Returning a Marine, Shot Down in 1968
Forty years ago — before Richard Nixon was president, before the Chicago Seven were tried, before the shootings at Kent State — a 19-year-old Brooklyn man was shipped to Vietnam.
His name was Jose Ramon Sanchez and he was a private first class with the First Battalion, Fourth Regiment of the Third Marine Division, Headquarters and Support Company. On June 6 — D-Day — of 1968, his CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter was sent to extract a team of fellow grunts who were pinned down by the enemy in the mountains seven miles southwest of Khe Sahn. The craft took small-arms fire from a hillside. It crashed and burned. Private Sanchez and four others were D.O.I. Dead on impact.
For the next four decades, his death was no mystery but his remains were never formally identified — until, that is, last month. The military said this week that investigators from the Joint P.O.W./M.I.A. Accounting Command, working with bone fragments and wreckage from the crash, managed to officially certify his remains and those of three other servicemen on the flight.
Read entire article at NYT
His name was Jose Ramon Sanchez and he was a private first class with the First Battalion, Fourth Regiment of the Third Marine Division, Headquarters and Support Company. On June 6 — D-Day — of 1968, his CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter was sent to extract a team of fellow grunts who were pinned down by the enemy in the mountains seven miles southwest of Khe Sahn. The craft took small-arms fire from a hillside. It crashed and burned. Private Sanchez and four others were D.O.I. Dead on impact.
For the next four decades, his death was no mystery but his remains were never formally identified — until, that is, last month. The military said this week that investigators from the Joint P.O.W./M.I.A. Accounting Command, working with bone fragments and wreckage from the crash, managed to officially certify his remains and those of three other servicemen on the flight.