“The Unknown soldier who has returned to us today … is symbolic of all our missing sons,” said Reagan. “About him, we may well wonder as others have: As a child, did he play on some street in a great American city, did he work beside his father on a farm in America’s heartland? Did he marry? Did he have children? Did he look expectantly to return to a bride? We may never know the answers to those questions about his life. We do know, though, why he died. He saw the horrors of war and bravely faced them, certain his own cause and his country’s cause was a noble one … Today we pause to embrace him and all who served us so well in a war whose end offered no parades, no flags, and so little thanks.”3
As Reagan spoke, a sultry breeze stirred American flags in the colonnade behind him. Before him sat reminders of the war’s cost—a man with a black eye patch, a squadron of young veterans in wheelchairs, a scattering of others sitting with crutches or canes at the ready. Near the front of the arena a line of warriors occupied an honored place, some streaming tears that threatened to stain the pale blue ribbons around their necks, from which hung the Medal of Honor. Several hundred others in the audience had never served in Vietnam but nonetheless carried deep wounds from the conflict; their loved ones were among the twenty-five hundred men still missing in action,4 eleven years after Americans ended their involvement in the war.5
To reassure this last group, Reagan promised that the government would continue searching for their lost brothers, fathers, and husbands, no matter how long it took or where it led. “An end to America’s involvement in Vietnam cannot come before we have achieved the fullest possible accounting of those missing in action,” he said. “Our dedication to their cause must be strengthened with these events today. We write no last chapters, we close no books, we put away no final memories.”6
Coming full circle, Reagan turned back to the man of the hour, whose flag-covered casket occupied center stage. “Thank you, dear son,” said Reagan, his voice cracking, “and may God cradle you in His loving arms.” The president, tucking his speech cards in a pocket, crossed the stage and draped the Medal of Honor on a velvet stand at the foot of the Unknown’s bier. Then the nameless hero of Vietnam was decorously borne away by eight white-gloved comrades who slow-marched him from the apse of the amphitheater and out onto the terrace overlooking Washington, where Reagan joined mourners for final honors. The muddled weather prevented a flyover by F-15 fighter jets that day, but this did not keep a joint services color guard from gliding across the terrace with battle ribbons streaming. Nor did it dampen the Old Guard’s artillery battery, which uncorked a thundering twenty-one-gun salute that shook the earth and answered itself in echoes from the hills. The Army Band, all shining brass and gold braid, rolled the drums and sent a majestic version of “America, the Beautiful” sailing out over the cemetery. Pallbearers from the uniformed services lifted the Unknown’s flag from his casket, tugged the ensign free of wrinkles, folded it into a taut triangle, and passed it to Maj. Gen. John L. Ballantyne III, chief of the Washington Military District, who in turn presented it to President Reagan. Accepting the flag as the Unknown’s next of kin, Reagan nodded his thanks to General Ballantyne, entrusted the flag to Arlington’s superintendent, and paused for a last look at the Unknown. Then Reagan turned for home, having put in a performance considered to be one of his most affecting.7
Later that evening, after the flags had come down and the crowds had dispersed, cemetery workers lowered the Unknown into the ground, where he would rest beside his comrades from World War I, World War II, and Korea. Just before midnight a marble slab was hoisted into place over the new crypt and sealed flush with the plaza; its simple inscription, “1958–1975,” was a reminder that the undeclared conflict in Vietnam had been the longest war in American history.8
Reagan’s appearance at the cemetery helped smooth raw memories of Vietnam and reinforce the pride of those who served there. Since the time of his election in 1980, he had worked toward this symbolic moment at Arlington, which would bury not only an individual but also, with luck, the war’s divisive legacy.9 In 1973, as America withdrew the last of its forces from Vietnam, Congress authorized the entombment of an anonymous serviceman from the conflict,10 and workers at Arlington readied a new crypt for him.11 But the tomb remained empty as the years piled up, through the reunion of North and South Vietnam in 1976, through President Jimmy Carter’s pardoning of Vietnam-era draft evaders in 1977, through President Reagan’s dedication of the black-walled Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the National Mall in 1982.12
