By Owen Sexton / [email protected]
On Friday, August 30, at 11 a.m., U.S. Air Force Sergeant David S. Price will finally be laid to rest with full military honors at Greenwood Cemetery in Centralia, more than 56 years after he was killed in a Vietnam War battle on March 11, 1968, atop Mount Phou Pha Thi in Houaphan Province, Laos.
Price was originally from Centralia and graduated from Centralia High School.
On that fateful day in Laos, he was one of 19 soldiers assigned to guard Lima Site 85, a tactical radar outpost on the mountain, when it was overrun by a North Vietnamese attack. Price was killed along with 10 other soldiers and his remains were not recovered as the survivors were forced to retreat.
“After 56 years, you don’t think you’ll ever find anything “It’s been too long,” Price’s daughter Brenda Fuller of Goshen, Utah, told the Chronicle in a phone call Thursday, Aug. 8.
Fuller was only seven years old when she lost her father, who was 26 at the time. Although everyone told the family that Price had died during the battle, Fuller said she never really got over it.
“When I was growing up, even as an adult, you don’t really believe he’s dead unless you have remains. He could be anywhere, and you make up stories about where he could be and why he didn’t come back,” Fuller said. “Now that you know he’s actually dead and died then, all those stories can kind of go away. It’s nice to know the truth.”
The public is invited to attend Price’s funeral service on August 30 at Greenwood Cemetery. Prior to the service, citizens are also invited to take to the streets and wave flags for his funeral procession. The procession will depart at 10:15 a.m. from Sticklin Funeral Chapel, 1437 S. Gold Street.
From the chapel, the funeral procession will travel west along Fair Street, then north along Kresky Avenue and continue north as Kresky Avenue becomes Tower Avenue, according to Mindy Rocha-Barella, Sticklin funeral director.
The procession will continue on Tower Avenue until it turns west onto Main Street, and continue west where Main becomes Harrison Avenue, then turn north onto Johnson Road before turning west onto Reynolds Road to Van Wormer Street, where Greenwood Cemetery is located.
Price’s remains will arrive in Portland from Hawaii on August 29. A funeral service will be Transport Price from Portland International Airport to Stricklin Funeral Home to prepare for his funeral.
The mystery surrounding Price’s fate was solved when the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) announced that it had finally identified Price’s remains, according to a July 21 press release. Fuller and the rest of her family learned the news about a month before the release.
“They called me on June 24, I didn’t recognize the number and thought it was a spam call… I was really speechless. It took me a minute to believe what she was actually saying because it was 56 years ago,” Fuller said.
Scientists from the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System, in collaboration with the DPAA, used mitochondrial DNA analysis and used circumstantial evidence to positively identify the remains discovered last year as those of Price.
Price’s family was previously unsure of where his remains might be, as the remains of one of his comrades were discovered on a rocky outcrop of Phou Pha Thi in 2003.
In addition, other boots and items belonging to US soldiers were discovered, but it is not known whether Price’s remains are still there or whether he may have actually survived the attack and was taken to a prisoner of war camp in Russia at the time.
The DPAA had previously begun joint recovery operations with the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (LPDR) in 1994, but no remains were found at that time.
Between 1994 and 2009, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam also supported the DPAA and the LPDR by pursuing dozens of witness leads and conducting interviews with those involved in the March 11, 1968, attack.
Despite these joint efforts, it was not until 2023 that DPAA staff, along with members of partner organizations, discovered unexploded munitions and other combat-related materials, as well as possible human remains, at a research site.
“Today, Price will be memorialized on the missing persons plaques at the National Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, Hawaii, and on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, DC,” the DPAA press release said. “A rosette will be placed next to his name to indicate that he is missing.”
In the early 2000s, a plaque commemorating Price was placed on the Veterans Memorial Museum’s Wall of Honor outside the building in Chehalis. The plaque was paid for by the 1959 graduating class of Centralia High School.
Judy Outland, a member of the class of 1959, told The Chronicle in 2005 that she helped raise money for the project when the museum opened.
“He was a wonderful guy,” Outland said of Price at the time, but admitted she could remember few other details from their high school years.
According to the 1959 Skookum Wawa yearbook, Price was a member of the band for four years and played concerts and was a member of the pep band during his penultimate and senior years.
In his final year of study, he was also president of the service club and in his penultimate year, he was president of the projectionists club.
At the back of the yearbook, seniors wrote down one thing they would do at the end of their high school years.
“I, David Price, bequeath all the papers hidden in my sousaphone to the Boys ‘C’ Club (which comprised the school’s best sports medallists),” Price wrote in 1959.
