Francis George Graziosi, age 19, from Rochester, New York, Monroe county.
Service era: Vietnam
Date of death: January 10, 1970
Death details: On December 6, 2006, the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC, now DPAA) identified the remains of Sergeant First Class Francis George Graziosi, missing from the Vietnam War.
Sergeant First Class Graziosi joined the U.S. Army from New York and was a member of the 178th Aviation Company, 14th Battalion, 16th Aviation Group, 1st Aviation Division. On January 10, 1970, he was the door gunner aboard a UH-1C Iroquois carrying three other crew members on a return flight to their base at Chu Lai, Vietnam. Inclement weather caused the helicopter to crash in Quang Nam Province, and SFC Graziosi and the rest of the crew were killed in the incident. Immediate search efforts were unable to locate the helicopter’s crash site. However, in 1994, a local informant led a joint U.S./Vietnamese search team to a burial site in Quang Nam Province. Excavations of the site found several sets of remains, including those of the UH-1C’s crew. In 2006, modern forensic techniques allowed for the identification of SFC Graziosi among the remains recovered.
Source: National Archives, Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency