That year, for the first time since Michael Blassie’s death in 1972, his family learned that the airman’s remains had been found and, further, that he was most likely installed in the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington.70 This revelation came from an unlikely source, a former Green Beret and Vietnam veteran named Ted Sampley, the scrappy publisher of U.S. Veteran Dispatch and founder of the Last Firebase Veterans Archives Project in Kinston, North Carolina. Rooting through his extensive files on POW/MIA cases, grilling sources, and poring over Pentagon documents, Sampley independently pieced together his own version of Michael Blassie’s chronicle, publishing his findings in Veteran Dispatch on July 14, 1994.
Under the headline “The Vietnam Unknown Soldier can be Identified,” Sampley described the recovery of Blassie’s remains and identity card, the testimony of eyewitnesses, and the suggestive evidence linking Blassie with the Tomb of the Unknowns. “Many facts pertaining to 1 Lt. Michael J. Blassie’s shootdown closely match those of the Unknown Soldier,” Sampley reported. Noting recent advances in forensic technology, Sampley made a suggestion: “If the experts at CILHI [Central Identification Laboratory Hawaii] can identify American MIAs from minute tooth fragments … then they should be able to right this wrong by determining through DNA if the remains of 1 Lt. Blassie is [ sic] in the tomb of the Vietnam Unknown Soldier.”71 Before publishing his article, Sampley telephoned St. Louis to share his discovery with Michael’s mother. “She seemed grateful,” Sampley recalled. “She had heard nothing since 1972.” After his report was published, Sampley delivered a copy to the Pentagon a few days later—in person.72
Sampley’s revelation stirred up old feelings for the Blassie family, who had to relive the anguish of Michael’s death all over again. “It was shock and disbelief,” Pat Blassie recalled. “I still marvel at it after all these years. They knew it was Michael. They didn’t tell us because of the political expediency. They took his name away. Your name is your identity, the first thing you tell someone when you’re introduced: “Hello, I’m so-and-so … They took that away from Michael. We felt betrayed.”73
After discussing the situation with her mother, Pat Blassie approached colleagues in the Air Force casualty office, who informed her that Sampley’s article could not be authenticated. They expressed no interest in reopening the case.74 Discouraged and numbed, the family let the matter drop for two years.75 Then Vince Gonzales, a producer from CBS News, read the Veteran Dispatch report, collected Sampley’s extensive research files, and called the Blassie family for their cooperation.76 The Blassies gathered in St. Louis. They talked for hours until Jean Blassie signaled that she had made a decision. The matriarch scanned the faces of her four children, one after the other, before speaking: “For twenty-six years, we have been told that Michael was never found. Yet he was found five months after he was shot down and then buried without our knowledge in the Tomb of the Unknowns. I want to bring my son home.” The family rallied around.77 Jean Blassie granted CBS access to her son’s files. Pat Blassie agreed to speak on camera. Gonzales wrapped up a seven-month investigation and, with Eric Engberg narrating, CBS Evening Newsbroadcast the results on January 19, 1998.
