Army MIA Soldiers from Vietnam War Identified
The Department of
Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) has announced that the
remains of four U.S. servicemen, missing in action since the
Vietnam War, have been identified.
They will be returned to their families for burial with full
military honors.
They are: Maj. Jack L. Barker of Waycross, Ga.; Capt. John F.
Dugan of Roselle, N.J.; Sgt. William E. Dillender of Naples, Fla.;
and Pfc. John J. Chubb of Gardena, Calif. All were from the Army's
101st Airborne Division. Chubb will be buried in Inglewood, Calif.,
on Feb. 18. Barker, Dugan and Dillender will be buried on April 12
in Arlington National Cemetery near Washington. D.C.
On March 20, 1971, Barker and Dugan were piloting a UH-1H Huey
helicopter with Dillender and Chubb on board. The aircraft was
participating in a troop extraction mission in the Savannakhet
Province of Laos. As the helicopter approached the landing zone, it
was hit by heavy enemy ground fire.
It exploded in the air and there were no survivors. Continued
enemy activity in the area prevented any recovery attempts.
A refugee in Nakhon
Phanom, Thailand, showed an identification tag of Pfc. Chubb and a
medallion to a U.S. interviewer in 1986. The medallion was
reportedly recovered near the same general location from an F-105
crash site. However, the location and the aircraft type did not
correlate with the missing aircraft and soldiers.
Between 1988 and 2001, joint U.S.-Lao People's Democratic
Republic teams, led by the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC),
conducted four investigations and three excavations for these
soldiers without positive results. An investigation team surveyed
three crash sites in 2002 after interviewing local villagers from
the province.
The team recovered a fragment of human tooth and some
crew-related artifacts from one of the crash sites.
In October and November 2004, another joint investigation team
excavated the crash site and recovered additional human remains and
crew-related evidence. The wreckage was of a UH-1H helicopter, and
contained insignia worn by members of the 101st Airborne
Division.
The remains included nine fragments of teeth that the forensic
anthropologists at JPAC were able to match with detailed
information from medical and dental records.
From the Vietnam War, 1,807 Americans are still unaccounted-for
with 364 of those from Laos. Another 839 have been accounted-for in
Southeast Asia with 208 of those from losses in Laos.