Brown, Wilbur Ronald
Air Force Major

Wilbur Ronald Brown, age 29, from New Hanover County Wilmington, North Carolina .

Service era: Vietnam

Date of death: Thursday, February 3, 1966
Death details: On January 23, 2009, the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC, now DPAA) identified the remains of Major Wilbur Ronald Brown, missing from the Vietnam War. Major Brown entered the U.S. Air Force from North Carolina and served with the 310th Air Commando Squadron. On February 3, 1966, he piloted a C-123B Provider (tail number 55-4537) on a mission along the border of Laos and South Vietnam. While over Quang Tri Province, radio contact was lost with the aircraft and it crashed for unknown reasons, killing Maj Brown. Aerial searches did not locate the crash site, and Maj Brown’s remains were not recovered at the time. From 2000 to 2003, joint U.S./Vietnamese investigative teams traveled to the crash site and recovered human remains and aircraft wreckage correlating to this loss; in 2009, U.S. investigators were able to identify Maj Brown from those remains. Major Brown is memorialized in 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