The making and unmaking of an unknown soldier

Setting the scene

The coproductive relation of science and memory, or technology and identity, reveals itself in the complicated account of an Air Force pilot shot down over hostile territory in southern Vietnam in 1972 and the circuitous route his remains traveled from the jungle of SEA to the marble crypt of Arlington. The unexpected course of 1stLt Blassie’s case – as evidence of his identity was gathered, disaggregated, overridden, reassembled, and finally reasserted – documents the shifting politics of knowledge production in both constructing and later disrupting a national icon. There is perhaps no better way to understand the temporal and political gulf separating these two eras than to consider the two ‘scenes’ at the Tomb of Unknowns that bookend Blassie’s posthumous journey. These scenes do more than depict singular moments in recent US history; they provide a snapshot of the respective states of technologies discussed here – of remembering and identity – at the same time that they chart the evolving construction of the social contract between the state and the public regarding care for those sent to fight for their nation.

The official interment of the Vietnam Unknown at Arlington National Cemetery took place on Memorial Day, 28 May 1984. In the eyes of many Vietnam veterans, the act was long overdue. ⁷ While Congress passed legislation to inter a Vietnam Unknown shortly after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in 1973 and the monument was readied with the addition of the Vietnam crypt in 1975, the sarcophagus lay empty for the next decade. The void had been welcome for some. On the opposite end of the MIA lobby spectrum, politically mobilized families of the missing fought against filling the Tomb with unknown remains; for them, it signaled that the government was abandoning the search for prisoners of war (POWs) in favor of recovery efforts – that is, live prisoners betrayed for mortal remains (Allen, 2011: 105–107). Bending to the former and bucking the latter, the Reagan administration saw the interment as a means to redefine the past conflict and redirect the narrative of US military might. As had his predecessors Harding and Eisenhower, President Reagan, symbolic pater of the nation and titular ‘next of kin’ for its unknown lost son, presided over the burial rites that sought to quiet a painful episode of the country’s recent history. ⁸ By honoring a Vietnam Unknown, Americans could, in his words, ‘transcend the tragedies of the past’ and ‘trust each other again’ (Allen, 2009: 239; Hagopian, 2009: 182–183). Thus, despite the losses of life and geopolitical face, Vietnam, Reagan’s ‘noble cause’, was enfolded into a discourse of healing – a narrative of ‘therapeutic triumph’ and national unity that linked it in time and space with other 20th-century wars (Hagopian, 2009: 18). In addition to (and, for some, apart from) the striking monument on the Mall, the veterans who had pressed for inclusion in the memorial now had their unknown, and the Reagan administration had its symbolic distancing from the failed war in SEA.

In stark contrast to the pageantry of the first ceremony, when Department of Defense (DoD) officials reopened the Vietnam crypt to remove its contents for forensic analysis 14 years later, they did so behind a screen of temporary walls and meshing to block the media. The disinterment of the remains began a 6-week period of intense scrutiny and painstakingly careful analysis of forensic evidence. Here, the construction of scientific fact turned on the experts’ ability to clear the muddied waters of the past – to address head-on the charges of political instrumentalism that had begun to swirl around the original selection of the Vietnam Unknown. Indeed, the disinterment presented the government’s forensic scientists with an opportunity to demonstrate how much had changed over the years – first and foremost, how rigorous scientific protocol now safeguarded the identification of missing service members from encroaching political agendas such as those that pushed to fill the Vietnam crypt in the first place. It was also, however, a chance to broadcast a reputation of scientific integrity and innovation, which the government’s forensic staff dedicated to accounting for MIAs of past wars had begun assiduously building in the 1990s. The spotlight shone especially bright on advances in forensic technology. Cast as the fail-safe proof of identity, DNA became an arbiter of truth before a nation whose appetite for forensic genetics had only recently been whetted (Aronson, 2007; Aronson and Cole, 2009; Jasanoff, 1998; Lynch et al., 2008) ⁹ and for whom the controversies of the Vietnam war were slowly receding from the national stage.

