Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => The O' Club => Topic started by: StarOfAfrica2 on February 06, 2006, 02:35:03 AM
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This has been a good weekend.
NEWS RELEASES from the United States Department of Defense
No. 094-06 IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Feb 03, 2006
Air Force Officer MIA from Vietnam War is Identified
The Department of Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO)
announced today that the remains of a U.S. serviceman, missing in action from
the Vietnam War, have been identified and will be returned to his family for
burial with full military honors.
He is Col. Eugene D. Hamilton of Opelika, Ala. Final arrangements
for his funeral have not been set.
On Jan. 31, 1966, Hamilton was flying an armed reconnaissance
mission over North Vietnam when his F-105D 'Thunderchief' was hit by enemy
ground fire over Ha Tinh province. His mission was part of a larger
operation, known as Operation Rolling Thunder, which attacked air defense
systems 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 not
provide any details.
Between July 1993 and November 2000, joint U.S.-Vietnam teams, led
by the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC), conducted four investigations
and one excavation searching for the pilot and his plane.
An investigation team in March 2000 learned from a Vietnamese
villager that an area excavated in 1997 was not the location of the pilot's
burial. 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 team
remains they had found at the same crash site a year earlier.
In late May 2005, the JPAC team recovered fragments of possible
human remains and life support equipment from the 2000 crash site. Personal
effects found there also included a leather nametag with the name "HAMILTON"
partially visible on it.
JPAC scientists and Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory
specialists used mitochondrial DNA as one of the forensic tools to help
identify the remains. Laboratory analysis of dental remains also confirmed
his identity.
Of those Americans unaccounted-for from all conflicts, 1,807 are
from 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 end
of the war, with 599 from Vietnam.
For additional information on the Defense Department's mission to
account for missing Americans, visit the DPMO website at
http://www.dtic.mil/dpmo [http://www.dtic.mil/dpmo]
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Yes it has..
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Welcome home sir
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RIP, sir
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May Col. Hamilton rest peacefully now that he is home.
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