NEWS RELEASES from the United States Department of DefenseNo. 094-06 IMMEDIATE RELEASEFeb 03, 2006 Air Force Officer MIA from Vietnam War is IdentifiedThe Department of Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO)announced today that the remains of a U.S. serviceman, missing in action fromthe Vietnam War, have been identified and will be returned to his family forburial with full military honors.He is Col. Eugene D. Hamilton of Opelika, Ala. Final arrangementsfor his funeral have not been set.On Jan. 31, 1966, Hamilton was flying an armed reconnaissancemission over North Vietnam when his F-105D 'Thunderchief' was hit by enemyground fire over Ha Tinh province. His mission was part of a largeroperation, known as Operation Rolling Thunder, which attacked air defensesystems and the flow of supplies along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.Airborne searches for his crash site that day were unsuccessful.A radio broadcast from Hanoi reported an F-105 had been shot down but did notprovide any details.Between July 1993 and November 2000, joint U.S.-Vietnam teams, ledby the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC), conducted four investigationsand one excavation searching for the pilot and his plane.An investigation team in March 2000 learned from a Vietnamesevillager that an area excavated in 1997 was not the location of the pilot'sburial. A second location was then excavated in August and September 2000,which did yield aircraft wreckage, personal effects and human remains.In 2004, three Vietnamese citizens turned over to a JPAC teamremains they had found at the same crash site a year earlier.In late May 2005, the JPAC team recovered fragments of possiblehuman remains and life support equipment from the 2000 crash site. Personaleffects found there also included a leather nametag with the name "HAMILTON"partially visible on it.JPAC scientists and Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratoryspecialists used mitochondrial DNA as one of the forensic tools to helpidentify the remains. Laboratory analysis of dental remains also confirmedhis identity.Of those Americans unaccounted-for from all conflicts, 1,807 arefrom the Vietnam War, with 1,382 of those within the country of Vietnam.Another 839 Americans have been accounted-for in Southeast Asia since the endof the war, with 599 from Vietnam.For additional information on the Defense Department's mission toaccount for missing Americans, visit the DPMO website athttp://www.dtic.mil/dpmo [http://www.dtic.mil/dpmo]
