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Dear Doug Collins

Michael Blassie: Buried as the Vietnam Unknown, Named by DNA in 1998

Michael Blassie was never, in the full sense of the word, unknown. The patrol that found his crash site in October 1972 found his identity card and his wallet with it, and for years the file on his remains carried his name as "believed to be." What happened next is the subject of this page: a laboratory in Hawaii decided the bones could not be his, his name came off the file, and the remains — reclassified X-26 — were chosen in 1984 to lie in the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington as the Vietnam Unknown, guarded day and night, while his family in St. Louis was never told his remains had been recovered at all. It took an outside advocate working from Pentagon records, a sister who would not accept the Air Force's first answer, a seven-month CBS News investigation, and a technology that did not exist when he died — mitochondrial DNA testing — to reverse the file. On May 14, 1998, the Tomb was opened. On June 30, 1998, the Defense Department announced that the Vietnam Unknown was First Lieutenant Michael Joseph Blassie. On July 11, 1998, he was buried under his own name in St. Louis.

The service and the promise

Michael Joseph Blassie was born on April 4, 1948, in St. Louis, Missouri, the oldest of five children of George and Jean Blassie — a St. Louis meat cutter’s family, in the National Museum of Health and Medicine’s description. He attended St. Louis University High School, entered the United States Air Force Academy in 1966, received his commission in June 1970, completed pilot training at Columbus Air Force Base, and qualified in the Cessna A-37B Dragonfly. Assigned to the 8th Special Operations Squadron, he deployed to Southeast Asia, arriving in Vietnam at the end of January 1972 by the squadron accounts collected since. His few months in combat were heavily decorated: the museum records that he “served with distinction and was awarded the Silver Star, the Distinguished Flying Cross, and the Air Medal with 4 Oak Leaf Clusters.”

The spring of 1972 was the Easter Offensive, and An Loc — about sixty miles north of Saigon, near the Cambodian border — was one of its central battlefields: besieged, largely leveled, held by troops who depended on air support to survive. Blassie’s squadron flew that support. The Department of Veterans Affairs’ history counts May 11, 1972, as his 132nd combat mission. That morning his A-37B was hit by ground fire over An Loc; his wingman saw the aircraft explode, with no indication Blassie had survived. He was twenty-four.

The promise owed to a man in Blassie’s position ran in two directions. To the dead, the institution owed the fullest possible accounting: recovery, identification by the best science available, and return to the family. To the family, it owed the truth as it was known — including the truth that remains had been found. The Tomb of the Unknowns rests on the same promise from the other side: a man lies there precisely because he cannot be identified, “known but to God,” so that every family whose son never came home can see its own loss honored in him. A man who could be named did not belong in that crypt — not because the honor was too great, but because it was meant for the genuinely unidentified, and for the families who would never get a grave of their own.

What happened

A recovery mission to the crash site was launched and aborted because of the heavy enemy presence around An Loc, the VA’s history records, and Blassie’s parents were notified that their son had been killed in action and his body not recovered. His sister Patricia has described the family’s understanding differently: Michael was listed as missing in action, presumed dead. On either wording, what the family believed for the next twenty-two years was simple, and wrong in the one particular that mattered most: they believed nothing of Michael had ever been found.

Five months later, in October 1972, a South Vietnamese Army patrol reached the crash site and recovered partial remains — in the museum’s summary, the pelvis, the upper arm bone, and some ribs, six partial bones in most accounts — together with remnants of a flight suit, pieces of a life raft and a parachute, and part of a U.S. Air Force holster. With them, by the accounts of the participants, were Blassie’s military identification card and his wallet, containing a family photograph. The patrol turned the remains over to U.S. Army Captain William C. Parnell, who placed them in a body bag wrapped in plastic and sent them, in the CBS account he gave and other participants’ accounts, to the mortuary in Saigon labeled with Blassie’s name — “believed to be,” BTB, in the laboratory’s terminology, a working association short of positive identification. The wallet and identification card were separated from the remains somewhere between the crash site and the laboratory and lost — “presumed stolen in storage or transit,” in the Veterans Breakfast Club’s summary of the record. What traveled on to be filed, measured, and eventually entombed was the bones.

The remains traveled through the identification system of the era — to a center in Thailand, and in 1976, when the Army’s Central Identification Laboratory returned from Southeast Asia, to the laboratory in Hawaii, CILHI. The bones arrived as a file, “believed to be” Blassie, with the crash-site evidence pointing one way and nothing else to test against: no dental or fingerprint identification was possible from six bones. What there was, in 1978, was forensic anthropology.

The analysis that removed Blassie’s name was performed under the Hawaii laboratory’s chief physical anthropologist, Tadao Furue, using a technique later accounts call morphological approximation — estimating age, height, and blood type from fragments. The numbers did not match: the remains were estimated at roughly twenty-six to thirty-three years of age (Blassie was twenty-four), at a height topping out below or barely at his six feet, and blood typing on hair and blood found on the flight suit came back O-negative against his recorded A-positive. When the Defense Department explained the file in April 1998, acting Assistant Secretary Charles Cragin put the central finding in the laboratory’s own terms: comparing Blassie’s stature with the outer parameters derived from the right humerus, there was “only a 1.1 percent probability that the stature of the individual who belonged to the [bone] could be 1st Lt. Blassie.” Furue recommended in a memorandum dated December 4, 1978 — the date given in Military History magazine’s reconstruction — that the remains be reclassified as unidentified; a review board rescinded the “believed to be” status on May 7, 1980, on the same reconstruction. The museum states the conflict resolved: “With the conflicting information between the forensic analysis and the physical evidence, there was no alternative but to designate the remains as ‘Unknown.’ They were assigned the number X-26.”

How strong that scientific case was has been contested ever since, and this page attributes the contest rather than settling it. The laboratory’s defenders could point to three mismatches against a circumstantial association: effects found near bones on a battlefield are evidence, not identification. The critics’ case is that the mismatches were artifacts of a method that could not bear the weight placed on it: the morphological technique was later discredited — the Veterans Breakfast Club’s account, drawing on the subsequent Army review of the Hawaii laboratory, reports that an independent Army-commissioned inquiry found morphological approximation “not a logical nor correct technique,” and it was discontinued. What is not contested is the decision: the circumstantial evidence — a single-seat aircraft, a single pilot missing at that site, his identification card and wallet recovered with the remains — was set aside, the name came off, and X-26 went onto a shelf in Hawaii. Because the association was less than positive, Army practice kept the recovery from the family. The distinction between “not identified” and “never found,” invisible from St. Louis, is where the next twelve years came from.

What returned X-26 to the front of the laboratory was not science but ceremony. Congress had directed the selection of a Vietnam Unknown, and the crypt at Arlington stood empty. By the early 1980s, identification work had reduced the Vietnam-era unknowns to four candidate sets, in both the 99% Invisible reconstruction and Military History’s account, and the field narrowed to one. On May 17, 1984, at Pearl Harbor, Marine Corps Sergeant Major Allan J. Kellogg Jr., a Medal of Honor recipient, designated X-26 as the Vietnam Unknown; the casket traveled aboard USS Brewton to California, reached Andrews Air Force Base on May 25, and lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda for three days. On Memorial Day, May 28, 1984, President Reagan presided at Arlington, presented the Medal of Honor to the Vietnam Unknown, and — acting as the Unknown’s next of kin — accepted the interment flag. “Thank you, dear son,” he said, in the line preserved in the Reagan Library’s record, “and may God cradle you in his loving arms.”

The Blassie family was not at Arlington. They had no reason to be: nothing they had been told connected the ceremony to their son. George Blassie would die without ever learning that his son’s remains had been recovered, circumstantially identified, reclassified, and buried with the nation’s highest honors. For fourteen years X-26 lay in the Vietnam crypt under continuous guard — honored as everyone, and therefore, in the one way that mattered to five people in St. Louis, as no one.

What the institution did afterward

The correction did not come from inside the institution. It came from Ted Sampley — a former Army Green Beret, POW/MIA activist, and publisher of U.S. Veteran Dispatch — working through Pentagon records. On July 14, 1994, he published “The Vietnam Unknown Soldier Can Be Identified,” laid out the recovery of Blassie’s remains and identification card and the evidence linking Blassie to the Tomb, and urged that the Tomb be opened for DNA testing. He contacted the family. It was, by their account in Military History’s reconstruction, the first time since 1972 they had heard that Michael’s remains had been found at all. Pat Blassie’s recollection is the family’s verdict on the preceding twenty-two years: “It was shock and disbelief. 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. We felt betrayed.” That characterization is the family’s, recorded here as theirs; what the record establishes without it is narrower and sufficient — the remains had been recovered with his identification in 1972, and no one had told his family.

