Griffin, Rodney Lynn
Army Sergeant

Rodney Lynn Griffin from Centralia, Missouri, Boone county.

Service era: Vietnam

Date of death: May 2, 1970
Death details: On January 27, 2015, the Department of Defense announced it had identified the remains of Sergeant Rodney Lynn Griffin, missing from the Vietnam War.

Sergeant Griffin, who entered the U.S. Army from Missouri, served with the 2nd Battalion, 34th Armored Regiment, 25th Infantry Division. On May 2, 1970, he was a passenger aboard a UH-1H Iroquois (serial number unknown) that carried eight in total and flying to Fire Support Base Katum, South Vietnam. At some point, the helicopter was diverted due to bad weather. It flew into Cambodian air space where it was hit by enemy ground fire. The pilot made an emergency landing in Kampong Cham Province, Cambodia. The four crew members and four passengers survived the crash landing, but three, including SGT Griffin, died in a firefight with enemy soldiers that occurred after the landing. One U.S. soldier escaped, but the rest were taken as prisoners of war. The bodies of the three men killed in the firefight were not recovered until February 2012, when a Joint U.S./Cambodian team located the crash site and recovered human remains, and forensic analysis identified SGT Griffin among the remains recovered from the site.

Source: National Archives, Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency