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## News Release

# Missing In Action Sserviceman Identified (Trembley)

The Department of Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) announcedtoday that the remains of a U.S. Navy pilot, missing in action from the Vietnam War, have beenidentified and will be returned to his family for burial with full military honors.

Navy Lieutenant Commander J. Forrest G. Trembley of Spokane, Wash., will be buriedin Arlington National Cemetery on April 1.

On August 21, 1967, Trembley and his fellow crewman took off in their A-6A Intruderfrom the U.S.S. Constellation on a strike mission against the Duc Noi rail yards near Hanoi,North Vietnam. On leaving the target area, their aircraft and another one in the flight wereattacked by enemy MiGs. When last seen, the two aircraft were disappearing into the cloudsnear the Vietnamese-Chinese border. The last radio message from Trembley indicated the MiGswere in hot pursuit, but no further communications were heard.

Later that day, the Chinese government reported that two U.S. A-6s had been shot downover the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The broadcast noted that one of the four crewmenhad been captured but the other three died in the shoot down. The surviving crewman wasreleased by the Chinese in March 1973.

With the assistance of the Chinese government, a joint U.S.-PRC team interviewedwitnesses to the shootdown and crash in 1993 and 1999. U.S. specialists from the JointPOW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) interviewed a Chinese citizen near the crash site. Heturned over Trembley’s identification tag and fragmentary human remains alleged to be those ofAmerican pilots. The team recovered some pilot’s gear from a burial site, but found noadditional human remains.

Scientists of the JPAC and the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory usedmitochondrial DNA as one of the forensic tools to identify the remains as those of Trembley.

Of the 88,000 Americans missing in action from all conflicts, 1,836 are from the VietnamWar, with 1,399 of those within the country of Vietnam. Another 747 Americans have beenaccounted for since the end of the Vietnam War.

For additional information on the Defense Department’s mission to account for missingAmericans, visit the DPMO web site at www.dtic.mil/dpmo, or call 703-699-1169.

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