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The mist shrouded Limestone Mountain in Laos where the plane went down had held its secrets for more than 30 years.

NEVER BEFORE has a nation made such a commitment of manpower and resources to account for its wartime missing. Every year, U.S. search teams travel to remote areas of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. They face difficult terrain, brutal heat, insects, deadly snakes and diseases to look for the remains of our MIAs from the Vietnam War. PARADE asked reporter Earl Swift to travel with one of the search teams to Laos this spring and share with us what he found.

IT ERUPTS FROM A JUNGLE of teak, cedar and banana trees: a chunk of bare limestone near­ly a mile high that villagers in this road less area of eastern Laos call Phou Louang. The Americans call it The Mountain, and on this March morning they struggle on ropes up its stony face to a ledge near its peak-and the bones of a U.S. Navy patrol plane. The OP-2E Neptune is a tangle of electrical wire, exhaust pipe and shredded fuselage, its engine wedged in the moist earth beside a busted prop, cockpit gauges and a blackened fire extinguisher, and some-where here lie the nine men who flew the Neptune. After 33 years, their countrymen have arrived to take them home.

The nine were members of a secret squadron, VO-67, based in Thailand during the Vietnam War. Their mission: to sprinkle the jungle with sensors that detected tremors as slight as foot­falls and eavesdropped on conversa­tions. Other planes used signals from the sensors to bomb enemy convoys.  

On the morning of Jan. 11, 1968, Navy Cmdr. Del Olson was at the controls of MR-2, a Neptune loaded with sensors. The North Dakotan had spent the bulk of his 22-year Navy career in patrol planes, and he knew his craft and mission well. Beside him in the cockpit was his co-pilot, Lt. jg Denis Anderson, a newcomer to the war, married just 14 months. Below them, in the glass nose, the bombardier, Lt. jg Phillip Stevens, crouched over the plane's bombsight. And in the long tunnel of the Neptune's fuselage, another lieutenant junior grade-the navigator, former college jock Arthur "Charlie" Buck-prepared for the day's work with five enlisted Navy airmen.  Two other planes were making drops that day. Cmdr Larold Gire made his drop and climbed to safety. Cmdr. Adam Alexander's plane descended and popped back out of the clouds. Olson started his run. "The last thing I heard him say was, `I'm going down through this hole in the cloud,"' Alexander recalls. "What happened after that, only God knows."

Officially, MR-2 flew into cloud-shrouded rock. Olson's squadron mates surmise that he and his crew must have taken enemy fire. Whatever the case, 12 days later an Air Force patrol spotted the plane's broken remains near Phou Louang's summit. The terrain barred the crew's recovery-and opened years of doubt for the dead men's families.  "I remember walking down the street in Manhattan, Kan., where I was living at the time and thinking:   Am I a widow or am I married?'" says Sue Jenkins of San Marcos, Tex., Denis Anderson's widow. "And there was no one to ask."

THE MISSING  

The Nine Who Died

Cmdr. Delbert A. "Del" Olson, 42, MR-2's pilot:

A North Dakota native, the 6­foot-4 married father of two was a 22-year Navy veteran a­nd the squadron's executive officer.

Lt. J.g. Denis L. Anderson, 25, co-pilot: A Bible college graduate, Anderson hoped to work one day as a flying missionary. The Hope, Kan., native had been married 14 months when he died.

Lt J.g. Phillip P. Stevens, 25, bombardier: From North Muskegon, Mich., he had been an electrical engineer before he shipped off to war and was a pilot in his own right.

Lt. J.g. Arthur C. "Charlie" Buck, 26, navigator:

A Navy reservist from Sandusky, Ohio, he had a liberal arts degree and had attended college on a football scholarship.

Petty Officer 2nd Class Richard M. Mancini, 30, aviation electrician's mate: From Amsterdam, N.Y., he left a wife and an 18­month-old son.

Petty Officer 2nd Class Michael L. Roberts, 23, aviation ordnanceman: He'd spent two years in the Navy after enlisting in Purvis, Miss.

Petty Officer 2nd Class Donald N. Thoresen, 31, aviation machinist: A father of three, the plane's top enlisted man came from Detroit

Petty Officer 2nd Class Kenneth H. Widon, 27, photographer's mate: A 10-year veteran from Detroit, he enjoyed playing the violin and ukulele.

