Completed Event: Men's Lacrosse versus Georgetown on May 10, 2025 , Loss , 12, to, 16
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Final
Men's Lacrosse
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vs Georgetown
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Photo by: Duke Athletics
Remembering Bob Holt
5/28/2020 11:27:00 AM | Men's Lacrosse, Men's Soccer
On the Thursday afternoon of September 19, 1968, an F-4B Phantom jet loaded with six Mark-8 bombs, four Zuni rockets and two U.S. Marine captains took off from DaNang Airfield in South Vietnam headed for the Quang Binh province of North Vietnam. As the lead aircraft on combat mission 412, their target destination was a strategic storage depot located in a heavily populated coastal plains area controlled by the enemy North Vietnamese Army.
Piloting the F-4B was Capt. John LaVoo, a 28-year-old product of the U.S. Naval Academy, with a wife and young daughter back home. His RIO — radar intercept officer — was Capt. Robert A. Holt, three-plus years removed from graduation at Duke, where he had played three sports and been active in campus life. Part navigator, part communications specialist, part bombardier — think Goose from the movie Top Gun — Holt had developed a close friendship as well as partnership with his pilot during their time together in the VMFA-542 Tiger squadron.
Utilizing the speed, range and sleek maneuverability of the F-4B, the hot jet of the day, LaVoo and Holt crossed the demilitarized zone into North Vietnam in less than 20 minutes, accompanied by a wing aircraft. About 13 miles north of the DMZ, they unleashed their six bombs on the target site, then made another pass to drop the Zuni rockets when they were struck by enemy anti-aircraft artillery. Already in a dive to launch the rockets, the disabled jet crashed into the countryside and exploded.
Eyewitness accounts provided by the wingman indicated no trace of survivors. No ejections or parachutes were spotted, no emergency beepers heard, no electronic sensors detected. A search-and-rescue operation on the ground was impossible due to the presence of enemy forces, but low passes by the wingman over the wreckage revealed no sign of life. After the appropriate reports were completed, LaVoo and Holt were declared, in official military terminology, killed in action/bodies not recovered.
The impact from their collision created a large crater in the landscape, but that was nothing compared to the eternal impact felt by the friends and loved ones they left behind.
• • • • •
Bob Holt was a good-natured, All-American guy — blond, athletic, president of his high school class and the oldest of two boys in a working class family from Reading, Mass. That according to his younger brother Richard, an award-winning creative director in the advertising industry.
"There's a great mythology about my brother," he said in a 2014 interview, and one of the oldest apologues is the tale of how Bob, a junior basketball player for the public high school in Reading, got on his bike one day and pedaled the 10 miles north to exclusive Phillips Andover Academy to make a headstrong pitch for admission after he and his father had a beef with his coach.
He was able to finish high school at Andover, repeating his junior year as a day student and his senior year as a boarder, with a roommate who hailed from Greensboro, N.C., and piqued his interest in Duke.
At Duke, Holt played for the freshman basketball team under coach Bucky Waters in 1961-62, helping the squad to a 14-2 record. A few of his classmates, including Hack Tison and Denny Ferguson, moved up to the varsity in subsequent years, teaming with Art Heyman and Jeff Mullins for back-to-back Final Four appearances.
Holt spent his next three years on the varsity soccer team and started at halfback throughout his senior year. He was described in the Duke yearbook as one of a handful of players who consistently stood out on the field.
"I remember him as a fierce competitor," recalled Roy Skinner, who was an assistant coach at the time. "He played regularly and he played a very competitive game."
Classmate Ken Hubbard noted Holt's knack for always playing hard, but with a smile on his face, "whose team you would want to be on anywhere," he said. "We traveled together, practiced together and I had a terrific time with him as a teammate. He was a solid guy who would have had a very full and good life, I know that."
Holt also played a season of lacrosse, but his Duke life extended well beyond the athletic arena. He was a member of the Delta Tau Delta fraternity and was involved in both the Men's Student Government Association and the Freshman Advisory Council, according to his senior bio in the 1965 Chanticleer. The history major was also chosen for Beta Omega Sigma his sophomore year. That honorary organization annually tapped second-year students who had excelled in scholarship, leadership and service and enlisted them to help promote exemplary conduct as well as major campus events such as Homecoming.
After graduation, Holt joined the Marines with the thought of one day becoming a commercial airline pilot. Commissioned on Dec. 17, 1965, he headed to Basic School then completed the Naval Flight Officer curriculum and got qualified to serve as an F-4 Phantom RIO. He was sent to Vietnam in May of 1968, assigned to the 542 flying attack squadron known as the Tigers.