An uneasy process of elimination

With the ‘snapshot’ scenes of interment and disinterment as markers along this trajectory of shifting technologies of remembering and identification, the significance of Blassie’s story reveals itself as much in the making of the Unknown Soldier as it does with his unmaking. The making – that is, the selection – of the Vietnam Unknown depended primarily on state officials silencing particular uncertainties. The foregrounding and backgrounding of evidence was not exclusive to the Blassie case. Rather, the handful of bones that turned out to be those of 1stLt Michael J. Blassie were just one of four sets of remains under consideration to go into the Tomb in the late 1970s and early 1980s. By 1982, 9 years after Congress had passed legislation to add a Vietnam crypt to the Tomb of the Unknowns, the search for a suitable (unidentifiable) unknown intensified, and the task fell to the forensic scientists charged with accounting for the missing. ¹⁰

At that time, POW/MIA cases were processed by the DoD’s Joint Casualty Resolution Center and its associated forensic facility, the Central Identification Laboratory, Hawaii (CILHI), located on Hickam Air Force Base. ¹¹ With President Reagan bent on closing the chapter on the Vietnam War, the DoD directive to produce an unknown for burial in the Tomb came to the laboratory in unabashedly political terms. A special task force had been appointed to find the requisite ‘candidate’, and under the guidance of the laboratory’s commander, Major Johnie Webb, Jr, a Vietnam veteran himself, a reluctant staff at CILHI was directed to review four potential sets of remains. The fact that Webb headed the laboratory was a telling sign of the times in and of itself, as he had no formal forensic scientific credentials. Rather, Webb was a military man assigned to the laboratory in Hawaii when it ‘stood up’ in 1976 and was made its commander in 1982.

The head of the task force, DoD official Rudy De Leon, told Webb in no uncertain terms, ‘We are going to place remains in the Tomb of the Unknowns and we want you to sign a certification’, a document affirming that the remains were in fact unidentifiable. ¹² Webb balked. He refused to sign the document and instead wrote a memorandum to the Army in which he and his staff systematically argued against the premature and potentially malfeasant selection of an unknown from among the four sets. In addition to raising the problem of the relative incompleteness of the four sets (each consisted of only ‘minimal recovered portions’), the nature of the hostilities (only four sets of remains existent compared to many more unknowns from WWI, WWII, and the Korean War), and the possibility of additional remains being recovered (‘Perhaps there will be a breakthrough in our relations with SEA [Southeast Asian] governments’), the memo stipulated:

The first point (paragraph 7) sets up the ideological foundation for the second (paragraph 8). Framing the first objection in terms of the symbolic weight of the monument, the memorandum presciently warned of the possible, precarious circulation of information. At a time when the government, particularly the Pentagon, was under intense scrutiny for its handling of the POW/MIA issue, Webb and his staff knew that inquiries – and the disclosures they might compel through ‘Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests’ – were inevitable. ‘The selection must not be flawed’. The subtext is clear: the potential for error and, more damning, the taint of manipulation would be politically disastrous. More to the point, it would cast a pall over the entire monument, dishonoring not just the government that had made the faulty selection, but the honored dead, the other three Unknowns, as well. The symbolic power of the monument lay in the very declaration of definitive unknowability etched in stone, ‘Here Rests in Honored Glory an American Soldier Known But to God’.

The next paragraph contained the evidentiary rebuttal against the encroaching political agenda. The memo set forth a step-by-step evaluation of existent evidence – of what was known, what could be known, and what might be known in the future. However faintly, Webb and his staff invoked the ideology of scientific progress to argue against sealing off both the potentiality for expanding knowledge and the evidence itself (the physical remains). Someday, somehow, science might produce new tools and offer new insight to render the unknowable knowable. The memorandum then went on to lay out the case for each of the four sets of remains, charting their status of knowability on a table, all prefaced with the ‘letter of the law’ – a transcription of the legislation authorizing the Pentagon to select and inter the Vietnam Unknown. The columns were the cases; the rows the individual criterion according to the law:

Public Law 93-42

The Secretary of Defense is authorized and directed to cause to be brought to the United States the remains of an American, who was a member of the Armed Forces of the United States, who served in Southeast Asia, who lost his life during the Vietnam era, and whose identity has not been established, for burial in the Memorial Amphitheater of the National Cemetery at Arlington, Virginia. ¹⁴

OPEN IN VIEWER

	TSN 8878-67X-32	TSN 0138-72X-15	TSN 0673-72X-26	CILHI 0014-A-78
1. Must be an American	Probable	Probable	Probable	Questionable
2. Must be a member of United States Armed Forces	Probable	Probable	Probable	Questionable
3. Must have served (died) in Southeast Asia	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
4. Lost life during Vietnam era Aug 64–Mar 73	Yes	Yes	Yes	Unknown Questionable

The remainder of the memo details the information and analysis summarized in the table, spelling out case-by-case the available evidence in terms of both skeletal elements and the historical context of their recovery. In response, a DoD emissary, an Army general, traveled to CILHI to issue the ultimatum; they had 6 months to identify or hand over a set of remains for the Vietnam crypt.