The family’s first attempt through channels failed. Patricia Blassie — by then an Air Force captain who had followed her brother into the service — took Sampley’s information to the Air Force Casualty Office at Randolph Air Force Base in Texas. The answer she received, in the Veterans Breakfast Club’s account of her telling, was: “By no means is there anything to substantiate that your brother is in the Tomb of the Unknown.” The family let the matter drop for about two years.

What revived it was journalism. CBS News producer Vince Gonzales came across Sampley’s reporting, obtained further records through the Freedom of Information Act, interviewed participants including Parnell, and with correspondent Eric Engberg spent seven months building the case; the family granted CBS access to Michael’s files, and Pat Blassie spoke on camera. On January 19, 1998, the CBS Evening News broadcast the investigation: “A seven-month CBS News investigation has revealed,” Engberg reported, “that the identity of the unknown serviceman is almost certainly known, and that some military officials, for whatever reason, knew it all along and tried to hide it.” The concealment charge was CBS’s allegation; the Defense Department’s position was the opposite characterization of the same file — in de Leon’s later words, the “remains were not identifiable when interred as the Unknown in 1984.” Between them sits the documented middle ground: circumstantial identification in 1972, a name stripped in 1978–1980 on a method later discredited, and no record located for this page showing the family told any of it before 1994. The broadcast made the case impossible to leave on the shelf: the family, led by Pat, formally petitioned the Department to disinter the remains for DNA testing.

The Department then did in four months the work it had not done in fourteen years. A senior working group reviewed the family’s issues, the reliability of mitochondrial DNA testing, and the legal implications of opening the Tomb. Briefing reporters on April 27–28, 1998, Charles Cragin laid out its conclusions: the evidence pointed to one of two men — Blassie, or Army Captain Rodney Strobridge, a Cobra pilot, both lost on May 11, 1972, near An Loc — with seven other Americans lost within a twenty-five-mile radius included in testing, nine candidates in all, and a greater than 50 percent probability of extracting mitochondrial DNA. The group recommended disinterment, framing the balance, in Cragin’s summary, as “the sanctity of the tomb and the U.S. national commitment to a full accounting of missing service members.” Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen agreed.

On May 14, 1998, the Vietnam crypt was opened and X-26 was carried by a joint-service casket team, to the Army Band playing “Going Home,” to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology at Walter Reed. Cohen stated the terms: “We disturb this hallowed ground with profound reluctance.” And, in words the American Forces Press Service carried from the same ceremony: “If advances in technology can ease the lingering anguish of even one family, then our path is clear.”

The testing was built to be believed. Laboratory anthropologists took bone samples for mitochondrial DNA sequencing at the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory — AFDIL, in Rockville, Maryland — under a double-blind protocol the museum records: X-26’s samples and a second set of bone samples were analyzed independently, with no scientist knowing either case’s identity. The sequences were compared against ten reference samples from maternal relatives of the seven servicemen reported missing within twenty-five miles of where X-26 was found; mitochondrial DNA passes through the maternal line, which is why the comparison ran to mothers and sisters. X-26’s sequence excluded six of the seven families and exactly matched the two samples submitted by Michael Blassie’s mother and sister. On June 22, 1998, the Central Identification Laboratory identified First Lieutenant Michael J. Blassie “using the results of anthropological and mtDNA analyses to the exclusion of all other possibilities” (the museum’s account of the laboratory record). On June 30, 1998, Pentagon spokesman Ken Bacon announced the identification publicly.

The homecoming took eleven days. On July 9, 1998, the remains, escorted by an Air Force honor guard, left the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology for Missouri, arriving in St. Louis on July 10 — carried, by the Society of the Honor Guard’s account, by an MC-130 of his own former unit, the 8th Special Operations Squadron. On July 11, 1998, First Lieutenant Michael Joseph Blassie was buried with full military honors at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery, under a stone with his name on it, in the same cemetery where his father lay. His name is also on Panel 1W, Line 23 of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Two questions remained, and the institution answered both in writing. The first was the Medal of Honor, authorized by Congress to the Vietnam Unknown; the family asked that Michael receive it. On August 20, 1998, Undersecretary Rudy de Leon wrote to Jean Blassie denying the request, announced August 25. The reasoning was legal, not personal: the medal was a symbolic award to the Unknown “to represent all service members who lost their lives in these conflicts”; it “is symbolic, not personal” and “not transferable”; and “the most senior officials within the Department of Defense” had found “the department has no authority to give Blassie the award.” It would stay at Arlington “as a tribute to all who, like Michael, unselfishly gave their lives in service to our nation during the Vietnam conflict.” Accounts of this case — including the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund’s — sometimes state the outcome as the medal having been “rescinded” on identification. The Department’s own 1998 record says otherwise, and this page follows it: nothing was rescinded from Michael Blassie, because in law the medal had never been his; transfer was denied, and it remained at Arlington.