By this time the number of unidentified war dead had been whittled down to just four candidates out of more than 47,000 killed in combat.13 Some specialists held out the hope that each of those remaining four could have their names restored by further investigation. Forensic medicine had developed to the point that science might render obsolete the nation’s long tradition of honoring Unknowns from each war.14
Even though few suitable candidates from the Vietnam conflict were available for Unknown honors, veterans continued to press for a new tomb at Arlington, in part to justify their sacrifice in an unpopular conflict. “Vietnam veterans for the most part interpreted, in their accustomed way, the decade of delay in seeking and interring an Unknown comrade as yet another of the many real or imagined insults and omissions they have endured for their participation in our nation’s first true bastard war,” Joseph Rehyansky wrote in the National Review. Reagan sought to erase those insults, which set him on the path to that unforgettable Memorial Day of 1984.15
The journey might have ended then and there, with the Unknown resting in marble splendor “until the second coming of Christ,” in the phrase of a Marine Corps chaplain who conducted prayers that day.16 But just as the fighting for Vietnam was seldom predictable, so with the war’s aftermath. Fourteen years after Reagan’s appearance at Arlington, the unthinkable happened: the Tomb of the Vietnam Unknown was broken open, not to the rousing call of Gabriel’s trumpet, but to the prosaic shriek of a diamond-tipped saw biting through granite. As the clock ticked toward midnight on May 13, 1998, workers made their way through ten-inch-thick paving stones and into the tomb, lifting the heavy marble marker away, prizing the lid from the Unknown’s vault, and bringing his steel casket up into the night. When the chill morning of May 14 arrived, so did a military band, which struck up “Amazing Grace” to announce the next, wholly unexpected leg of the Unknown’s journey. Covered in a new flag and bundled into a hearse, he was driven to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, where his meager remains were prepared for DNA testing. Much to the relief of one anguished family and the disappointment of others, those genetic tests provided a name: the Unknown was Lt. Michael J. Blassie, a twenty-four-year-old Air Force pilot shot down over An Loc, South Vietnam, in 1972.17
The final chapter of Blassie’s story—from the Air Force Academy, to a jungle war zone, to years of limbo in mortuaries and forensic labs, to the ceremonial heights of Arlington, and finally home to his native St. Louis—is a narrative spanning more than a quarter century, with enough twists and turns to make his experience seem like a work of barely plausible fiction. It is a story confused by the fog of war, the loss of crucial evidence, the misreading of forensic data, and the well-meaning but poorly considered ministrations of a Reagan White House keen to enshrine an Unknown for political purposes despite the sketchiness of the evidence, the objections of service families, and the warning of a key forensics officer who worried that the Unknown was being rushed to the grave.
That forensics officer, Johnie E. Webb Jr., was a Vietnam veteran and a major commanding the army’s Central Identification Laboratory in the early 1980s when his Pentagon superiors began squeezing him to find an Unknown. “There was a lot of pressure to get a Vietnam Unknown,” recalled Webb, who still serves as a civilian in the Pentagon’s Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, which oversees operations of the Central Identification Laboratory at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii. “All the pressure was coming to bear on me,”
said Webb. “I was the guy who was not in agreement with what the White House was trying to do.” He described his tug of war over Michael Blassie as the most trying period of his long military career.18
The chain of events that brought Blassie to Arlington was set in motion by the bleating of a Klaxon summoning pilots to duty at the Bien Hoa Air Base at dawn on May 11, 1972. Blassie rushed to his A-37 Dragonfly attack jet, strapped himself into the seat, and zoomed northwest toward An Loc in formation with Maj. Jim Connally, the flight commander who piloted an identical Dragonfly that morning. Each plane, known for its lightness and maneuverability, was equipped with a Gatling gun, fourteen rockets, and two five hundred–pound napalm bombs; the napalm was meant for enemy antiaircraft emplacements near An Loc, a strategically situated city of thirty thousand close to the Cambodian border and about sixty miles northwest of Saigon.19
Under siege by North Vietnamese ground troops for more than a month, An Loc stubbornly held off its attackers, in part with air support from pilots such as Blassie, a decorated veteran of 132 combat missions. Connally led the attack on May 11, whizzing in low over enemy guns, releasing one bomb, and pulling up to open the way for Blassie. When the ground debris cleared, Blassie put his jet into a dive and dropped toward the target, but he was intercepted by antiaircraft fire. His jet began spewing fuel, rolled over, and slammed into the earth with a tremendous explosion.20 Connally circled and watched carefully. He saw no sign of a parachute, no sign of life on the ground below. He continued circling, swooping in to repel enemy ground troops, until Cobra helicopters arrived for search-and-rescue operations. “The team pulled out after determining that Mike indeed had gone in with the aircraft,” Connally reported to Blassie’s family shortly after the crash.“However, no attempts were made to pull anything out of the wreckage, because the helicopters were caught in a murderous hail of fire. I orbited over the crash site until the last hope faded and all other aircraft departed the scene.”21
Fierce fighting around An Loc marooned Blassie’s wreckage for more than five months, while his parents and four siblings in St. Louis pored through letters of condolence from friends and comrades, grieved over his disappearance, and hoped for some word regarding his fate. None was forthcoming. “We didn’t hear a whole lot for a period of time,” said Patricia S. Blassie, who was fourteen when her brother vanished. “They told us they couldn’t recover him but they knew he was killed.”22
Blassie’s comrades waited for an opportunity to resume their search. Unable to reach An Loc by chopper, they finally dispatched allies from the Armed Forces of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), who disguised themselves as Viet Cong to comb through the area. Walking some thirty miles into the volatile An Loc region, a reconnaissance patrol from the 48th ARVN Regiment made their way to the coordinates of Blassie’s crash and found what they described as an A-37 wreck on October 11, 1972. With it they found what remained of Michael Blassie—four ribs, one humerus, and part of a pelvis, or six of the 206 bones each of us is allotted in life. From the same site, the ARNV team recovered physical evidence—Blassie’s military identification card with his picture, remnants of his flight suit, an ammunition pouch, a parachute fragment, a holster for a signal marker, a piece of his pistol holster, a life raft, a wallet, and a small amount of local currency.23
Packing the remains and evidence away, the ARVN patrol made its long return trek through the jungle to a remote rendezvous point, where Army Lt. Chris Calhoun and other American advisors were waiting to meet them. Calhoun, taking charge of the airman’s remains and other evidence, was struck by an incongruity that day—how new Blassie’s wallet looked considering what it had been through. Calhoun summoned a helicopter, which came beating in over the trees and dropped into the makeshift landing zone. Two bags were unceremoniously tossed aboard, one containing physical evidence, the other Blassie’s remains. Army Capt. Richard S. Hess, another ARVN advisor on the scene that day, confirmed the inventory of recovered items and witnessed their transfer to the Tan Son Nhut Air Base in Saigon. In a later statement, Hess recalled verbatim the details from Blassie’s ID card: “Name: Blaisse [ sic], Michael Joseph, 1LT, 6 foot 200 lbs picture showed with mustache, dark hair.” Hess’s recollection would later prove to be a critical clue linking Blassie to the crash site.24 The reason? At some point during Blassie’s journey from An Loc to Saigon, his wallet, identification card, and money disappeared, never to be recovered.25
Thus began the St. Louis airman’s long descent into limbo. There was enough evidence to form a reasonable hypothesis that the bones and other material from the crash were probably Blassie’s, but not enough to support a positive identification. Reliable DNA testing, still decades in the future, was unavailable to those who took charge of Blassie’s remains when they arrived at the Tan Son Nhut mortuary in November 1972. His case number reflected the ambiguity of his new status: “TSN 0673-72 BTB Blassie, Michael Joseph,” military shorthand for Tan Son Nhut remains Believed To Be Blassie.26
Because mortuary specialists had insufficient evidence to provide an official identification, they kept Blassie’s family in the dark. His parents, George and Jean Blassie, were not informed that remains had been recovered from their son’s crash site, nor were they told about the lieutenant’s new “Believed To Be” status.27 George Blassie, a meat cutter in the Florissant suburb of St. Louis, kept his son’s memory alive by furnishing a basement room with photographs, awards, and other memorabilia from Michael’s military career. And each morning when the sun climbed out of the Mississippi River, George Blassie raised the Stars and Stripes in his front yard, dutifully reversing the ritual every evening.28 He was proud of his son’s service, an attitude reflecting Michael Blassie’s own feelings about his assignment in Southeast Asia.
