A Jacksonville soldier killed at age 20 during the Vietnam War is finally being laid to rest, nearly six decades after a helicopter crash claimed his life. Pfc. Robert E. Tyner, drafted into the U.S. Army in 1967 after working at a Winn-Dixie warehouse in Jacksonville, was memorialized Friday with a full military honors service before his interment at Riverside Memorial Park, where he will rest beside his mother and father.
Tyner was injured during heavy fighting in Vietnam and placed aboard a Marine Heavy Helicopter Squadron 463 CH-53A Sea Stallion for medical evacuation on Feb. 19, 1968, at the height of the Tet Offensive, according to VirtualWall.org. He was serving with Company A, 1st Battalion, 12th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division at the time. As reported by News4JAX, the helicopter carried a five-member crew and six passengers, including Tyner, when it went down.
The aircraft was initially reported missing over water off North Vietnam, prompting military authorities to declare everyone aboard dead on April 18, 1968, per VirtualWall.org. It wasn't until June 1968 that wreckage was spotted on a mountain near Da Nang, revealing the crash had happened on land rather than at sea. In all, the crash claimed nine service members: five Marine Corps aircrew from HMH-463 and four medical evacuees and corpsmen drawn from the Army, Navy and Air Force, VirtualWall.org reports.
A Crash Site Revisited Across Three Decades
When a Marine Corps search and rescue team reached the wreckage in 1968, they could not determine the identities of the remains they recovered, according to News4JAX. Those commingled remains were interred in a group burial at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri, on Sept. 10, 1968.
The site wasn't done giving up its secrets. Joint military recovery teams returned to the mountain crash location in January 1993 and again in May 2000, unearthing additional remains that would later be forensically identified as Tyner's, according to DVIDS. The Army's Past Conflict Repatriations Branch, which operates under the Casualty and Mortuary Affairs Operations Division at Fort Knox, Kentucky, works these cases by tracking down missing soldiers' primary next of kin to collect family reference DNA samples, per the U.S. Army Human Resources Command. That outreach, paired with new developments in DNA testing this year, positively identified some of the recovered remains as Tyner's, closing a case that had stretched 58 years.
Closure for a Family, and a Community
Tyner's identification this year has provided closure for his family, News4JAX reports. He was posthumously awarded the Bronze Star for heroic actions displayed in combat and the Purple Heart. His name is permanently etched on Panel 40E, Line 33 of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., according to Honor States.
His remains were flown to Jacksonville, where Hardage-Giddens Funeral Home arranged a public visitation and funeral service at Blanding Boulevard Baptist Church on Friday, DVIDS reports. The family has asked that, in lieu of other gestures, well-wishers consider contributions to the Tunnel to Towers Foundation or the Wounded Warrior Project.
Part of a Larger Wave of Identifications
Tyner's case fits into a broader surge of Department of Defense identifications. The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency surpassed its congressional mandate in fiscal year 2025 by accounting for 231 missing U.S. service members, including eight from the Vietnam War, marking its highest single-year identification total since 2019, according to the DPAA. Still, roughly 1,565 American service members who served in Vietnam remain missing and unaccounted for as of mid-2026, the agency says, a reminder that thousands of families are still waiting for the kind of answer Tyner's finally received.
