Rice, Thomas Jr.
Army Specialist 4

Thomas Jr. Rice, age 23, from Spartanburg County Spartanburg, South Carolina .

Service era: Vietnam

Date of death: Tuesday, December 28, 1965
Death details: On August 25, 2009, the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC, now DPAA) identified the remains of Specialist 4 Thomas Rice Jr., missing from the Vietnam War. Specialist 4 Rice joined the U.S. Army from South Carolina and was a member of the 7th Special Forces Group. On December 28, 1965, he was the door gunner aboard a UH-1D Iroquois that went down during a mission to pick up Special Forces soldiers in Gai Lai Province, Vietnam. All four members of the Iroquois’s crew were killed in the crash, and search and rescue efforts failed to locate the crash site. However, in 2006, a joint U.S. and Vietnamese investigative team interviewed a Vietnamese local who was able to escort them to UH-1D’s crash site. Excavations at the site in 2009 recovered human remains, and modern forensic techniques were able to individually identify SP4 Rice from among them. Specialist 4 Rice 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