Blassie was “almost certainly” buried in the Tomb of the Unknowns, the report said. His identity had been known for decades, and the government had deliberately hidden this information from his family and the public, CBS reported.78 Pat Blassie spoke for her family: “The trail of documents concerning Lt. Blassie leads to the Tomb,” she said. “We want to know the truth. We want to bring Michael home.” The family then asked the impossible: They wanted the tomb opened. They wanted the remains submitted for mitochondrial DNA testing, a relatively new procedure unknown at the time of Blassie’s death.79
The CBS report sparked outrage from the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion—the same groups that had lobbied for selection of a Vietnam Unknown, now complaining that the Blassies threatened to violate the most sacred site at Arlington.80 “It’s not sacred if we know the name of the person you have there,” Pat Blassie retorted.81 “It’s an honorable place to be, but not for a known soldier. That’s not what the tomb was meant for …82 Either put his name on the tomb or disinter him for DNA testing.”83
Two powerful lawmakers from Blassie’s home state, Sens. John Ashcroft and Christopher S. “Kit” Bond, asked for an explanation from William S. Cohen, secretary of defense under President Bill Clinton. At a Pentagon press briefing on the afternoon following the CBS story, the agency’s spokesman was peppered with questions about Blassie. Why had he been hurried into the tomb? Would the grave be opened? When? Had others been misidentified? Faced with the family’s high-profile appeal, the objections from veterans’ groups, the outrage on Capitol Hill, and the prospect of a public relations disaster, the Pentagon did what it often does at such times: it ordered a study.84
Cohen named Rudy deLeon, the respected and cool-headed undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, to head up a senior task force investigating the matter. “The last thing we expected was that we were going to exhume the remains from Arlington,” deLeon said recently. “That was the last resort.”85
Instead, deLeon mounted a fact-finding mission with three goals: to establish that the casualty known as X-26 was indeed the man entombed at Arlington; to find a paper trail and evidence linking him to the 1972 crash in Vietnam; and to determine if new DNA testing could provide a foolproof identity if the grave was exhumed. DeLeon met privately with Johnie Webb, who helped fill gaps in the documentary record with the purloined papers he had copied in 1984. Webb also dropped the bombshell that he had placed the relevant physical evidence in Blassie’s casket. From John Marsh, deLeon learned of the political pressures that had mounted within the Reagan administration as Unknown candidates fell by the wayside, leaving six tiny bone fragments to stand for all who fought and died in Vietnam.86
“In every other war,” deLeon said, “there were so many sets of unidentified service members that you could just arbitrarily pick a set of remains and there was no history. With Vietnam, everything was different. There was difficulty in finding a set of remains that could not be identified. What we discovered in our task force was a full inventory of the flight materials recovered with this set of remains,” deLeon said. “We got Captain Hess’s memo from the preinterment period. We got information from all of the primary sources. When this was done, I felt that indeed all of the data we had on X-26 told us that those were the remains at Arlington. Then the next question was whether the DNA testing could be conclusive. We were satisfied that it could be.” So on April 23, 1998, deLeon recommended that the tomb be opened, based on the following rationale:
The Tomb is a national symbol in which the entire nation has a heartfelt interest. Unfortunately, the current controversy has raised questions concerning the integrity of this national symbol. It requires us to reconcile two competing interests—the sanctity of the Tomb and our national commitment to return unaccounted for servicemen to their families. By taking action to resolve this controversy, we can preserve the integrity of the Tomb and fulfill our responsibility to the families.87
A few weeks later, on May 14, 1998, the Unknown of the Vietnam War was exhumed. William Cohen presided at ceremonies, saying that the disinterment was taken “with profound reluctance” but for good cause. “If advances in technology can ease the lingering anguish of even one family, then our path is clear. We yield to the promise of science, with the hope that the heavy burden of doubt may be lifted from a family’s heart.”88
By this time, Pat Blassie had no doubt. “I knew it was Michael before they opened the tomb. I knew the DNA would prove it. It was the only conclusion you could reach based on the evidence.”89 By June 28, 1998, DNA tests confirmed a match for Michael Blassie.90 He was flown home to St. Louis for a military burial with full honors at the Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery. This time, his name was inscribed on his tombstone.91
The story did not end there. A few weeks after Blass
