Bones to be buried with full honors

The soldiers' plane went down during a reconnaissance mission in 1966.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Bone fragments that scientists determined are the remains of six U.S. servicemen whose AC-47 gunship crashed in Laos in 1966 during the Vietnam war will be buried as a group Friday at Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors, the Pentagon said Tuesday.
The individual fragments, recovered by a joint U.S.-Lao excavation team in 1995, were too small to positively identify with any one of the six servicemen, but forensic anthropologists concluded after extensive study of the fragments and other evidence that the bones were from all six men.
Larger pieces of remains recovered from the crash site at the same time were positively identified in April 2003 as those of Air Force Chief Master Sgt. Luther L. Rose, of Howe, Texas, who was the aerial gunner aboard the AC-47 "Spooky," a World War II-era cargo plane that had been converted to a gunship.
Rose's remains were buried last summer.
The others were identified as Air Force Col. Theodore E. Kryszak, of Buffalo, N.Y.; Air Force Col. Harding E. Smith, of Los Gatos, Calif.; Air Force Lt. Col. Russell D. Martin, of Bloomfield, Iowa; Air Force Chief Master Sgt. Ervin Warren, of Philadelphia, and Air Force Chief Master Sgt. Harold E. Mullins, of Denver.
What happened
Their plane went down on June 3, 1966, during a nighttime armed reconnaissance mission over southern Laos, where U.S. forces were secretly engaged in combat to disrupt communist Lao and North Vietnamese forces.
The six were members of the 4th Air Commando Squadron, which was based in Nha Trang, South Vietnam, but maintained a detachment at Ubon Royal Thai Air Force Base in Thailand to fly interdiction missions along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Witnesses reported that the AC-47 caught fire and crashed in a heavily wooded area 30 miles northeast of Tchepone, in Khannouan Province, Laos, according to Defense Department records. No parachutes from the crew were observed and no emergency beepers were heard, the Pentagon says.
In 1994 a joint team of American and Lao specialists traveled to the suspected crash site and a villager led them to an area where personal effects, aircraft wreckage, crew-related materials and a crew member's identification tag were found. The next year an excavation was done and human remains were recovered, along with identifying materials from crew members.
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