Stancil, Kenneth Leon
Army Chief warrant officer 2

Kenneth Leon Stancil, age 31, from Hamilton County Chattanooga, Tennessee .

Service era: Vietnam

Date of death: Tuesday, December 28, 1965
Death details: On September 9, 2009, the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC, now DPAA) identified the remains of Chief Warrant Officer Kenneth Leon Stancil, missing from the Vietnam War. Chief Warrant Officer Stancil joined the U.S. Army from Tennessee 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 Gia Lai Province, Vietnam. He and the other crew members 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 the helicopter’s crash site. Excavations at the site in 2009 recovered human remains, and modern forensic techniques were able to individually identify CWO Stancil from among them. Chief Warrant Officer Stancil 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