Va. soldier missing from Vietnam is identified

From Wire Reports
Published: July 18, 2008

A Virginia soldier missing for more than 40 years from the Vietnam War has been identified.

The Pentagon says Warrant Officer Arthur F. Chaney of Vienna will be buried Sept. 16 in Arlington National Cemetery.

Also discovered were the remains of Chief Warrant Officer Bobby L. McKain, of Garden City, Kan.

On May 3, 1968, the two men flew an AH-1G Cobra gun ship on an armed escort mission to support a reconnaissance team operating west of Khe Sanh, in Quang Tri Province, South Vietnam.

Their helicopter was hit by enemy anti-aircraft fire, exploded in mid-air and crashed west of Khe Sanh near the Laos-Vietnam border. The crew of other U.S. aircraft flying over the area immediately after the crash reported no survivors, and heavy enemy activity prevented attempts to recover the men’s bodies.

In 1985, an American citizen with ties to Southeast Asian refugees turned over to U.S. officials human remains supposedly recovered from an AC-130 aircraft crash in Laos. Subsequent laboratory analysis disproved the association of the remains to the AC-130 crash, but some of the remains were those of McKain and Chaney.

Between 1989 and 2003, Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command investigative teams working in Laos and Vietnam made five tries to locate the crew’s crash site, but could not confirm the location.

Among other forensic identification tools and circumstantial evidence, scientists from JPAC and the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory also used mitochondrial DNA and dental comparisons in identifying the remains.