies at Arlington National Cemetery.
(Stephen J. Boitano -- AP)
By Carol Morello
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 26, 2003; Page B01
When Charles G. Herrick was shot down over Laos 40 years ago, his family and
his country had no inkling what he was really doing flying cargo planes
around Southeast Asia.
His wife and two children in San Antonio were told only that the Air America
plane on which he was co-pilot had crashed, and that he was presumed dead.
Everything about the CIA-owned airline was clouded in secrecy then,
particularly its covert missions to drop food and ammunition for friendly
tribesmen fighting communist rebels in officially neutral countries such as
Laos.
With Herrick's remains having finally come home for burial at Arlington
National Cemetery, yesterday was a day for colleagues and family to talk
openly about how and why he and pilot Joseph Cheney died on their fourth run
one September day in 1963. The CIA, and the departments of State and
Defense, all sent representatives, as did a group called the Air America
Association, which now holds annual conventions.
To Gayle Herrick Holt, who was 15 when her father died, it all was
strikingly different from the day a neighbor told her that Air America was a
CIA front, and when she asked her mother about it, was admonished, "Don't
you ever repeat that." Yesterday, it could be repeated aloud.
"It's a celebration to me that he's home and it's done," said Holt, who
lives in Modesto, Calif. "It was always in the back of my mind -- was he
really in the plane when it crashed? Did he really not get a chance to jump
out? Now I know he was never taken prisoner, he was never tortured."
The return of the remains of Herrick and Cheney is the latest success story
in a U.S. government effort to locate the remains of 1,874 Americans missing
and unaccounted for from the Vietnam War era. Among them are 35 civilians,
including medical missionaries and journalists. Most of those missing in
Laos worked for Air America, said Liz Flick, an official with the National
League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia. The
group starts its annual conference today at the Hilton Hotel in Arlington.
Air America was so secretive that even many of its employees did not realize
the extent of CIA involvement. They surmised that they were flying some CIA
missions, but did not know that the agency owned a large share of the
company until years later, said Bart Crotty of Springfield, a former Air
America maintenance engineer who attended Herrick's funeral.
Herrick, who grew up in Lockport, N.Y., and was a former semi-professional
ice hockey player, began flying supply planes for the U.S. military in 1943.
As an Air Force captain during the Korean War, he was awarded the
Distinguished Flying Cross. He eventually joined the Air Force Reserve and
retired as a major.
He joined Air America in 1962 in Taiwan, and soon was transferred to an
airstrip in central Laos near the border of Thailand.
Michael LaDue, one of two assistant chiefs of aerial delivery for Air
America, flew about 10 missions with Herrick. Typically, their missions were
to drop palettes of rice, meat and weapons to tribesmen known as Hmong.
On the day their plane went down, LaDue said, Cheney and Herrick had
completed three drops. They refilled their C-46 twin-engine cargo plane with
sacks of rice and water buffalo meat. Just before the scheduled drop, he
said, they flew over a known stronghold of Pathet Lao communist rebels, and
the aircraft was hit with 37mm antiaircraft fire. Their final radio message,
that they were heading back to their base in Thailand, ended in
mid-sentence.
Five crew members in the rear of the plane, including one American named
Eugene DeBruin, safely parachuted but were captured. LaDue led a rescue
attempt a few days later, but they were turned back by enemy gunfire and
forbidden by their superiors to try again. After years in jungle prison
camps, and several aborted escapes, one of the surviving crew members was
rescued. The others are presumed to have died, and their remains have never
been recovered.
"There are a lot of misconceptions about the airline and the agency," said
LaDue, who lives outside Kansas City. "Everyone felt that as a secret
airline, it couldn't be doing anything good. But we thought what we were
doing was terribly honorable. We were following the rules of the Geneva
Accord, and the North Vietnamese were not. The military couldn't go into
Laos because of the Geneva Accords. But the North Vietnamese were there,
30,000 of them. We were able to go where the military couldn't, to stem
communism. Honorable means a lot to the people who flew for Air America."
Though Holt is relieved that her father's story is now in the open, she
believes some government missions must remain a secret. Four generations of
her family have served in the U.S. military, their service a thread through
the 20th century's major conflicts. Her grandfather fought in World War I,
her father in World War II and Korea, her husband in Vietnam and her son in
Iraq during Desert Storm in 1991.
"I didn't expect the funeral to be so emotional," she said. "But I'm glad I
stuck a couple Kleenex in the purse at the last minute. Patriotism. That's
what it's all about."
This article appeared in
The Washington Post on June 26, 2003