That there were so few sets of unknown remains attested to the changing strategies and technologies of warfare that characterize the US military’s engagement in SEA during the 1960s and 1970s (Allen, 2011: 105). Increased reliance on air power meant that bodies were located and extracted with greater efficiency, and there were fewer ground losses than in the Korean War or WWII battles in the Pacific theater. ¹⁵ Thus, to have only four ‘viable’ unknowns made sense. The DoD directive, however, placed the lab in an untenable position, turning upside down its very purpose to account for MIAs. Under the time constraints, the laboratory staff, led by anthropologist Tadao Furue, scrambled to uncover clues previously undetected. ¹⁶ They turned to categories of missing outside of the Department of the Army’s conventional realms of responsibility. This included deserters, servicemen the Army had written off as ‘discharged’, not missing. Major Webb sent requests to each of the branches, asking them to forward the names of deserters; he also sought information on possible ‘black ops’ MIA whose disappearance went undocumented because of the classified nature of the operations.

Therein lay the first breakthrough. With just 2 weeks remaining before the DoD deadline, the first of the four sets of remains, X-15, the one in best condition at 90 percent complete, including teeth, turned out to be those of a possible deserter. The information came to CILHI in the most serendipitous of manners. That summer a repatriation from Vietnam had taken place. Remains had been received through a unilateral turnover and the US military had sent a delegation to escort them home. The aunt of a soldier who had never returned from the war saw the coverage and wrote her Congressman asking whether the repatriated remains might be those of her nephew. After some investigation, it was discovered that the soldier had been declared a deserter (he had been absent without leave for 30 days) and so had been ‘discharged’ rather than designated missing (Mann and Williamson, 2007: 103–104; Poole, 2009: 241–242). Recalling Webb’s earlier appeal, the Army express-mailed their files on the young man, and, using dental records, the laboratory quickly identified the first potential unknown.

The second candidate, X-32, entailed another slippage of responsibility and, more problematically, a grievous error in a wartime identification and the Joint Casualty Resolution Center (JCRC) reluctance to address the error. The story is a series of misfortune and mishaps. ¹⁷ In August 1967, a helicopter and an F-101 ‘Voodoo’ jet collided mid-air. While the pilot of the fighter managed to eject and survive, the helicopter crashed, killing all aboard. Of the five individuals on the helicopter, four bodies were positively identified, while the fifth, clothed in jungle fatigues, was assumed to be William McRae, a passenger listed on the manifest. Four months later, a reconnaissance team came across the same site and discovered a sixth set of remains. Compelling circumstantial evidence, including dog tags and an identity card, and anthropological analysis pointed toward McRae, who had boarded the helicopter after being released from the notorious Long Binh jail, a military stockade. But the ‘first’ McRae had already been sent home to his family in Boston, Massachusetts. Staff at Tan Son Nhut (TSN), the US mortuary outside of Saigon, and later at CILHI either did not recognize or ignored the discrepancy, and so failed to inform the McRae family that they had buried someone other than their own relative. The remains of the sixth individual thus sat on the shelf until the directive arrived from the Pentagon to produce a Vietnam unknown. Now designated the unknown set of remains X-32, the ‘second’ William McRae, the sixth recovered body and the associated material evidence, underwent a more thorough examination. Major Webb wrote a memorandum to the Army, indicating that he believed X-32 was ‘someone who has been misidentified’. ¹⁸ The laboratory pushed through the identification, and the first body, originally returned to the McRae family, was disinterred from the Boston cemetery and sent back to CILHI. Years later, it would emerge that the remains, dubbed ‘Boston Billy’, were those of an unmanifested passenger, a civilian contractor who trained helicopter pilots and who had gone missing around the time and place of the crash.