“Even with the protests at home, Michael wasn’t tainted,” his sister Pat recalled. “He really believed that the people needed us there. He wanted to keep flying as long as he could help.” She produced a copy of her brother’s last letter home, which arrived the same week his family received the telegram announcing his crash: “Why am I trying to live if I’m just living to die?” Michael wrote to his girlfriend. “I’ll keep on living to fight as long as there is a fighting reason … for others to live.”29 By this time, most of the ground war had been transferred from the Army and Marines to ARVN units, with an enhanced role for those like Blassie, who took America’s fight into the skies, even as peace talks between the United States and North Vietnam continued in Paris.30
With the conflict’s end in sight, the military stepped up its withdrawal of remaining forces, along with the unidentified dead stored in wartime mortuaries. The Army, designated as the lead service for search, recovery, and identification of the war dead, transferred remains and case files from its in-country morgues at Tan Son Nhut and Danang to a newly opened Central Identification Laboratory at Camp Samae San in Thailand. Blassie’s remains, evidence, and paperwork were transferred there in 1973. The St. Louis airman was moved again in 1976, a year after Saigon fell to Communist forces; this transfer took him to the Army’s new forensic laboratory near Honolulu, a modern facility where scientists and investigators methodically worked through the war’s backlog of unidentified servicemen—poring over after-action reports, interviewing witnesses, scrutinizing debris from crashes, and analyzing fragments of bone to reduce the number of unknowns to a handful. Blassie was part of that handful remaining on the shelf, not yet identified, not yet buried, awaiting the one scrap of evidence that would end their war.31
Instead of resolving Blassie’s identity, though, investigators from the Hawaii lab sent his case deeper into the shadows as 1978 drew to a close. That is when Blassie’s box was taken from the shelf and his bones were spread out on a stainless-steel table for inspection. Tadao Furue, a physical anthropologist with more than twenty years of forensic experience and a reputation for making osseous material yield its secrets, supervised the examination. Furue was famous in the forensic community for innovating a technique
known as craniofacial superimposition, where he married a database of hundreds of thousands of photographs to the skulls of unidentified humans to produce a match—and a name; his technique is still solving cases today.32 Since no skull was recovered from Blassie’s crash, Furue relied on more traditional anthropological identification methods, measuring the airman’s bones for comparison to averages derived from thousands of others to determine the likely age, height, and sex of the person on his table.33
Based on his analysis, Furue concluded that the bones labeled TSN 063-72 BTB Blassie did not match Michael Blassie’s. Instead, Furue suggested, the remains belonged to a man who was between thirty and forty years of age. Blassie was twenty-four. Furue guessed the height of his subject to be between five feet six inches and five feet eleven inches—a possible match, since Blassie stood between five feet eleven and six feet, but at the outer limit of the average. Finally, Furue discovered a small, light brown body hair on a fragment of the flight suit recovered from Blassie’s crash; this minuscule clue yielded another piece of evidence, fixing the dead man’s blood as type O. Blassie’s was type A. Based on these three findings, Furue recommended, in a memorandum dated December 4, 1978, that the remains previously associated with Blassie be reclassified as unidentified and that the airman’s name be stripped from the accompanying case file.34 Faced with this recommendation and the anthropological evidence before them, a military review board followed Furue’s lead: on May 7, 1980, Blassie’s remains were designated as unidentified and his Believed To Be status rescinded. His bones were assigned a new file number, TSN 0673-72 X-26. The X designation, which took the place of Blassie’s name, pushed him one step closer to the Tomb of the Unknowns.35
On Hallowed Ground Page 29