Staff Sgt. John Robert Adams

July 31, 1946 - Nov. 8, 1967

Chico

By the time he was 21, Robert Adams had 400 hours of combat as crew chief aboard a Huey helicopter. On Nov. 8, 1967, his chopper, part of the 189th Assault Helicopter Company, was shot down by small arms fire during the bloody battle of Dak To.

First reports indicated the chopper fell in North Vietnam, but later accounts said it dropped in Viet Cong-held territory.

Army spokesmen told Adams’s anguished parents that all efforts to save the crew were unsuccessful and that the Viet Cong “sealed off the area and occupied the crash site.”

For a long two months in late 1967, Adams’s parents did not know whether their son was dead or held prisoner. In a nightmarish snafu, the Army at one point shipped home the body of a soldier who was not Robert Adams.

Adams was listed as missing in action until March 13, 1978, when he was officially declared deceased.

Robert Adams, a I964 graduate of Chico High School, worked after high school in the carpentry shop in Six Rivers National Forest near Eureka. He went in the service in mid-1966.

Chico News & Review, May 26, 1988

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