ie’s reburial in St. Louis, Cohen announced that he was withdrawing the airman’s Medal of Honor, based on complaints from the American Legion and the Medal of Honor Society. “The Medal of Honor is something very, very special, “said Phil Budahn, a spokesman for the Legion. “It simply was not awarded to this particular hero.”92 Cohen determined that the Legionnaires had a point, since President Reagan had presented the award to the Vietnam Unknown as a symbolic figure, not to Blassie as an individual; thus the medal remains at Arlington, where it is displayed in a glass case with other trophies overlooking the amphitheater terrace.93 Out on the plaza, a marble slab covers the Tomb of the Vietnam Unknown, vacant since Blassie left it, but with a new inscription for all of those lost in Vietnam: “Honoring and Keeping Faith with America’s Missing Servicemen, 1958–1975.”94
Given the innovations in forensic science, improved record keeping, better recovery methods, and enhanced investigative techniques, it is almost certain that Michael Blassie will be the last of the Unknowns. Some of his comrades from Vietnam, scattered through four hundred boxes of unidentified remains, still occupy shelf space in the Hawaii laboratory, where experts hope that further sleuthing and new science will eventually provide names for other missing warriors.95
“Unidentified doesn’t mean unidentifiable,” said Johnie Webb, who still haunts the Central Identification Laboratory as a senior advisor to the commanding officer. “We’ve got DNA samples from most of them—we just haven’t found a match yet.”96
14
WAR COMES TO ARLINGTON
THE BIG 757 CAME SILENTLY, and so low that it almost grazed the roof of the four-story Navy Annex building on the edge of Arlington National Cemetery. Darrell Stafford, the cemetery’s interment foreman, watched in disbelief as the jet swooped toward him, head-on.“Look! Look! Look!” he shouted to three coworkers, who had just been discussing setups for the day’s remaining funerals.1
“I know where he’s going—it’s the Pentagon,” Stafford thought. In that instant of sinking recognition, he made a decision to run away from the Pentagon and toward the plane. “He goes over. He’s pouring on the power. Then it’s Boom! Boom! Boom! Everybody flattened on the ground. It was like somebody had just put a heat lamp on the back of your neck—the heat was that intense. I kind of peeked over my shoulder to see this big old ball of flame, hundreds of yards in the sky, just a big fireball.”2
Stafford remembers the morning of September 11, 2001, with perfect clarity: a cool, sunny day carrying an intimation of autumn; the nose of the jet edging into view; the shining turbine blades whirling inside the engine cowlings; the bronze sheen of the fuselage lumbering into view; the blast, the heat, and the thick green cemetery turf showered with glass, plastic, and a million other bits of debris from the impact of American Airlines Flight 77 slamming into the west face of the Pentagon at 529 miles an hour.3
The day claimed the lives of 2,993 people in New York City, Washington, and Pennsylvania, plunging the nation into a messy period of conflict with multiple enemies, shifting battlefields, hit-and-run attacks, and no clear prospect of a traditional armistice to mark the end of hostilities, which continue to this day. It was not the “long twilight struggle” President Kennedy had foreseen in 1961, but the phrase seems eerily apt. However one characterizes this state of affairs—as a “global war on terror,” which President George W. Bush termed it, as an “overseas contingency operation,” in the preferred wording of President Barack Obama, or “asymmetric warfare,” as Gen. David Petraeus and other professionals call it—the consequences of September 11 have been seen, felt, and heard at Arlington each day since the shadow of Flight 77 passed over the cemetery.4 For months after the disaster, the sounds and dust of reconstruction drifted across Arlington from the charred black gap in the Pentagon’s west face, even as men and women from the building’s wreckage were identified, borne off, and buried in Section 64, within sight of the place where they died. Uniformed service members, sent off to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, returned to lie in Section 60, where young families gathered to hear the sound of Taps, collect their folded flags, and sometimes to linger as Darrell Stafford’s crews reverently close the earth over another grave.5
Now and then Stafford glances up from his work to track a jet’s progress across the sky. “I look at things a little differently now,” said Stafford, a lean, soft-spoken man in dark blue coveralls with his name on the pocket. He has worked at Arlington for twenty-seven years, in that time digging many a grave and watching the planes hustling in and out of the airport just downriver. “I’d see them in the wintertime when it was cold and I’d be like a kid thinking, ‘I’ll bet they’re going to Florida where it’s warm. Wonder where they’re going while we’re freezing?’ You know? Now I wonder, ‘Where is he going? Is he coming this way?’ I’m very conscious of flight patterns and what doesn’t look right in the sky. Maybe it bothers me more than I realize.”6
