Becerra, Rudy Morales
Army Staff sergeant

Rudy Morales Becerra, age 19, from Richmond, Texas, Fort Bend county.

Service era: Vietnam

Date of death: Tuesday, March 24, 1970
Death details: On February 15, 2001, Joint Task Force-Full Accounting (JTF-FA, now DPAA) identified the remains of Staff Sergeant Rudy Morales Becerra, missing from the Vietnam War.

Staff Sergeant Becerra joined the U.S. Army from Texas and was a member of the 170th Aviation Company. On March 24, 1970, he was the crew chief aboard a UH-1H Iroquois on a mission to extract a long-range reconnaissance patrol in Ratanakiri Province, Cambodia. The aircraft picked up the recon team and was beginning its ascent when it suffered an explosion that caused it to crash. Staff Sergeant Becerra was killed in the incident. Heavy enemy presence in the area prevented ground investigations of the UH-1H’s crash site at the time. In April 1995, a joint U.S. and Vietnamese search team recovered remains associated with the loss of SSG Becerra’s helicopter. In 2001, U.S. analysts identified some of the returned remains as those of SSG Becerra.

Source: National Archives, Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency