Grella, Donald Carroll
Army Specialist 5

Donald Carroll Grella, age 25, from Cedar County Laurel, Nebraska .

Service era: Veitnam

Date of death: Tuesday, December 28, 1965
Death details: On July 24, 2009, the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC, now DPAA) identified the remains of Specialist 5 Donald Carroll Grella, missing from the Vietnam War. Specialist 5 Grella joined the U.S. Army from Nebraska and was a member of the 7th Special Forces Group. On December 28, 1965, he was aboard a UH-1D Iroquois that went down during a mission to pick up Special Forces soldiers in Gai Lai Province, Vietnam. All the men aboard the helicopter were killed, and search and rescue efforts failed to locate the crash site at the time. However, in 2006, a joint U.S. and Vietnamese investigative team interviewed a Vietnamese local who was able to escort them to the crash site. Excavations at the site in 2009 recovered human remains, and modern forensic techniques were able to individually identify SP5 Grella’s remains among them. Specialist 5 Grella is memorialized on the Courts of the Missing at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific. His name is also inscribed along with all his fallen comrades on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, DC.

Source: National Archives, Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, Lincoln Journal Star (2010)