On Hallowed Ground (36 page)

Burying a Vietnam Unknown would be an important sign of thanks from the nation, a sentiment that fueled the Reagan administration’s
drive to fill the tomb—and soon. But instead of producing prospects for Vietnam honors, the Central Identification Laboratory
began eliminating them. The first candidate to be withdrawn was a serviceman killed in 1970 and labeled as X-15. Much to the
consternation of Pentagon officials, Johnie Webb refused to certify this combatant for Arlington honors because Webb suspected
that the man’s identity would eventually be established. His skeleton was in the best condition of the four candidates—more
than 90 percent complete. He had a full set of teeth, which would cinch identification if only his service records could be
found in the coils and recesses of the military bureaucracy. Even without those files, X-15’s bones carried a tantalizing
clue to his identity: three steel pellets were imbedded in his right arm, put there not by enemy action but most likely by
an American-made claymore mine he had tripped. It was almost certainly the cause of his death. But his remains could not be
associated with any of the twenty-five hundred servicemen still listed as missing. Prodded by Webb, the Army eventually produced
a name, which led to the man’s dental records, which provided a perfect match with X-15’s teeth. The soldier, who had been
erroneously listed as honorably discharged, proved to be an eighteen-year-old Army private from Michigan who had gone AWOL
near An Khe, where he made his fatal misstep on the fringes of Camp Radcliff. He won a long-delayed ticket home for burial
in 1983, at which point the case of X-15 came off the list of prospective Unknowns.
⁵¹

“We came that close to putting a deserter in the Tomb of the Unknown,” Webb recalled, holding his thumb and finger a few millimeters
apart. “We went on to the next three individuals.”
⁵²
The first of that trio, designated as X-32, turned out to be William McRae, an Army private killed in a helicopter crash
near Long Binh in 1967 but misidentified in the chaos of that multi-fatality incident. Another victim from the same crash,
thought to be McRae, was mistakenly sent home to McRae’s family in Boston. Years later, when Webb and his associates received a shipment of badly decayed remains from Vietnam, they discovered McRae’s
dog tags in the box labeled X-32. The lab won permission to exhume the misidentified body from Boston, whereupon McRae took his rightful place in the cemetery at home. This closed the X-32 file, but it created a new mystery:
who was the man mistaken for McRae? Until his identity could be established, scientists at the lab dubbed him “ Boston Billy,” a label that stuck until 2002, when investigators determined that he was Jerry Degnan, a civilian who trained helicopter
pilots in Vietnam until 1967, when he died in the same Huey crash that killed McRae and jumbled their remains.
⁵³

With the mysteries of X-15 and X-32 settled, attention shifted to a third case, which involved a set of unidentified remains
turned over to the United States by Laos. Since this recovery was, in the military argot a “unilateral turnover,” with no
Americans involved in collecting or transferring the remains, the chain of custody failed to meet basic requirements of the
1973 law. “The pertinent law says that the remains must be an American fighting man who died in combat during this time period,”
Webb said. “Since it’s a unilateral turnover, you have no information to meet the intent of the public law. My contention
was that those remains did not meet the requirement. Won that argument. That brought us down to the fourth guy, the X-26 case.
That one I lost.”
⁵⁴

With all other candidates eliminated, on March 16, 1984, Caspar Weinberger informed President Reagan that the Pentagon was
ready to bury X-26 as the Vietnam Unknown on Memorial Day. “In 1982 we began an intensive effort to determine whether any
of the remains in our possession are qualified for the Vietnam Unknown,” Weinberger reported. “We concluded that we have one
set of remains which cannot be identified and which, although not as complete as we would like, meets the legal requirements
for the Vietnam Unknown … The interment of a Vietnam Unknown is the highest honor our Nation can give to the Vietnam Veterans
… I look forward to joining you in honoring those who faithfully served their Nation during those difficult times.”
⁵⁵

Weinberger said nothing about lingering doubts over X-26, or the associations with Michael Blassie. “Reagan wanted his Unknown,”
said a historian at Arlington. “Nobody was going to stop it.”
⁵⁶

In Hawaii, however, Johnie Webb made one last try. “These remains should be disqualified for selection as the Unknown because
of past and present name associations,” he wrote to Washington about the time of Weinberger’s announcement. Webb sketched out the tangled story of X-26 in his memo. Without naming Michael
Blassie, Webb reminded his superiors that his case had been linked to a particular pilot who had been formerly assigned “Believed
To Be” status. He listed the evidence found with Blassie, including the one-man raft, the flight suit, the parachute, and
the vanished identification card. For good measure, Webb also mentioned another unnamed casualty associated with the X-26
remains; he was referring to Capt. Rodney Strobridge, who matched the anthropological profile from Blassie’s crash but not
the other evidence from the site. Webb’s note, sent to an assistant secretary of the army, was supposed to be forwarded up
the chain to John O. Marsh Jr.
⁵⁷
Marsh says he never saw the document. “If Johnie Webb had second thoughts, I never heard about it,” Marsh said recently.
“He should’ve said something.”
⁵⁸
For his part, Webb avows that he did say something—and that Washington ignored his warning.
⁵⁹