Petty Officer 3rd Class Gale R. Siow, 27, aviation electronics technician: The Native American from Keams Canyon, Ariz, was on his second tour.

THE SEARCHERS

Dave Rankin was 3 years old when the MR-2. struck the_. mountain. Today he's a forensic anthropologist with the Army's Honolulu-based Central Identification Laboratory and part of a massive government effort to recover the remains of America's lost fighting men in Southeast Asia. Masked in sweat and beard stubble, Rankin leans on a shovel among the Neptune's wreckage, watching his teammates scrape gray dirt from the ledge's 35-degree slope. 

They dump the soil in buckets and pass them to three others waiting to sift the contents through screens. Anything bigger than a quarter inch is examined pebbles, tiny curls of aluminum, shards of glass, ripped fabric. For all the military's technological advances, finding its dead comes to this: a tedious, bone-wearying process of digging and dirt and sweat.

"It's not like classic archaeology," Rankin says quietly. "I'm not trying to reconstruct the accident. It's really a recovery. I do my best to find the guys." Looking with him are a Special Forces medic, two mountaineers from an Army post in Alaska, a half-dozen soldiers trained to recognize bone when they see it and a Navy parachute rigger who can eye a sliver of metal or a zipper and say what it was, and what it did, before the Neptune crashed.

"When you start finding stuff, that's when you get motivated," says Sgt Ist Class Sean Bendele. The career soldier from Victorville, Calif., gasps his words between swings of a pickax, his sweat drawing a squadron of orbiting bees. "I mean, you know they're here," he says. "It's just a matter of finding them."

The dig is one of 590 overseen so far by Joint Task Force-Full Accounting, a stew of the military services created in 1992 to manage recovery operations in Southeast Asia. The task force's 161 linguists, logistical experts and investigators scour war records and interview witnesses to pinpoint the places where planes went down, patrols were ambushed or men simply vanished. Then, five times a year in Laos, four times a year in Vietnam and once a year in Cambodia, the recovery teams fan out through the countryside to dig.

"We believe it's a national priority" says Army Lt. Col. Franklin Childress, the task force's chief spokesman. "Behind every one of those statistics is a person-and a family waiting for a loved one to be identified."

The teams face long odds, despite the roughly $100 million spent on recovery operations worldwide each year. Closing the books on the Neptune crash will be especially difficult. While most of the wreckage settled here, 150 feet shy of Phou Louang's peak, some of it rests on a smaller ledge farther up the mountain and some on two ledges below. Everywhere, the heat is swooning, the footing slick. The soil writhes with leeches, foot-long centipedes and venomous bamboo vipers.

Just reaching base camp takes guts. Helicopters must set down on a boulder that juts from the jungle canopy. Such aerial ballets are risky: In April, a chopper carrying search officials crashed a short distance east of here, in Vietnam's Quang Binh Province. All 16 aboard the craft died.

In fact, when a search team first reached the Neptune's crash site in 1996, it judged the place too hazardous to dig. Pleas from Del Olson's squadron mates and the families of the dead persuaded the task force's leaders to organize this expedition.

On the dig's seventh day, the shovels unearth a prize: a brittle, curving plate of skull. In the days that follow, a satchel of what seem to be bones, teeth and personal effects will be recovered-the fossils of lives ended that January morning in 1968.

MR-2's crew isn't home yet, however. Ahead lie visits to the mountain's smaller ledges and months of analysis at the Army's Central Identification Lab in Hawaii. Bone may be sent to a Maryland lab for DNA matching. Perhaps there will be enough to identify all nine men. Perhaps not: The jungle devours its dead with a vengeance.

As long as the process takes, it will seem longer. "I try to put it out of my mind, because I know he's dead and gone," says Katie Harter of Southgate, Mich., sister of Donald N. Thoresen. "But it's on my mind all the time."

David Olson of Prairie Village, Kan., the pilot's son, tries to avoid getting his hopes up. "It could be a year or two yet," he says. "And that's the problem: With every year that goes by, there are more and more parents and family of these guys who aren't around anymore."

As for the search team, its members will have embarked on other missions and worked other digs to find the 1966 men still left in Southeast Asia before they learn if their time on Phou Louang was successful. "Some of us do it for the families, to help them with closure," Dave Rankin says. "The ones I do it for, personally, are the guys. I do it for the guys up on the mountain."