Stafford had little time to reflect upon the events of September 11 before he was drawn into the investigation and its aftermath. Within minutes of the crash, a military police officer came by to search for clues. He collected Stafford for the short walk across Columbia Pike to the Pentagon, where a column of black smoke coiled into the sky, wounded workers staggered to aid stations, and FBI agents began interviewing any eyewitness they could grab. Stafford was one of them.7
“They wanted to know if I could see the pilot,” Stafford recalled. “I told them all I saw was the plane coming in and that’s when I started scrambling for my life. I wasn’t looking to see who the pilot was.” That seemed to satisfy the agents, who sent Stafford back across the road to Arlington, where he was soon busy with the morning’s funerals, even as sirens wailed in the background and workers picked through the smoldering rubble a few hundred yards away. “Some of my guys were so scared they left right after the plane hit,” Stafford said. “One jumped in his car and didn’t stop until he got to North Carolina. But we continued to bury that day with the staff we had. We finished the last funeral about two or two-thirty that afternoon. That was just the beginning for us.”8
For the next several months, Stafford and his colleagues at Arlington would be burying many of the victims of the Pentagon attack. Of 189 who died in the crash, 125 were uniformed service members, civilian workers, or contractors—all at their desks when the plane hit; the remaining 64 fatalities were passengers aboard Flight 77. In addition, five hijackers were killed. Before the end of September, Stafford’s crews began peeling back the turf for the first Pentagon victims. More came in October, November, and December.9
Most of the Pentagon fatalities—sixty four—were laid to rest in Section 64, a low-lying part of the cemetery on its southeastern edge, affording a clear view of orderly white gravestones climbing the green hills all around, with the tan hulk of the Pentagon breaking the near horizon.10
“Normally, somebody dies, we don’t know them and we weren’t there,” said Stafford. “But because of the crash, I felt connected to them. Everybody who came from there,” he said, nodding toward the Pentagon, “I felt like I knew them. You recognize the name when you’re burying them.”11
Stafford helped bury Army Lt. Col. Kip Paul Taylor in Section 64 a month after the attack. The thirty-eight-year-old Michigan man, a major before his posthumous promotion, served as military assistant in the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel, in the Pentagon’s outer ring. Taylor’s office took a direct hit from Flight 77, leaving very little of him or his personal effects intact. “There was nothing left of his office,” his sister Ann Zaenglein told USA Today. But on the morning of the attack, Taylor left something that would be remembered by many in the days ahead, a string of e-mail messages to friends about his happy marriage to Nancy Melvin Taylor, their joy in their two-year-old son, Dean, and a father’s great expectations for a second child, due in a month. Luke Taylor was born right on schedule, on October 25, just after his father was buried at Arlington.12 While Nancy Taylor was hospitalized for Luke�
��s birth, doctors discovered that she had cancer. She survived two more years before joining her husband at Arlington. Their sons, then ages four and two, were taken in by Kip’s brother and his wife, who still care for them.13
The Taylors’ grave is in a quiet, lonely part of the cemetery, placed well away from the heavily visited Kennedy memorial and the Tomb of the Unknowns. The Taylors lie among the graves of others killed in the Pentagon attack; surrounded by a wide swath of turf, their stones form a sort of island, standing together, just as they died together. A few steps away, near the intersection of Patton Drive and Marshall Drive, a black granite marker, notable for its understated dignity and modest height, lists the names of all who died at the Pentagon on September 11. Among those named are the five who could not be found, now represented by unidentified remains gathered into one casket and buried on September 12, 2002, beneath the five-sided memorial stone.14
The black stone in Section 64 was a reminder that this conflict was unlike traditional wars, in which forces faced enemies on more or less equal terms until one side got the upper hand and dictated peace terms. In the 9/11 attacks, a small, elusive enemy had struck indiscriminately at civilians and uniformed service members alike, sacrificing their own lives and exacting terrible bloodshed from an adversary of superior strength. The sneak attacks on Washington and New York were the most devastating since Pearl Harbor, but the asymmetric tactics were hardly unprecedented. Similar methods had been used by kamikaze pilots in World War II, by Viet Cong fighters in the Vietnam conflict, and most memorably by a terrorist attack on the Marine Corps barracks in Beirut on October 23, 1983.15
On Hallowed Ground Page 31