American War Hero · Vietnam War · Notice Nearby
No rights-safe contemporary likeness is on file. The record is the service and the writing, not an invented face.
Humbert R. Versace
July 2, 1937 – executed September 26, 1965; remains not recovered
Born Honolulu, Hawaii
Loss location: U Minh Forest, An Xuyen Province (reported)
Captain, U.S. Army Special Forces; S-2 adviser, MAAG Detachment 52, Cà Mau
Missing in action — DPAA lists Capt. Humbert Roque Versace as Unaccounted For (Active Pursuit). He was captured on October 29, 1963, near Thoi Binh, An Xuyen Province. The Viet Cong announced his execution on September 26, 1965. His name was on the January 1973 died-in-captivity list. Remains have not been recovered. An announced death is not a grave.
Humbert Roque Versace — Rocky to the Army that sent him to the Delta — was born in Honolulu on July 2, 1937, and commissioned from West Point in 1959. In 1963 he was an intelligence adviser with a Civilian Irregular Defense Group in An Xuyen Province. On October 29 a patrol met a Viet Cong force that outgunned it. Versace was wounded in the knee and back and taken.
The public record of the next twenty-three months comes from other prisoners, especially James N. Rowe after his 1968 escape: isolation, irons, reduced rations, and a man who would not give the political performance his captors wanted. On September 26, 1965, a Viet Cong broadcast said he had been executed. The family heard it on the news. The Army entered a finding of death in 1966.
The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency still lists him unaccounted for. The 1973 died-in-captivity list is documentation of a reported killing, not a recovery. President George W. Bush presented the Medal of Honor to his siblings on July 8, 2002. He is on the Courts of the Missing and on the Wall in Washington.
No rights-safe official portrait is hosted here. This page will not print camp dialogue that cannot be sourced as public fact. It will say a Special Forces captain is still not home, and that a radio announcement is not a grave.
- Publication
- NN-HERO-1965-002
- Content hash
- e57d319c c43b5c85 1cb75840 9aaf47ae d6c4d67e e2112cf5 69ebc352 cdddab34
- Base anchor
- 0x49dc83 8f2534e4 ce8e5d47 2f709e70 b5ba9194 adce5636 624ce398 c6bb1a1d f5
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