TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) — An airman from Florida will finally be laid to rest after he disappeared off a mountain in Laos over 50 years ago during the Vietnam War.
Sergeant Willis R. Hall, 40, of Broward County, was one of 19 men assigned to Lima Site 85, a secret radar site on a remote mountain in Laos. The site was used to guide bomb strikes against North Vietnam, according to the National Museum of the United States Air Force.
The site, manned by volunteer Air Force technicians, operated for a little over four months before it was attacked by Vietnamese troops. The Americans sought shelter on a narrow ledge of the mountain, and eight of them were rescued by U.S. helicopters a few hours later.
Hall was one of the 11 Americans who were presumed to be killed in the battle, and despite numerous recovery operations, their remains were unable to be recovered.
But the Department of Defense Prisoner of War/Missing in Action Accounting Agency (DPAA) never stopped trying to recover the missing airmen. A 1994 mission was unsuccessful, but in 2003, the remains of one of the other missing airmen, Sgt. Patrick Shannon, were recovered.
In 2023, DPAA and other partner organizations discovered “unexploded ordnance, incident-related materials, possible material evidence,” and bone tissue from a research site that was later identified as belonging to another missing airman, Sgt. David Price.
Earlier this year, recovery teams excavated the site and recovered possible human remains, material evidence, and bone tissue, which were sent to the DPAA laboratory for analysis.
Along with anthropological analysis, scientists analyzed mitochondrial, Y-chromosome, and autosomal DNA to identify Hall’s remains.
DPAA said Hall has been memorialized on the Courts of the Missing at the National Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, as well as on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in DC. A rosette will now be placed next to his name to indicate he has been accounted for.
After being missing for 57 years, his family will finally lay him to rest this fall.