The second question was the crypt. Cohen decided no new Vietnam Unknown would be interred unless remains were found that would be unidentifiable for all time — a standard, the Department acknowledged, no remains in U.S. custody met. The crypt would stay empty, and its cover would speak for the missing; to choose the words, the Department consulted Congress, the Cabinet, and veterans’ and family organizations. On September 17, 1999 — National POW/MIA Recognition Day — Cohen presided at the dedication, with Senator Max Cleland among the speakers. The slab now reads: “Honoring and Keeping Faith with America’s Missing Servicemen, 1958–1975.” Cohen’s words that day are the institution’s closing statement on the case it had made necessary: “Science helped ease the sorrow and suffering of a family and return their son to his rightful place, and science may one day help ease the weight of grief of those who wait and wonder.”

Where it stands now

For Michael Blassie himself, the account is closed, and it closed in 1998. He lies at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery in St. Louis County, in his hometown, in the same cemetery as his father, under his own name, with his own decorations. The fight his family waged — for exhumation, for DNA testing, for his name — is complete, and nothing in the record since 1998 has reopened an identification that rested on a double-blind mitochondrial DNA match excluding every other candidate family tested.

The Vietnam crypt at Arlington remains as the 1999 settlement left it: vacant by deliberate decision, inscribed “Honoring and Keeping Faith with America’s Missing Servicemen, 1958–1975” — a cenotaph now rather than a grave, the only one of the Tomb’s crypts with no one in it. The Army’s centennial history states the expectation plainly: given DNA identification, “it is unlikely that another unknown will ever be added to the Tomb.” The Medal of Honor presented to the Vietnam Unknown in 1984 remains at Arlington, on display as the symbolic award the Defense Department ruled it to be. The work the empty crypt points to continues under the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency: by the Army’s centennial accounting, more than 1,500 Americans remain unaccounted for from the Vietnam War.

What has no closing entry is the institutional question. No public finding by the Defense Department adjudicating the 1984 selection — who knew what about X-26’s file, and when — has been located for this page. The documented sequence stands without an official verdict: circumstantial identification in 1972; a name stripped in 1978–1980 on a method later discredited; a family not told; a selection in 1984; a correction in 1994–1998 driven from outside — by an activist’s records research, a sister’s persistence, and a news organization’s Freedom of Information Act requests — and completed, once forced, with rigor and with honors. Patricia Blassie’s formulation of what the family was owed is the one the record supports without embellishment: her brother deserved to be known. He is.

The ledger

The accounting, in three lines — what the record shows has been done, what it shows has not, and what is still being sought.

What has been done

What has not been done

What is being sought

The record, on video

Michael Blassie’s case was recorded three ways: in the documentary history of the Tomb he lay in for fourteen years; in WETA’s film of Arlington National Cemetery; and in Arlington’s own tour of the Memorial Amphitheater Display Room, where the Unknowns’ interment flags and honors — including the Vietnam Unknown’s Medal of Honor, kept at Arlington by the Defense Department’s 1998 ruling — are exhibited. Three films, in that order.

The documentary. A history of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, its sentinels of the Old Guard, and "the remarkable story of Michael Blassie — the Vietnam War pilot who was once buried as an Unknown Soldier before DNA testing revealed his identity." (Soul Moments.)

The cemetery. WETA's 2014 documentary on Arlington National Cemetery — its history, its daily work, and its landmarks, the Tomb of the Unknowns among them, told through staff, military personnel, and families of the fallen. (WETA.)

The display room. Arlington historian Tim Frank tours the Memorial Amphitheater Display Room exhibit — the room that holds the Unknowns' interment flags and honors, in the amphitheater beside the empty Vietnam crypt. U.S. Army video by Les Owen. (Arlington National Cemetery.)

Sources

Part of Betrayed, Not Forgotten — this site's accounting for the service members and veterans their own institutions failed. Videos are embedded from their publishers; nothing here is re-hosted.