Burying the forgotten soldiers of bygone wars

Thomas Rice’s chopper went down deep in the jungles of South Vietnam just before dawn on December 28, 1965. Several missions retraced his route but the helicopter was never found.

His younger brother, James, also in the Army, asked to be stationed in the same spot, where he continued the search himself. In December of 1966, Rice was declared dead and the following May a memorial service was held for him, sans body.

The search for the crash site was resumed in 1993 by the Department of Defense’s Prisoner of War and Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) but came up empty-handed. Then four years ago two Vietnamese villagers admitted to having shot down a chopper in the mid-1960s in the same area where Rice’s craft had disappeared; a team of Defense Department officials trekked to the presumed crash site. Remains were recovered and identified and last month Rice and his comrades were finally laid to rest but there are still more than 1,700 American soldiers unaccounted for from the Vietnam War, according to DPMO stats. The lost bodies lie somewhere in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and China. Of the 1,332 American soldiers still unaccounted for in Vietnam, 614 are in a ‘no further pursuit’ status, reads a DPMO website. “We have conclusive evidence the individual perished,” says the site, “but do not believe it possible to recover his remains.”

Major Russell C. Goodman is another one of the missing. He was a member of the Thunderbirds, an air demonstration squadron from Nellis Air Force Base, in Nevada. During the Vietnam War he flew with a Navy air combat unit, aboard the USS Enterprise. In February of 1967 Goodman and his navigator, Gary Thornton, flying in an F-4B Phantom fighter jet, earned a Silver Star for rescuing a downed aircrew. Just days later, they received instructions to bomb a railroad in North Vietnam. About eight miles south of Thanh Hoa they were struck by enemy antiaircraft fire and their plane exploded. Thornton ejected at just 250 feet altitude but lived. He was captured and held as a prisoner of war until 1973. Goodman never escaped the jet. His remains were recently found and shipped back to Nellis Air Force Base. “That day, a husband, a father and a friend was lost,” said Thornton, at a service for his comrade held earlier this year. “I am honored to be here to see him come home.”

The U.S. military is still searching the Vietnam jungle for remains but some battles are so far in the past and so far away their victims will likely never be brought home. In Tarawa, a tiny island in the Central Pacific where in late November of 1943 the U.S. fought fiercely with the Japanese, some 1,000 U.S. Marines and nearly 700 Navy personnel were killed. One of them was 17 year-old James Johnson, the first and last military action he ever saw.  Johnson still lies somewhere beneath the sand. Because U.S. units had to move quickly across the Pacific there was no time for body bags and coffins. Graves were hastily excavated and locations sketched on a map. Several years ago, Johnson’s nephew set out to find him. He linked up with a professional crash site locator named Mark Noah and using burial maps retrieved from military archives located Johnson’s grave, which now lies beneath a gravel parking lot. The pair made the trip to Tarawa, but left Johnson’s remains there. “Those are sacred sites,” said Noah. “It’s not our role to touch or move anything.”

That’s not always the case. In May of last year the remains of Corporal Isaiah Mays, a Buffalo Soldier, were finally laid to rest, at Arlington National Cemetery. Mays was born in Virginia in 1858, a slave.  He traveled west, joined the famous black cavalry known as the Buffalo Soldiers and fought in the Indian Wars of the frontier. In 1889, he was part of a detachment assigned to protect a U.S. Army pay wagon. Bandits ambushed the convoy and a gunfight ensued, killing or wounding most of the soldiers. Mays was shot through both legs. He crawled two miles to a nearby ranch and survived.

For this, he was awarded a Medal of Honor. Several years afterward, he left the Army and was committed to an Arizona state hospital that cared for the indigent and mentally ill. Mays died in 1925, he was buried in the hospital cemetery in a grave marked only with a number. Decades later, hospital staff and several veterans located his grave and arranged for a formal burial, which took place on Memorial Day 2001. A few weeks ago, after receiving court permission, volunteers dug up Mays’ remains and transported them to Washington D.C., where he was finally given the honorable military funeral he deserved. “One more out of 6,000 has his day of recognition,” said William McCurtis, a regimental sergeant major of a Buffalo Soldier group that attended the memorial. “We need to get the rest recognized.”