Morgan, Thomas R. – KIA

On January 26, 1967 “Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Morgan flew F-100D #55-2911 over a Vietnam jungle and prepared to mark his target with a smoke bomb.

Pilots in three other F-100 fighter/bombers behind him would key off of the smoke to deliver more destructive payloads on a Viet Cong camp. But Morgan never dropped the marker. As the 34-year-old, career Air Force officer approached the target, his tail assembly burst into flames. He pulled up, and his wingman lost sight of him as he crested a hill. As the wingman came over the rise, he saw another hillside burning where Morgan’s plane had crashed. It was unlikely that the flight leader had time to eject.

The Ohio pilot disappeared in the Central Highlands of what was South Vietnam, a region of rugged, steep hills shrouded in dense jungle that saw some of the fiercest fighting of the war. It would be a year before the military could even send investigators into the hostile territory to view the crash site.

They verified plane wreckage but found no sign of the pilot.”(1)

In 1996, “The Midwest Archeological Center in Lincoln sent a team of military and civilian investigators to attempt to find prisoners of war, those missing in action and those listed as killed in action,  and bodies unaccounted for. Although the fighting ended long ago, the Central Highlands remain just as inaccessible as they were in 1967. Vietnamese officials flew the team into the crash site on helicopters, and they camped for 30 days in the jungle.

Their labor proved fruitful.

They found F-100 wreckage scattered across the hillside. And, more importantly, they found a flight suit zipper. Then, as they were about the conclude the mission, some local Vietnamese men approached the team with bone fragments they said they found at the crash site. Because the team did not recover the remains, Jones was hesitant to say they were those of Lt. Col. Thomas Morgan without supporting proof.

Back in the United States, Bob Morgan (Thomas’s only living sibling) got a call at his home in Uniontown, Ohio. Military investigators needed a DNA sample from a close relative of Thomas Morgan.

The test proved the remains were those of Colonel Morgan.” His remains were recovered on March 5, 1996, and identified on June 27, 1997

At the time of his death, Thomas Morgan was married with two sons. On October 2, 1997, Thomas’s widow, Shirley, who never remarried, his sons and his brother Bob Morgan attended the funeral and interment at Arlington National Cemetery.

Thomas Raymond Morgan is also memorialized at Courts of the Missing at the Honolulu Memorial, and honored on the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial in Washington DC. His name is inscribed at VVM Wall, Panel 14e, Line 81.

Sources: HonorStates.org; (1) ArlingtonCemetery.net; findagrave.com