This announcement is in from the National Alliance of Families MEMORANDUM FOR CORRESPONDENTS December 22, 1998
The remains of three American servicemen previously unaccounted-
for from the war in Southeast Asia have been identified and are being
returned to the United States for burial. Two are identified as Capt.
Thaddeus E. Williams Jr., Mobile, Ala., and Spc. 4 James P. Schimberg,
Cedar Rapids, Iowa, both U. S. Army. The name of the third, a U.S. Navy
officer lost in North Vietnam in 1965, is being withheld at the request
of his family.
On Jan. 9, 1966, Williams, with crew member Schimberg, was
flying his OV1-C Mohawk on a night combat surveillance mission over Phu
Yen province, South Vietnam when radio contact was lost at midnight. He
was forced to fly "dead reckoning" as the navigation system on the
aircraft was inoperable. Weather in the area was marginal, with dense
cloud cover over the mountains when their last radio contact was heard.
Their aircraft never returned to home base. Search attempts discovered
no evidence of either the aircraft or the crew.
In August 1993 a joint team of specialists from the U.S. Joint
Task Force-Full Accounting and from Vietnam interviewed two Vietnamese
informants in a local village near the suspected crash site. One of the
villagers said he had recovered bone fragments, two identification tags
and Williams' identification card in 1979. He recalled that one of the
identification tags contained a name beginning with "S." The joint team
flew an aerial survey of the suspected crash location, but found no
evidence of the loss.
The following month, one of the informants met with the team
again and presented them with identification tags with both Williams'
and Schimberg's name affixed. He also turned over the bone fragments he
claimed were those from the crash.
Anthropological analysis of the remains and other evidence by
the U.S. Army Central Identification Laboratory Hawaii established the
identification of both Williams and Schimberg. Mitochondrial DNA
testing was used to help confirm the identifications.
With the identification of these three servicemen, the remains
of 510 Americans have been accounted for since 1973, and 2,073 are still
unaccounted-for from the war in Southeast Asia. The U.S. government
welcomes and appreciates the cooperation of the government of the
Socialist Republic of Vietnam that led to the accounting of these
servicemen. We hope that such cooperation will bring increased results
in the future. Achieving the fullest possible accounting for these
Americans is of the highest national priority
No. 198-M
