Parsley, Edward Milton
Air Force cmsergeant
Edward Milton Parsley, age 33, from Mingo County Naugatuck, West Virginia .
Service era: Vietnam
Date of death: Thursday, February 3, 1966
Death details: On June 7, 2004, the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC, now DPAA) identified the remains of Chief Master Sergeant Edward Milton Parsley, missing from the Vietnam War. Chief Master Sergeant Milton entered the U.S. Air Force from West Virginia and served with the 310th Air Commando Squadron. On February 3, 1966, he was the loadmaster aboard 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 CMSgt Parsley. Aerial searches did not locate the crash site, and CMSgt Parsley’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 2004, U.S. investigators were able to identify CMSgt Parsley from those remains. Chief Master Sergeant Parsley 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