Part of Holt's training time was spent in Japan and the Philippines, where his athleticism and competitiveness impressed his fellow Marines. For recreation he played a lot of basketball, tennis and handball, and at one point he coached a base softball team.
"He was a sports fiend!" Capt. Christian Renninger wrote in a letter to Holt's parents the month after his fateful crash. "I took softball seriously for awhile but just couldn't get as excited as he did…He made, and would have made a wonderful coach for young boys, and with that in mind, he would have been a wonderful father."
Renninger, it should be noted, was the RIO in the wing aircraft that accompanied Holt and LaVoo on what would prove to be their final mission in September of 1968. He and his pilot made the low altitude passes over the crash site looking for any sign that their friends had survived, to no avail.
• • • • •
When the Vietnam War ended, a total of 2,646 American servicemen were listed as unaccounted for, either as missing in action or killed in action/body not recovered. Since then, the remains of more than 1,000 have been repatriated for burial in their home soil. Holt and LaVoo moved from the former category to the latter, but it was a painstakingly long process.
In July of 1992, almost 24 years after the incident, a joint team of U.S. and Vietnamese investigators visited the crash site. They interviewed informants in the area, examined some wreckage in a local village and were given some remains that one informant said had been taken from the site.
That started a two-year process during which six different teams visited the area, leading to a meticulous excavation operation that recovered several crew-related artifacts as well as human remains, most prominently 25 bone fragments.
In 1994 the remains were turned over to the U.S. Army Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii for anthropological analysis. After almost five years of study, including DNA testing, the lab confirmed that some of the remains belonged to Holt, some to LaVoo and some were too badly damaged to be identified with either man.
Clifford Holt, Bob's father, was 83 years old, retired and living in Florida in April of 1999 when military officials told him his son was coming home for burial. He told an Army press reporter that he was shocked, but that the news brought partial closure.
"We didn't think it was practical that he survived, so we had to face reality and live with that."
The families of Holt, LaVoo and several of their fellow surviving Marines went to Arlington National Cemetery on July 19, 1999 for a unique memorial service. Capt. LaVoo's identifiable remains were buried in one grave, then beside that in another grave, the unidentifiable remains from the crash site were buried under a marker with the names of both Capt. LaVoo and Capt. Holt.
Clifford Holt then took the 4-by-4 inch box with the remains that were positively identified as his son's and buried them at Forest Glenn Cemetery in Reading, Mass., where Bob's mother had been interred 20 years earlier — and where he would be buried when he passed away in 2004.
• • • • •
Richard Holt, Bob's brother, was a year out of college and just starting an elementary school teaching assignment when he got word of his sibling's demise. He was devastated, and late in the fall resigned the position. He admits that over the ensuing years he coped mostly by repressing the details, avoiding "the military particulars" and relying on a handful of comforting snapshots to keep his brother's memory alive.
But by the time Bob's remains were repatriated, Richard had a wife and two kids of his own — Alex, age 22, and Nick, age 19. At the Arlington memorial they had met some of Bob's old Marine buddies and heard stories about the uncle they never knew.
At the memorial in Reading, a group of 10-12 Vietnam vets had come marching over a hill to the spot where the family was gathered and presented Clifford Holt with their copper POW/MIA bracelets bearing Bob's name. In the early 1970s, five million such bracelets with the names of unaccounted for Americans had been distributed to draw attention to the issue. The pledge was that you wore your bracelet until your serviceman, or his remains, returned to the U.S. The return of Capt. Robert Holt bracelets almost three decades after his death made an impression on Alex and Nick, who asked their grandfather if they could each have one to wear.
The Holt brothers had heard the family mythology surrounding Bob — both had even worn his old No. 7 during their own sporting ventures — and Alex, in particular, sought a further connection. He pressed his father for the military details that had been boxed up, literally and figuratively, for so many years. Eventually, in 2007, at the age of 30, he encouraged the immediate family to take a vacation trip to Southeast Asia to visit the site of Bob's crash.
A hired guide and driver navigated their van through villages and hamlets, over dirt roads and puddles, until finally they came upon the crater created by the Phantom jet crash of 1968. It was filled with water — this was during the rainy season — but behind a house nearby stood a most astonishing sight: a turquoise and pink ceramic pagoda, surrounded by pink flowers, with incense sticks and fresh fruit inside — a memorial to the men who had died there long ago.
"It's a Vietnamese tradition," the guide told the Holts. "When someone dies, no matter who it is, even a stranger, we bury them carefully. We worship them carefully."
Richard Holt bent down for a moment of reflection and kissed the ground at the edge of the crater, then the family headed back down the dirt roads and scenic highways toward their hotel on China Beach.
"It's a fascinating story about our culture," Richard Holt said. "My generation either protested or ran the other way. Our relationship with the war was one thing…But from another point of view, here's this land we're bombing and people are dying. In some parts of Vietnam they still talk about the war of the aggressor, so what do we represent to these people? But in spite of all that, because it was a human being, they built this shrine and maintain it at great cost.
"It's an amazing human phenomenon."
#GoDuke
Piloting the F-4B was Capt. John LaVoo, a 28-year-old product of the U.S. Naval Academy, with a wife and young daughter back home. His RIO — radar intercept officer — was Capt. Robert A. Holt, three-plus years removed from graduation at Duke, where he had played three sports and been active in campus life. Part navigator, part communications specialist, part bombardier — think Goose from the movie Top Gun — Holt had developed a close friendship as well as partnership with his pilot during their time together in the VMFA-542 Tiger squadron.
Utilizing the speed, range and sleek maneuverability of the F-4B, the hot jet of the day, LaVoo and Holt crossed the demilitarized zone into North Vietnam in less than 20 minutes, accompanied by a wing aircraft. About 13 miles north of the DMZ, they unleashed their six bombs on the target site, then made another pass to drop the Zuni rockets when they were struck by enemy anti-aircraft artillery. Already in a dive to launch the rockets, the disabled jet crashed into the countryside and exploded.
Eyewitness accounts provided by the wingman indicated no trace of survivors. No ejections or parachutes were spotted, no emergency beepers heard, no electronic sensors detected. A search-and-rescue operation on the ground was impossible due to the presence of enemy forces, but low passes by the wingman over the wreckage revealed no sign of life. After the appropriate reports were completed, LaVoo and Holt were declared, in official military terminology, killed in action/bodies not recovered.
The impact from their collision created a large crater in the landscape, but that was nothing compared to the eternal impact felt by the friends and loved ones they left behind.
• • • • •
Bob Holt was a good-natured, All-American guy — blond, athletic, president of his high school class and the oldest of two boys in a working class family from Reading, Mass. That according to his younger brother Richard, an award-winning creative director in the advertising industry.
"There's a great mythology about my brother," he said in a 2014 interview, and one of the oldest apologues is the tale of how Bob, a junior basketball player for the public high school in Reading, got on his bike one day and pedaled the 10 miles north to exclusive Phillips Andover Academy to make a headstrong pitch for admission after he and his father had a beef with his coach.
He was able to finish high school at Andover, repeating his junior year as a day student and his senior year as a boarder, with a roommate who hailed from Greensboro, N.C., and piqued his interest in Duke.
At Duke, Holt played for the freshman basketball team under coach Bucky Waters in 1961-62, helping the squad to a 14-2 record. A few of his classmates, including Hack Tison and Denny Ferguson, moved up to the varsity in subsequent years, teaming with Art Heyman and Jeff Mullins for back-to-back Final Four appearances.
Holt spent his next three years on the varsity soccer team and started at halfback throughout his senior year. He was described in the Duke yearbook as one of a handful of players who consistently stood out on the field.
"I remember him as a fierce competitor," recalled Roy Skinner, who was an assistant coach at the time. "He played regularly and he played a very competitive game."
Classmate Ken Hubbard noted Holt's knack for always playing hard, but with a smile on his face, "whose team you would want to be on anywhere," he said. "We traveled together, practiced together and I had a terrific time with him as a teammate. He was a solid guy who would have had a very full and good life, I know that."
Holt also played a season of lacrosse, but his Duke life extended well beyond the athletic arena. He was a member of the Delta Tau Delta fraternity and was involved in both the Men's Student Government Association and the Freshman Advisory Council, according to his senior bio in the 1965 Chanticleer. The history major was also chosen for Beta Omega Sigma his sophomore year. That honorary organization annually tapped second-year students who had excelled in scholarship, leadership and service and enlisted them to help promote exemplary conduct as well as major campus events such as Homecoming.
After graduation, Holt joined the Marines with the thought of one day becoming a commercial airline pilot. Commissioned on Dec. 17, 1965, he headed to Basic School then completed the Naval Flight Officer curriculum and got qualified to serve as an F-4 Phantom RIO. He was sent to Vietnam in May of 1968, assigned to the 542 flying attack squadron known as the Tigers.
Part of Holt's training time was spent in Japan and the Philippines, where his athleticism and competitiveness impressed his fellow Marines. For recreation he played a lot of basketball, tennis and handball, and at one point he coached a base softball team.
"He was a sports fiend!" Capt. Christian Renninger wrote in a letter to Holt's parents the month after his fateful crash. "I took softball seriously for awhile but just couldn't get as excited as he did…He made, and would have made a wonderful coach for young boys, and with that in mind, he would have been a wonderful father."
