His name was Charles Herrick, and he was a pilot who served his country both in and out of uniform. For years, his remains were lost in the jungles of Laos.

Now, after a ceremony Wednesday afternoon, Charles Herrick's remains are where they belong, at Arlington Na- tional Cemetery. And his daughter, who was a teen when he disappeared, can find some certainty at last.

"It was a lot more emotional than I thought it would be," Holt said after the service. "After 40 years, I can lay him to rest."

Holt is 55, a mother of two and a businesswoman who works in imports and title insurance. She's lived in Modesto since 1979, the wife of Vietnam veteran and businessman William Holt.

She'd been to Arlington before, as a tourist. Wednesday was different, as she and her family felt the full measure of the place.

The Air Force chaplain, Capt. John Kenyon, spoke of how Herrick "knew the expanse of the sky (and) loved to fly." He re- cited the poem, "High Flight," and took note of how generations have served.

Holt's 35-year-old son William Jr., a Downey High School graduate who's now an Army drill instructor, stood erect for taps, and for the grandfather he never knew.

"It was fantastic," Gayle Holt said afterward. "I was very impressed by the honor, and the solemnity of the service, and it's important to have that closure."

Air America a CIA front

In September 1963, she was 15 years old and living in San Antonio with her mother and brother. Her father was a former Air Force pilot who'd flown in World War II and the Korean War before joining a mysterious outfit called Air America in 1962.

The CIA essentially owned Air America, through a front com- pany. Most employees were kept in the dark.

Certainly, Herrick's family knew little of what he was up to, but when he was around, they loved so much about him. His hands, for instance. Holt recalled how her father was always fiddling with cars or working with miniature trains.

"Being a pilot, and carrying that Air Force mentality, and with his flying job, that kept him gone quite a lot," Holt said, but "he was a good father; he was very warm."

While stationed in Vientiane, Laos, Herrick and the other Air America pilots undertook harrowing missions in a country supposedly off-limits to U.S. forces.

"We did work that the military couldn't, because they couldn't go there," said Allen Cates, a former Air America pilot and past president of the Air Amer-ica Association.

This off-the-books status would cause problems. Some 217 Air America crewmen died during the Vietnam War; however, as civilians, they don't automatically get the benefits, including burial at Arlington, provided uniformed military personnel.

Cates, noting that the Air America veterans "want to know that what they did was not in vain," is urging the Defense Department to grant the pilots veterans' benefits. An Air Amer-ica Association representative, aviation consultant Bart Crotty, attended Herrick's service, along with several men Crotty described as "former CIA types."

Perhaps tellingly, though, the Air Force chaplain made no reference Wednesday to Air Amer-ica. Herrick already had earned an Arlington plot on his own, as a former Air Force major who'd won the Distinguished Flying Cross in Korea.

Herrick was among the first Americans in 1949 to qualify as a jet pilot. But in Laos, he co- piloted a twin-propeller C-46 cargo plane that frequently was subjected to small arms fire undirected by any radar.

"They'd aim at the airplane, and, of course, they usually missed. But once in a while, they'd get lucky and hit you," former C-46 pilot Tony Durizzi recalled in an oral history maintained by the Air America Association.

Herrick, pilot Joseph Cheney and a five-man crew took off from Vientiane the night of Sept. 5, 1963.

Fellow Air America pilot Michael LaDue told The Associated Press the mission was to move rice and meat to Laotian soldiers.

5 of 7 survived jungle crash

About 30 miles from the border with North Vietnam, Herrick's plane was shot down. Five crew members parachuted out, but Herrick and Cheney did not escape. Ten days later, a U.S. helicopter returned carrying investigators.

"A team member entered the wreckage and worked his way forward to the cockpit area," retired Air Force Lt. Col. Lee Mullins recounted in a letter filed at the Library of Congress. "At that point, he had found no bodies and was compelled to retreat due to the enemy firing on the helicopter."

It took a U.S.-Laotian effort after the war to track the site, and it wasn't until last year that Holt received the definitive word that her father's remains had been identified.

"Major Herrick, stand down," Kenyon said. "Your mission is now complete."

Bee Washington Bureau reporter Michael Doyle can be reached at (202) 383-0006 or mdoyle@mcclatchydc.com.

This article appeared in Modbee Online on June 27, 2003