Sergeant Alan Boyer comes home

One of our Facebook friends sends us the news that Sergeant Alan Boyer is finally home. He went missing in the jungles of Laos on March 28, 1968 when he was 22 years old and according to The Missoulian, his sister, Judi, who was 19 at the time he went missing, says his remains have been identified by DPAA.

On March 28, 1968, Boyer, a sergeant, was on a reconnaissance mission in the jungles of Laos 15 miles from the Vietnamese border. He was with fellow Green Berets rifleman Charles Huston of Ohio, intelligence Sgt. George Brown of Florida, and seven South Vietnamese soldiers.

It was a rugged and dangerous sector that housed the North Vietnamese control center on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and the soldiers encountered an unknown enemy force. A helicopter that came to rescue them couldn’t land in the dense canopy. According to a report on pownetwork.org, six of the South Vietnamese scrambled to safety up a rope ladder and the seventh was climbing aboard when the ground fire intensified, forcing the chopper to leave the area.

Boyer began to climb the ladder but it broke, either in the foliage or in the ground fire. He tumbled to the ground, but the other two Americans appeared unhurt. A six-hour ground search four days later turned up no sign of them. Meanwhile, Charles and Dorothy Boyer were notified back home in Illinois that their son was missing in action.

A Laotian activist bought Boyer’s remains from a “remains trader” there and turned them over to the DPAA which, in turn, identified the remains with DNA.

Boyer’s mother became an advocate for POW/MIA families when her son went missing according to RRSTAR until her death in 2013. Alan Boyer has been awarded a posthumous Silver Star and he’ll be laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery on June 22nd.

Category: We Remember