PATRICK SPACE FORCE BASE, Fla. -- Earlier this year, a member of Space Launch Delta 45 was able to take part in a unique opportunity to assist in the accounting of missing personnel from the Vietnam War. During a mission lasting from mid May to late June of 2025, U.S. Air Force Technical Sergeant Brian Vosper, 45th Civil Engineer Squadron explosive ordnance disposal technician, went to Vietnam as part of a Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency team.
Vosper was able to assist in the mission of the DPAA, which carries out our nation’s obligation to account for and recover the remains of service members who went missing during previous wars and provide updated and accurate information to their families.
The DPAA, headquartered at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickham, Hawaii, utilizes joint teams made up of members of different military branches working alongside civilians in order to execute its mission of traveling to foreign countries to account for service members who went missing in action.
Requests for support from the DPAA are spread across the different branches based upon the jobs and positions they need at the time. The request for an experienced EOD member to assist with a DPAA mission in Vietnam came down to the 45th CES EOD flight, which Vosper volunteered and was ultimately selected for.
He was part of an investigative team that cleared areas of interest of any potential hazards so that a recovery team could safely conduct a more thorough search for the remains of personnel afterwards.
“My team did surveys of sites that investigations had led to, and we set them up for an upcoming recovery team to hopefully be able to bring back the remains of a missing American from the Vietnam War,” said Vosper.
Due to his expertise in the EOD careerfield, he was tasked with utilizing special equipment to find and cordon off any unexploded ordnance that existed at the locations they were surveying. These areas had once been active battlefields of the Vietnam War and occasionally still contained live munitions.
Everyone on his team had specialized duties, but they all pitched in to help with digging and general labor when they could. Vosper’s team consisted of a team leader, scientific recovery expert, analyst, archaeologist, a translator, a documentarian, a mountaineer, and a medic.
“Everybody was trying to find their place and was figuring out how to work together,” said Vosper. “Then it became a well-oiled machine where everybody just falls in and knows what needs to be done.”
In addition to the DPAA team, Vosper also worked alongside a Vietnamese team that had been assigned to assist them during their mission.
“It was really unique to watch our two countries work together - the fact that they're willing to work with us to get the remains of our service members back”, said Vosper. “They really dedicated a lot to supporting this mission.”
Over his roughly six weeks working with his survey team in Vietnam, he visited many parts of the country as they journeyed from site to site.
“I really got to see a lot of the country, all the way from cities to mountains in the middle of nowhere,” said Vosper. “I also got to learn a lot about their culture and the relationship we have now. The country is beautiful and the people are really nice.”
Some of the locations they worked in were more remote and required hiking up steeply mountainous terrain or constructing a base camp so they could stay overnight. In one case, they had to pull themselves across a river on a bamboo raft in order to reach their survey site.
“A few of the hikes were decently steep and had areas where it was really slick, so that made it a lot harder,” said Vosper. “The path would start out flat and then as you got closer and closer to the site higher up in the mountain, it got steeper and steeper.”
The mountaineer in their team was there to help them traverse these kinds of terrain and would run rope lines for their safety and support.
They mainly drove to the areas where they would begin their hikes, but for one of the sites, they traveled by different means.
“We took a Soviet-era helicopter out to a landing zone in the mountains,” said Vosper. “After we flew to the landing zone, we had a two and a half hour hike up a rocky mountain to the base of a site.”
The 45th CES EOD flight conducts training regularly, but this mission provided a chance for Vosper to operate in new environments and gain valuable experience.
“Being able to do it in the real world, I was able to learn new workflows for going to a site and surveying it cleared of hazards", said Vosper. “That was definitely beneficial.”
This mission also provided new insight and perspective for Vosper.
“It felt really rewarding and powerful to be a part of this mission and try and bring back our missing,” said Vosper. “To be a part of something much bigger than myself, honestly, I'm just honored and blessed to have been given the opportunity.”
Vosper will continue to utilize his new-found skills and experience as he returns to the 45th CES EOD Flight.
Currently, according to the DPAA, there are still 81,500 American service members unaccounted for from conflicts ranging from WWII, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, the Gulf War, and other conflicts.
“Many people have given their lives for our country - to go out and try to bring them home felt really fulfilling”, said Vosper. “If I was asked to do it again, I’d go back in a heartbeat.”