Renninger, it should be noted, was the RIO in the wing aircraft that accompanied Holt and LaVoo on what would prove to be their final mission in September of 1968. He and his pilot made the low altitude passes over the crash site looking for any sign that their friends had survived, to no avail.
• • • • •
When the Vietnam War ended, a total of 2,646 American servicemen were listed as unaccounted for, either as missing in action or killed in action/body not recovered. Since then, the remains of more than 1,000 have been repatriated for burial in their home soil. Holt and LaVoo moved from the former category to the latter, but it was a painstakingly long process.
In July of 1992, almost 24 years after the incident, a joint team of U.S. and Vietnamese investigators visited the crash site. They interviewed informants in the area, examined some wreckage in a local village and were given some remains that one informant said had been taken from the site.
That started a two-year process during which six different teams visited the area, leading to a meticulous excavation operation that recovered several crew-related artifacts as well as human remains, most prominently 25 bone fragments.
In 1994 the remains were turned over to the U.S. Army Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii for anthropological analysis. After almost five years of study, including DNA testing, the lab confirmed that some of the remains belonged to Holt, some to LaVoo and some were too badly damaged to be identified with either man.
Clifford Holt, Bob's father, was 83 years old, retired and living in Florida in April of 1999 when military officials told him his son was coming home for burial. He told an Army press reporter that he was shocked, but that the news brought partial closure.
"We didn't think it was practical that he survived, so we had to face reality and live with that."
The families of Holt, LaVoo and several of their fellow surviving Marines went to Arlington National Cemetery on July 19, 1999 for a unique memorial service. Capt. LaVoo's identifiable remains were buried in one grave, then beside that in another grave, the unidentifiable remains from the crash site were buried under a marker with the names of both Capt. LaVoo and Capt. Holt.
Clifford Holt then took the 4-by-4 inch box with the remains that were positively identified as his son's and buried them at Forest Glenn Cemetery in Reading, Mass., where Bob's mother had been interred 20 years earlier — and where he would be buried when he passed away in 2004.
• • • • •
Richard Holt, Bob's brother, was a year out of college and just starting an elementary school teaching assignment when he got word of his sibling's demise. He was devastated, and late in the fall resigned the position. He admits that over the ensuing years he coped mostly by repressing the details, avoiding "the military particulars" and relying on a handful of comforting snapshots to keep his brother's memory alive.
But by the time Bob's remains were repatriated, Richard had a wife and two kids of his own — Alex, age 22, and Nick, age 19. At the Arlington memorial they had met some of Bob's old Marine buddies and heard stories about the uncle they never knew.
At the memorial in Reading, a group of 10-12 Vietnam vets had come marching over a hill to the spot where the family was gathered and presented Clifford Holt with their copper POW/MIA bracelets bearing Bob's name. In the early 1970s, five million such bracelets with the names of unaccounted for Americans had been distributed to draw attention to the issue. The pledge was that you wore your bracelet until your serviceman, or his remains, returned to the U.S. The return of Capt. Robert Holt bracelets almost three decades after his death made an impression on Alex and Nick, who asked their grandfather if they could each have one to wear.
The Holt brothers had heard the family mythology surrounding Bob — both had even worn his old No. 7 during their own sporting ventures — and Alex, in particular, sought a further connection. He pressed his father for the military details that had been boxed up, literally and figuratively, for so many years. Eventually, in 2007, at the age of 30, he encouraged the immediate family to take a vacation trip to Southeast Asia to visit the site of Bob's crash.
A hired guide and driver navigated their van through villages and hamlets, over dirt roads and puddles, until finally they came upon the crater created by the Phantom jet crash of 1968. It was filled with water — this was during the rainy season — but behind a house nearby stood a most astonishing sight: a turquoise and pink ceramic pagoda, surrounded by pink flowers, with incense sticks and fresh fruit inside — a memorial to the men who had died there long ago.
"It's a Vietnamese tradition," the guide told the Holts. "When someone dies, no matter who it is, even a stranger, we bury them carefully. We worship them carefully."
Richard Holt bent down for a moment of reflection and kissed the ground at the edge of the crater, then the family headed back down the dirt roads and scenic highways toward their hotel on China Beach.
"It's a fascinating story about our culture," Richard Holt said. "My generation either protested or ran the other way. Our relationship with the war was one thing…But from another point of view, here's this land we're bombing and people are dying. In some parts of Vietnam they still talk about the war of the aggressor, so what do we represent to these people? But in spite of all that, because it was a human being, they built this shrine and maintain it at great cost.
"It's an amazing human phenomenon."
#GoDuke
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