🇺🇸 News from the US — AFTER 83 YEARS, AN AMERICAN AIRMAN IS FINALLY COMING HOME. Six siblings served. Five came home. For Charles Ray Smith, the journey home would take 83 years. He was a kid from Henderson County, North Carolina, who enlisted in 1942. A year later, he was serving his country as a tail gunner aboard a B-24 Liberator, thousands of miles from home. On August 16, 1943, Staff Sgt. Smith took off from Libya with the 67th Bombardment Squadron, 44th Bombardment Group. Their targets were enemy airfields at Foggia, Italy. Twenty-six bombers went out. Seven never returned. His was one of them. Back in North Carolina, a family that had sent six of its children into military service would welcome only five home. Charles remained missing. In 1945, American personnel recovered unidentified airmen’s remains from a cemetery in Lacedonia, Italy. Unable to establish their identities, they buried them as unknowns in an American military cemetery in Naples. Among those remains were Charles’s. Decades passed. His relatives provided DNA samples, hoping that one day there would be an answer. In June 2022, the unidentified remains were exhumed for examination. On May 29, 2026, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency finally identified him. His return to North Carolina was scheduled for this weekend, with burial announced for Sunday, October 25, at Shepard Memorial Park in Hendersonville, with full military honors. Eighty-three years after his final mission, another generation of his family would finally have the chance to bring him home. There is something deeply moving about a country still searching for its fallen long after the guns have fallen silent. About investigators, historians, scientists, veterans, and families working to recover a man whose war ended before many of them were born. Because he was never just a name on a list. He was someone’s son. Someone’s brother. An American airman who served his country and never got to grow old. Eighty-three years cannot give him back the life he lost. But they have not erased his name. Welcome home, Staff Sgt. Charles Ray Smith. 🇺🇸 Follow @Vanguard_WW2 to help keep their names and their stories alive.