Rangers Lead The Way- RIP 1st Lt Sunstad

Mission Complete-RIP 1st Lt Herman J. Sunstad, U.S Army, killed in Action on 5 June 1944, recently identified and returned home to his daughter and family so that today could be laid to rest with full military honors by the United States Army Rangers!
Diane was born just 30 days following his death and is incredibly thankful for everyone who made this happen so she may have her father home!
First Lieutenant Sundstad entered the U.S. Army from Minnesota and served with the 5307th Composite Unit (Provisional), a volunteer-only Special Operations Light Infantry Unit known as Merrill's Marauders. The Marauders arrived in Burma in February 1944, and on May 17, with the help of two Chinese infantry regiments, seized a strategic airfield near the village of Myitkyina, beginning a major battle in which combined American, Chinese, British, and Kachin (a group of native ethnicities of northern Burma) air and ground forces fought to drive out Japanese forces from the area, often fighting in grueling jungle conditions.
1st Lt Sundstad was killed in action on June 5, 1944, during the Battle of Myitkyina, but due to battlefield conditions his body could not be immediately recovered. Post-war efforts by U.S. military personnel during the 1940s to recover and identify 1st Lt Sunstad’s remains were unsuccessful. In 2018, DPAA began the first series of exhumations of unidentified remains believed to be associated with the Battle of Myitkyina and buried as World War II Unknowns in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific (NMCP), in Honolulu. In November 2021, as a part of this effort, DPAA personnel exhumed one these unknowns from the NMCP for comparison to unresolved casualties of the Battle of Myitkyina. Based on DPAA laboratory analysis, and the totality of circumstantial evidence, an association was determined between this Unknown and 1st Lt Sunstad.