Vietnam War missing in action Airman identified Published May 20, 2005 WASHINGTON (AFPN) -- The Department of Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office announced May 20 that the remains of a U.S. Airman, missing in action from the Vietnam War, have been identified and returned to his family for burial with full military honors.On Oct. 15, 1965, Maj. Robert Harry Schuler Jr., of Wellsburg, N.Y., was flying his F-105 Thunderchief as part of a four-ship flight north of Hanoi when the lead aircraft was hit by enemy fire. Major Shuler remained in the area to provide support to the downed pilot while the two other aircraft departed for aerial refueling. When they returned, Major Shuler was no longer in the area and they could not establish radio contact with him. An extensive aerial search of the entire flight route met with negative results.Between 1993 and 1998, joint U.S. and Vietnamese teams conducted seven investigations, including unilateral archival research by Vietnamese officials. The final investigation in Nov. 1998 led the teams to a Vietnamese army officer who recounted his unit shooting down an F-105 on the date and in the area where Major Schuler went down. That team surveyed the crash area, found fragments of an F-105, and recommended the area for excavation.Teams led by the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command excavated the site on four occasions between September 1999 and March 2001, recovering more wreckage as well as human remains. Besides other forensic tools, scientists used mitochondrial DNA comparisons to confirm the identification of Major Schuler's remains.Of the 88,000 Americans missing in action from World War II, the Korean War, the Cold War, the Vietnam War and Desert Storm, 1,833 are from the Vietnam War, with 1,397 of those within the country of Vietnam. Another 750 Americans have been accounted for since the end of the Vietnam War, with 524 of those from the country of Vietnam.