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.
Robert E. Rausch
May 22, 1938 – unaccounted for since April 16, 1970
Born Hicksville, Nassau County, New York (home of record)
Loss location: Tri-border area Laos / North Vietnam / South Vietnam corridor (loss location)
Captain (promoted Major while missing), U.S. Air Force; navigator, 12th Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron, 460th Tactical Reconnaissance Wing; RF-4C Phantom II (tail 66-0409), reconnaissance mission April 16, 1970
Missing in action — DPAA lists Capt. Robert Ernest Rausch as Unaccounted For (Active Pursuit), profile a0Jt00000001UR2EAM (verified 2026-09-24). Navigator of RF-4C 66-0409 lost April 16, 1970 after in-flight refueling on a reconnaissance run in the tri-border area; last radio said the aircraft was moving north to another target; searches along the flight path found neither crew. Pilot Maj. Richard L. Ayers also Unaccounted For. Remains not recovered. Memorialized on the Courts of the Missing, National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific. Active Pursuit means DPAA still treats recovery as an open investigative track.
Robert Ernest Rausch was born May 22, 1938, and entered the Air Force from New York — Hicksville on the public home-of-record line. By April 1970 he was a captain flying as navigator in the RF-4C with the 12th Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron out of Tan Son Nhut, the photo Phantom that carried cameras instead of guns.
On April 16 he and Maj. Richard L. Ayers took tail 66-0409 on a reconnaissance mission toward the tri-border country between Laos and the two Vietnams. They refueled in the air and told the forward air controller they were heading north to another target. That was the last transmission. Searches along the intended track found nothing. He never appeared on a prisoner list. While carried missing, the Air Force promoted him to major.
DPAA profile a0Jt00000001UR2EAM still lists him Unaccounted For, analytical category Active Pursuit. He is on the Courts of the Missing in Honolulu and on the Wall in Washington. A finding of death is paperwork. It is not a recovered grave.
- Publication
- NN-HERO-1965-020
- Content hash
- d9a34ba2 564f5354 2f2b0153 d2b3f01c eeb88f23 c9e93853 8c9aa402 eb8d6a85
- Base anchor
- 0x097516 6c00038c 202acdb7 ba7ec0bf ef03b61d 8b5af90e 3447b730 adb98bac 08
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