The burial plan was announced by the Pentagon on Wednesday.

The remains of "McGoon," whose real name was James B. McGovern Jr., were recovered from an unmarked grave in a remote northern Laos village in 2002 and identified last year by forensic experts at the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command's laboratory at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawai'i.

But plans for his burial were stalled by a family feud among relatives in New Jersey, even as former colleagues of McGoon in World War II and Indochina tried to arrange an Arlington interment to coincide with a planned "final reunion" of pilots who flew in China and French Indochina with Civil Air Transport, a postwar airline secretly owned by the CIA.

"McGoon," who weighed 260 pounds and was nicknamed after a hulking character in the hillbilly comic strip "Li'l Abner," was killed May 6, 1954, while air-dropping an artillery piece to the trapped French garrison at Dien Bien Phu. His C-119 "Flying Boxcar" cargo plane, crippled by anti-aircraft fire, continued 75 miles into Laos and crashed on a hillside.

The crash also killed his co-pilot, Wallace Buford, and a French flight engineer. Three other French Legionnaires survived the crash and were captured by communist troops, but one died later. The remains of Buford, of Kansas City, Mo., were never found.

Dien Bien Phu fell to Ho Chi Minh's communist-led revolutionary army the next day, dooming the French colonial regime in Indochina.

McGovern and Buford, both civilians at the time, were the first two Americans killed in fighting in Vietnam, where ensuing warfare would kill nearly 60,000 Americans and more than a million Vietnamese over the next two decades.

"Earthquake McGoon" was a flamboyant figure who became famous in the early 1950s for his escapades. As a member of an Air Force squadron descended from the famed Flying Tigers, he shot down four Japanese planes and destroyed others on the ground.

His adventures included being captured by communist Chinese troops who freed him because he called them "liars" for not letting him go; winning a clutch of dancing girls in a poker game; and setting free a group of Japanese POWs on a beach rather than follow orders to "dump cargo" after he developed engine trouble.

Possible graves were spotted in the Laotian village of Ban Sot in the late 1990s by an analyst for the Hawai'i-based POW/MIA Accounting Command, which searches for missing Americans in Asia and elsewhere.