Within five days of Weinberger’s letter to Reagan, Webb received orders to certify that X-26 could never be identified, an
action that would clear the way for Blassie’s entombment.
⁶⁰
Against his better judgment, Webb produced the required document on March 21, 1984, certifying that the remains of TSN 0673-72
X-26 “failed to support a positive identification with any known casualty of Southeast Asia.” He continued:

All efforts since 4 November 1972 to establish a positive identification have proven negative. The portions of the recovered
remains do not include the identification criteria that can be matched exclusively to an individual and it is highly improbable
that continued identification processing would be successful. These remains are determined to be unidentifiable.
⁶¹

Webb swallowed hard and signed his name. “I tried,” he recalled recently, “but the political pressure was such that I wasn’t
going to win.”
⁶²
Webb told another interviewer that short of resigning under orders, he could do nothing further to prevent Blassie’s designation
as the Unknown. “I didn’t have the horsepower … As an Army officer, my job was to advise. After the decision was made,
I saluted and began carrying out the mission.”
⁶³

Now his mission was to prepare Blassie for his trip to Washington. In keeping with the tradition of the Unknowns, the Pentagon ordered Webb to surrender all original files relating to Blassie
and to destroy all copies to guarantee the anonymity of the tomb.
⁶⁴
Webb dutifully obeyed the first part of this directive, but not the second: He kept copies of the Blassie dossier in the
belief that they would be needed if the case was reopened. Webb was also asked to send the life raft and other physical evidence
to Washington, where it would be destroyed with the original paperwork. Webb demurred, keeping all of the evidence with Blassie—which meant
that man and artifacts would be buried together at Arlington.
⁶⁵

“These remains came in together with the material evidence,” Webb recalled. “I wanted to make sure everything stayed together.
If the remains were going into the tomb, the artifacts needed to go to the tomb so that at some point there was the historical
perspective on what came in with these remains.” Leaving nothing to chance, Webb monitored the preparation of Blassie’s bones,
which were folded into an olive drab army blanket with the life raft, the parachute fragments, and other physical evidence.
Webb watched as the blanket was fastened shut all around with safety pins to form a woolen envelope. He saw it go into the
polished steel casket. He saw the lid eased shut and heard the lock click in place. Blassie was ready for the next stage of
his journey, which commenced on May 17, 1984.
⁶⁶

For all the indignities Blassie had suffered, his passage from Hawaii to Washington constituted a sort of restitution. At Pearl Harbor, he was presented with flowers by a Medal of Honor winner, eulogized by
admirals and generals, and given a place of pride aboard U.S.S.
Brewton
, the naval frigate that conveyed him past all the ships in Pearl Harbor while all rendered passing honors. He sailed across
the Pacific Ocean with a Marine honor guard watching over him night and day, and on May 24 they sailed under Golden Gate Bridge,
past the gleaming hills of San Francisco, and into moorings at Alameda Naval Air Station, where further honors awaited: a
twenty-one-gun salute, more eulogies, and fighter jets streaking overhead in the missing man formation. These rituals were
but a warm-up for the round of state honors in Washington, where four days of tribute were planned, culminating with President Reagan’s Memorial Day speech.
⁶⁷
Among those who stood proudly with Reagan that day were Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and Rep. John P. Murtha of
Pennsylvania, both of whom had worked tirelessly to win recognition for this forgotten war, which had finally earned its place
at Arlington.
⁶⁸

This, at least, was the plan, and to a large degree it succeeded in calming the old ghosts of Vietnam. While Blassie slept
in anonymity on the grand plaza of the amphitheater, dead comrades were found and restored to their families; an all-volunteer
army replaced the draft; old enemies shook hands and made peace at home and abroad. New wars boiled up on the horizon. Reagan
flew to California and disappeared into the shadowy world of Alzheimer’s. George Blassie died in St. Louis never knowing that
his son had come home. Jean Blassie carried on but found it impossible to speak about her son outside of her family. Pat Blassie
took her brother’s place in the Air Force and worked her way up the ranks, earning her captain’s bars by 1994, when all of
a sudden the ghosts of Vietnam came rumbling back.
⁶⁹

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 News
broadcast the results on January 19, 1998.