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ID Announcements

Press Release | Sept. 7, 2012

Navy Pilot Missing From Vietnam War Identified (Broms)

The Department of Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) announced today that the remains of a U.S. serviceman, missing in action from the Vietnam War, have been identified and returned to his family for burial with full military honors.

Lt. Cmdr. Edward J. Broms, Jr., 25, of Meadville, Penn., was buried on Sept. 7, in Arlington National Cemetery near Washington, D.C. On Aug. 1, 1968, Broms was the pilot of an A-4C Skyhawk aircraft that crashed while attacking enemy targets in Ha Tinh Province, North Vietnam. Three other U.S. pilots in the flight did not witness the crash, and search-and-rescue teams found no sign of the aircraft or Broms.

In 1993, a joint U.S/Socialist Republic of Vietnam (S.R.V.) team, led by the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC), traveled to Ha Tinh Province to interview villagers and analyze leads. As a result, the team found and surveyed the crash site locating aircraft wreckage and military equipment. In addition, a villager turned over human remains that his father found at the site in 1968. The remains could not be identified given the technology of the time. During an excavation of the site in 1995, a second joint team located more aircraft wreckage but no additional remains.

In 2011, given advances in DNA technology, the remains were reanalyzed. Scientists from JPAC and the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory (AFDIL) identified the remains as Broms, using circumstantial evidence and mitochondrial DNA – which matched that of his mother and sister.

For additional information on the Defense Department’s mission to account for missing Americans, visit the DPMO web site at www.dtic.mil/dpmo or call (703) 699-1169.