Back in May of this year, Carl Brader passed along info here on the forum that US JPAC MIA search teams were looking for anyone with information about the Battle of Dak To in November 1967. I had always been interested in what happened there because many of the guys who RON'd with me when I wrenched in Dak To a year later had been part of that fight the year before.

I remembered that when we read names last year at The Wall in DC, and in emails around that time, Lynn Beckhorn and I had talked extensively about what he had experienced in the middle of that fight, so I passed the information along to him. He still has vivid and detailed memories of the situation at the time, and he got in touch with the JPAC folks right away.

Lynn is now waiting for final official notice, but it looks as though he will be traveling to Dak To next month with one of the US JPAC MIA search teams. He will spend about six weeks using his knowledge of the terrain and LZ locations to help them try to locate and recover the remains of MIA American 173d Airborne or 4th Infantry Division soldiers from that fight on Hill 875 in November 1967. It will be an extremely difficult job mostly because, forty years later, due to extensive logging in the Highlands area, what was in our time triple-canopy forest is now totally denuded, clear-cut ground.

Lynn has told me he will be leaving a 119th coin on Hill 875. In addition, we (meaning everyone who has bought a coin in the past) are supplying him with enough additional 119th coins to present to all JPAC personnel involved in the search effort, as a small token of our appreciation of what they are doing to find our missing comrades and return them home.

Lynn will be checking in here with news as soon as he irons out some mysterious communications issues that are keeping him off the site right now.

This is really good stuff; the site, JPAC, Lynn, Carl, the coins, the communications, the other people, the whole thing.

The battles are described in detail in Edward Murphy's book "Dak To" and Rick Atkinson's "Long Gray Line."

Bob K--