Defense Department forensic scientists identified the remains of two airmen who had been missing in action since the Vietnam War, announced the Pentagon on Aug. 6. Lt. Col. Charles M. Walling of Phoenix and Maj. Aado Kommendant of Lakewood, N.J., will receive a group burial with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Va., on Aug. 8—the 46th anniversary of the crash that took their lives, states DOD’s release. Walling was already individually buried on June 15 at Arlington, notes the release. Walling and Kommendant’s F-4C crashed on Aug. 8, 1966, during a close air support mission over Song Be province, Vietnam. Search and rescue efforts were unsuccessful in the days following the crash. Between 1992 and 2010, joint US-Vietnamese teams investigated the crash site and then excavated it, recovering aircraft pieces, Walling’s identification tag, and human remains. The recovered items led to the identification of these airmen, states the release.
While U.S. defense officials have spent much of the past decade warning that China is the nation’s pacing threat and its People’s Liberation Army represents an urgent threat in the Indo-Pacific, several defense researchers are skeptical that the PLA has the human capital, the structural ability, or the political appetite…