Price, Bunyan Durant Jr.
Army Staff sergeant
Bunyan Durant Jr. Price from Belmont, North Carolina, Gaston county.
Service era: Vietnam
Date of death: Saturday, May 2, 1970
Death details: On August 21, 2015, the Department of Defense announced that it identified the remains of Staff Sergeant Bunyan Durant Price Jr., missing from the Vietnam War.
Staff Sergeant Price, who joined the U.S. Army from North Carolina, served with Headquarters Company, 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 SSG Price, 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 SSG Price among the remains recovered from the site.
Staff Sergeant Price is memorialized on the Courts of the Missing at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific.
Source: National Archives, Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency