Black Hawk Helicopter Pilot Remains Found After 45 Years

Army finds Belmont veteran’s remains 45 years after disappearance
WSOC TV News
February 14, 2015

45 years after he disappeared during the Vietnam War.

Junior Price’s family told Channel 9 the Army found his remains a mile away from where his helicopter crashed.

Junior Price was 21 when he went to Vietnam. In 1970, he disappeared after his Black Hawk helicopter was shot down over Cambodia.

The news about his brother comes with mixed emotions for Dennis Price.

“They called us Monday, February 9, his birthday, and they told us it was 100 percent positive match that it was his remains,” Dennis Price said.

Dennis Price said the Army compared his brother’s DNA with his own and they matched perfectly. Junior’s remains had been buried along with two others.
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Bones from Southeast Asian buried in Arlington grave with MIA remains

This sounds even to strange for an episode of Bones

Documents reveal Southeast Asian remains buried with US vet at Arlington
Stars and Stripes
By Matthew M. Burke
Published: April 21, 2014

Remains from an indigenous Southeast Asian were buried with those of an Army Reserve pilot from the Vietnam War at Arlington National Cemetery, America’s shrine for its fallen heroes.

According to internal POW/MIA documents, when the remains of Chief Warrant Officer 3 William Smith Jr. were turned over to investigators in Vietnam in 1999, a portion belonged to someone else.

Central Identification Laboratory documents stated that the unrelated remains had been identified and segregated from those of the pilot and that only Smith’s remains were shipped to Arlington for burial.

However, an internal memo from the laboratory obtained by Stars and Stripes said that did not happen.

After a ceremony that included a slow march, a horse-drawn caisson and a lone bugler, Smith was buried with foreign remains.

Laboratory anthropologist Gwen Guinan wrote in the internal memo that “subsequent to the shipment and the burial’’ it was discovered that a fragment of a leg bone that should have been separated from Smith’s remains “had been inadvertently included.’’ The memo, addressed to “record” and included in Smith’s case file, was dated Sept. 20, 2000, 12 days after Smith was buried.
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AP IMPACT: MIA work 'acutely dysfunctional'

AP IMPACT: MIA work 'acutely dysfunctional'
Associated Press
ROBERT BURNS
51 minutes ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Pentagon's effort to account for tens of thousands of Americans missing in action from foreign wars is so inept, mismanaged and wasteful that it risks descending from "dysfunction to total failure," according to an internal study suppressed by military officials.

Largely beyond the public spotlight, the decades-old pursuit of bones and other MIA evidence is sluggish, often duplicative and subjected to too little scientific rigor, the report says.

The Associated Press obtained a copy of the internal study after Freedom of Information Act requests for it by others were denied.

The report paints a picture of a Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, a military-run group known as JPAC and headed by a two-star general, as woefully inept and even corrupt. The command is digging up too few clues on former battlefields, relying on inaccurate databases and engaging in expensive "boondoggles" in Europe, the study concludes.

In North Korea, the JPAC was snookered into digging up remains between 1996 and 2000 that the North Koreans apparently had taken out of storage and planted in former American fighting positions, the report said.

Washington paid the North Koreans hundreds of thousands of dollars to "support" these excavations.

The failings cited by the report reflect one aspect of a broader challenge to achieving a uniquely American mission — accounting for the estimated 73,661 service members still listed as missing from World War II, Korea and Vietnam.
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Remains of missing Vietnam War serviceman identified

Remains of missing Vietnam War serviceman identified
By the CNN Wire Staff
June 17, 2011 7:57 p.m. EDT

Air Force 1st Lt. David A Thorpe will be buried with full honors at Arlington National Cemetery.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS
DNA samples helped identify the remains of Air Force 1st Lt. David A. Thorpe
Thorpe will be buried in Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors
Thorpe's plane crashed in South Vietnam in 1966
Remains recovered at a crash site were later identified as Thorpe's

Washington (CNN) -- It has been more than 40 years since Air Force 1st Lt. David A Thorpe was declared missing in action from the Vietnam War. Now his family will finally receive some closure.

Thorpe's remains have been identified by forensic anthropologists and are being returned to his family, officials with the Department of Defense said Friday.

He will be buried in Arlington National Cemetery on June 23 with full military honors.
On October 3, 1966, Thorpe and four other airmen failed to arrive at Nha Trang Air Base after their departure from the Tan Son Nhut Air Base in South Vietnam. Eight days later, their remains were recovered by rescue personnel at a crash site some 40 miles west of Nha Trang.
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Remains of missing Vietnam War serviceman identified

US faces problems looking for remains of MIA in South Korea

Development poses hurdle in search for U.S. remains
By Ashley Rowland, Stars and Stripes
Pacific edition, Friday, May 16, 2008



SEOUL — In Southeast Asia, anthropologists face Indiana Jones-like hurdles to find the remains of U.S. troops lost in battle decades ago — jungles, poisonous snakes and acidic soil that can erode bones before they’re ever found.

In South Korea, obstacles are more modern but just as daunting — high-rise apartments that cover land where soldiers could be buried.

"One of the main, significant difficulties you see every time you look outside: This place is incredibly developed," said Charles Ray, deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office. "I have difficulty recognizing places where I spent a lot of time. Places that were once rice paddies are massive condominiums."

Ray and other top officials with the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command spoke with Stars and Stripes on Wednesday during a visit to South Korea. During their weeklong trip, they met with South Korean officials to discuss South Korea’s search for its missing, which often overlaps with the U.S. search for its missing.

JPAC is a U.S. military organization based in Hawaii that works to recover the remains of 88,000 troops unaccounted for since World War II. About 8,100 U.S. troops still are missing on the Korean peninsula, most in North Korea.
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http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=54826