CAMP H.M. SMITH, Hawaii - Vietnamese and American officials, including U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam Pete Peterson, were on hand at a Vietnamese hospital in Hanoi today to honor the arrival of the remains of those killed in the crash of an MI-17 helicopter on 7 April (Vietnamese time).
The Americans were members of Joint Task Force-Full Accounting’s (JTF-FA) Joint Advance Work Team on a routine mission as part of U.S./Vietnamese efforts to recover the remains of Americans still unaccounted-for as a result of the Vietnam War.
A team of military and civilian personnel from Hawaii, including two anthropologists and an odontologist from the Army’s Central Identification Laboratory-Hawaii (CILHI), is en route to Hanoi to assist in the identification of the American servicemen. Additional personnel for JTF-FA and CILHI, who recently completed recovery operations in Laos, arrived in Vietnam yesterday to assist in recovery efforts at the crash site. The names of the servicemen killed in the crash are being withheld pending positive identification.
Also killed in the crash were two members of the Vietnamese Office of Seeking Missing Persons, the Vietnamese agency that assists JTF-FA in its investigation and recovery efforts in Vietnam, three Vietnamese aircrew members and four aircraft technicians.
