On Hallowed Ground (35 page)

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

With the benefit of hindsight it is easy to see flaws in Furue’s analysis, which has been criticized as too pedantic, relying
heavily on numerical averages with scant attention to the individual variations in bone size that make each human unique.
Some people have long arms for their height; others have short arms and long legs, as was the case with Blassie. And while
the wear and tear on bones is generally a good guide to the age of their owner, the method relies on guesswork and personal
judgment and is therefore imprecise. If the dead person engaged in a lifetime of vigorous sports—as Blassie did—his bones
would appear to be older than their true age, according to Robert Mann, deputy scientific director of the Central Identification
Laboratory in Hawaii. “Some people’s bones don’t fit the expected pattern,” he wrote in
Forensic Detective
, in which he reviews the handling of Blassie’s case. “Although forensic anthropology is founded in science,” Mann wrote,
“there is still some art and subjective professional judgment to it. One always has to be aware of the limited degree of precision
inherent in drawing conclusions about a dead person’s biological profile based on skeletal features.”
³⁶

As for the conflicting blood type produced by Furue’s tests, such assessments, though considered reliable when they were made,
have since been shown to be less than perfect, producing dependable results about 67 percent of the time.
³⁷
Mann noted that the single hair provided for Blassie’s blood test may have been compromised by five months’ exposure to Vietnam’s
lashing rains and acid soil. If there was chemical degradation, Mann suggested, it could have produced a false reading for
type O blood.
³⁸
There was also a pertinent chain-of-custody question: when did the anomalous hair attach itself to the flight suit? If it
was not Blassie’s, it might have been picked up at almost any point on his peripatetic journey, from the jungle to the helicopter
to Tan Son Nhut to Thailand to Hawaii. Finally, even if one accepted Furue’s anthropological conclusion, what did the physical
evidence from Blassie’s crash contribute to his story? Furue did not say. At least eight other servicemen disappeared near
An Loc and had not been found.
³⁹

One of these, Army Capt. Rodney Strobridge, crashed in an AH-1G Cobra helicopter near the site of Blassie’s loss on May 11,
1972, the same day the St. Louis airman disappeared. This introduced another wrinkle into an already difficult case: Strobridge’s
physical profile matched Furue’s analysis for height, age, and blood type. But other physical evidence from the wreck pointed
to an A-37 Dragonfly, the only such aircraft that went down in the area and the only one equipped with a parachute and the
distinctive one-man life raft like those found with Blassie’s remains.
⁴⁰
In his report, Furue dutifully listed the raft along with other recovered equipment, but he failed to consider their significance,
or to invoke the testimony of witnesses such as Hess and Calhoun, who had seen Blassie’s identification card before it disappeared.
⁴¹

In the end, Mann concluded, Furue had too little evidence in 1980 to say whether the remains in the lab belonged to Blassie
or to someone else, a state of affairs that should have kept the pilot’s name associated with his remains and invalidated
his candidacy as the Vietnam Unknown.
⁴²
In fairness to Furue, who died in 1988, it should be noted that he thought the identity of X-26 could be established by
further recovery missions in Vietnam, where new evidence might turn up.
⁴³

By the early 1980s, however, key officials of the Reagan administration evinced little patience for more investigation, having
satisfied themselves that suitable remains were available if only the Central Identification Laboratory could be prodded to
produce them. “President Reagan and Caspar Weinberger [secretary of defense] wanted to go forward with it, as a way to honor
those who served and as a way to reach closure on the Vietnam era,” recalled John O. Marsh Jr., who as secretary of the Army
became Reagan’s point man for the Vietnam initiative. “The process was held up because some of the people in the forensic
area began to have second thoughts about it,” said Marsh. The former congressman from Virginia had no such qualms. “It’s what
the American Legion, the VFW, the Congress, and President Reagan wanted to do, as a way to help heal the divisions from the
war. My role was to jump-start the process.”
⁴⁴

To that end, Marsh traveled to the Army’s Hawaiian lab in 1982 to gather firsthand information about remains that might qualify
for Unknown status. By this time the possible candidates were down to the last four—Blassie and three others recovered from
Southeast Asia. Having borne more delay than he thought to be reasonable, Marsh made his move on June 16, 1982, declaring
that the time had come to make the selection and bury the symbolic warrior from Vietnam.
⁴⁵

“We have remains which meet the legal requirements for the Unknown,” Marsh told Weinberger that day. “After careful consideration,
I have concluded that the interests of the Nation are served best by proceeding with the anonymous selection and subsequent
interment of a Vietnam Unknown from these candidates. This coming Veterans’ Day, November 11, 1982, would be an appropriate
date since the World War I Unknown was also interred on Armistice Day.” In keeping with tradition from World War II, Marsh
proposed that the three runner-up candidates be buried at sea to preclude their later identification.
⁴⁶

Marsh’s proposal ignited howls of protest from the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast
Asia, who believed that the action was premature. “We are opposed to the interment of any remains now held,” Ann Mills Griffiths,
executive director of the league, wrote Weinberger in July. “Perhaps the Army should respond to Congressional inquires with
… a clear statement that qualified remains are not available and may never be due to technical expertise attained.” She
presciently warned against “interring an individual who may be identified at some point in the future.”
⁴⁷
Her note set off alarm bells in the Reagan White House, where Richard T. Childress, a Vietnam veteran and influential member
of the National Security Council staff, sided with Mrs. Griffiths. Pointing out that the Unknown contenders might be identified
in the future, he cautioned against rushing the process, which could be perceived as nakedly political. “We simply can’t have
the public believe we created an unknown for interment,” Childress told William P. Clark, Reagan’s national security chief.
⁴⁸
Faced with these objections, Weinberger delayed the selection so that the forensics laboratory could narrow its list of Unknown
candidates.
⁴⁹

While investigators in the Hawaii lab cranked up their review, a strange drama played out in Washington, demonstrating just how resentful some Vietnam veterans remained about their lack of recognition. At about five p.m. on March
23, 1983, as Arlington National Cemetery prepared to close for the day, a man in a business suit appeared at the Tomb of the
Unknowns and stepped over chains separating the visitors’ area from the amphitheater terrace. The tomb sentinel on duty, Cpl.
Michael Kirby, challenged the visitor. The man produced a small-caliber pistol, identified himself as an Air Force veteran
who had seen duty in Vietnam, and began railing about his treatment upon returning home. Kirby backed away. Other tomb guards
appeared, jumped the gunman from behind, and pinned him to the ground. The distraught man, who turned out to be a thirty-six-year-old
car salesman from Virginia Beach, Virginia, was taken to the hospital, confined for treatment, and later released. It was
true that he had served in Vietnam. He had driven to Washington intent on killing himself at the nation’s most famous military shrine. Tomb sentinels foiled his suicide, but the episode
was a reminder of the war’s unsettled legacy and Arlington’s importance to those who still struggled with it.
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