A JCRC Grouping named to George A. Fisher, SOA #636, LTC, USA (Ret) (who passed on 5 July 2014 at his home in Las Vegas, at the age of 79). George retired from the US Army after 28 years of service as a Military Intelligence officer with the rank of Lt. Colonel. His tours of duty encompassed South Vietnam, Laos (Project 404), Thailand, Cambodia, China, South Korea, Europe and the Middle East. Among his awards and decorations are The Legion of Merit, Bronze Star, Vietnam Cross of Gallantry, Joint Service Commendation Medal, Meritorious Service Medal, Army Commendation Medal and numerous awards from allied Nations. George was fluent in the Chinese, French, Burmese and Thai languages.

The grouping consists of the distinctive JCRC high visability jungle jacket with orange panels to show non-combatant status and worn on filed operations and studies and two JCRC patched jungle jackets that owuld be worn on base.

The Joint Casualty Resolution Center (JCRC), was created as an operational element. The JCRC was a unique organization in the annals of military history. Activated in Saigon on 23 January 1973, its first commander was Brigadier General Robert C. Kingston, a hard-driving infantry office with considerable background experience in special operations. The JCRC mission was solely to assist the Secretaries of the Armed Services to resolve the fate of those servicemen still missing and unaccounted for as a result of the hostilities throughout Indochina. The unit was to have a predominantly operational role -- the carrying out of field search, excavation, recovery, and repatriation activities negotiated through the FPJMT.

General Kingston gathered the initial JCRC cadre in Saigon, calling for volunteers and drawing heavily from among military personnel still remaining in-country at that time (January 1973). He personally interviewed each volunteer, accepting those whose talents matched a menu of personnel skills previously drawn up by the military planners at CINCPAC in Hawaii as the Paris negotiations were wending their way toward conclusion. The personnel roster, with an initial authorization of approximately 140 persons, was heavily loaded on the side of field search teams. . . .

The JCRC case records were inherited from another little-known military unit in Vietnam which was named the Joint Personnel Recovery Center (JPRC). The JPRC, which had already been operational in Vietnam for over six years, had the mission of attempting to rescue American prisoners-of-war and, consequently, had collected considerable information and had generated numerous files on those individuals who had disappeared. Therefore, with the establishment of the Joint Casualty REsolution Center, the old JPRC files constituted a logical starting point for the entire casualty resolution effort that was to follow. Efforts were soon launched by the JCRC to expand and update these files, beginning immediately with the debriefing of all POWs released during Operation Homecoming in February and March of 1973.

Though the JCRC was activated in Vietnam, because of the US interpretation of the restrictions imposed by the Paris Accords on the number of US military personnel who could be left in Vietnam, the unit was immediately moved to Nakhon Phanom Air Base in northeast Thailand.