The area was frequently and heavily bombed during the war and is scarred by crash sites of warplanes. The seven American victims were servicemen attached to the Joint Task Force-Full Accounting, based in Camp H.M. Smith, Hawaii. Its job is to locate U.S. servicemen missing from the Vietnam War. May. U.S. Army Lt. Col. Franklin Childress, spokesman for the MIA task force, said the helicopter was a Vietnamese military aircraft and its pilot was Vietnamese. We ve been flying in this type of helicopter for a number of years, and this is the first accident, Childress said.
Every mission is a dangerous mission.
The bodies of the Americans were returned to Hawaii on April 13. Task Force-Full Accounting has been searching for MIA remains in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and southern China for the past 11 years and more recently expanded its operations to include Americans missing from World War II and the Korean War. Since 1973, the remains of 591 American soldiers and sailors once listed as missing have been identified and returned to their families. Another 1,992 remain still unaccounted for from the war in Southeast Asia. The National Alliance of Families, a group working for the return of missing servicemen, urged the bereaved families to please find comfort in the fact that your loved ones will always be remembered for their commitment to finding our loved ones.