With the first two sets of remains now dismissed, the laboratory turned to its third candidate. These remains, CILHI 0014-A-78, were too risky because of the doubt – the conundrum of unknowability – surrounding them. The remains had been received along with three other individuals as part of a unilateral turnover from Laos. ¹⁹ Unilateral turnovers are remains acquired without American forensic personnel involved in their original excavation or procurement. In such instances, not only is the original provenience unknown, but the sequence of possession, from recovery to release – that is, who was responsible for and executed the transfer of evidence – is also uncertain. Another, more niggling doubt arose from the context of the original accession: the remains had arrived commingled, and, after examining and segregating them into four individuals, CILHI staff determined that two of the four individuals were ‘Mongoloid’ – that is, of Asian, probably Southeast Asian, ancestry. ²⁰ In all likelihood, the remains belonged to members of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) (i.e., South Vietnam), who had fought alongside American forces in Laos.

At stake were the bounds of scientific knowledge, of knowability and unknowability: what could the forensic examiners at CILHI definitively determine about the remains, and what kind of anxiety did their unknowable characteristics provoke? Typically when generating an identification, forensic anthropologists seek to establish what is ascertainable, measurable, quantifiable, comparable, and so on, through metric and nonmetric (morphoscopic) methods applied to a given set of individual remains. In selecting an unknown and thus designating that set of remains as unidentifiable, however, the epistemic concern is the extent of unknowability. Here, the absence of knowledge about where the remains came from, who obtained them, and whose hands they passed through was further complicated by the presence of Mongoloid remains in the same accession. Could the laboratory definitively rule out the possibility that the set of remains under consideration was not ‘American’? This was not to say that the remains were also of Southeast Asian descent, or that the laboratory was ignoring the fact that Asian Americans fought and died in Vietnam. Rather, lacking probative evidence of race – that is, diagnostic elements such as specific skeletal morphology or, in an age of DNA analysis, haplotyping or a matching family reference sample – the laboratory was left to follow the principle of parsimony: ceteris paribus, the simplest answer is the most correct answer by virtue of being the most conservative answer. Stripped of the archaeological context of recovery, the ‘candidate’ Unknown had only the association with the two other SEA remains to frame the void of identity.

In the end, what was unknowable prohibited the selection of the third set of remains as the Unknown. As Webb would argue in yet another memorandum to the Army, the remains did not ‘satisfy the public law that [the unknown] would have to be an American, fighting man who died in conflict during the war’. ²¹ Although it could not be demonstrated that the remains were not American, more compelling was that they could not be demonstrated to be American. ²²

From Believed to Be to X (Unknown)

Having averted those three potential political disasters – burying a presumed deserter, a delinquent soldier who had been mistakenly identified, or the chance, no matter how slight, of interring a ‘foreigner’, perhaps even the enemy himself, in the nation’s most hallowed of spaces – the forensic staff at CILHI turned to case X-26.

We know now definitively (and one could argue it was known then tentatively) that case X-26 was 1stLt Blassie. How he got there – the how and why of this knowledge production and deconstruction – are as compelling a set of circumstances as his eventual disinterment and identification. The bureaucratic machinations of evidence collected, disappeared, and disaggregated in the early years of his posthumous life as a Vietnam KIA/body not recovered (BNR) expose the politics and the material limitations of the early MIA accounting efforts; they also illustrate how state officials first ignored and then marshaled scientific authority in fulfilling the responsibility to honor the collective fallen through a symbolic anonymous individual.

To begin with, it is worth emphasizing that there was no doubt that Michael Blassie had died. As multiple accounts attest, his plane was shot down by antiaircraft artillery while he was carrying out a ground support mission, a ‘napalm delivery run’, near An Loc City in southern Vietnam. ²³ The incident report bears the ominous words, ‘no chute’ – a fellow pilot witnessed Blassie’s A-27 crashing into a canopy of trees in a ball of fire with no parachute sighted, a telltale sign that the pilot had not ejected. ²⁴

The first evidentiary gap appears early in the timeline. As Blassie’s plane had been shot down over hostile territory, a search and recovery mission could not be mounted until the area was secure. In October that same year, an ARVN (South Vietnamese) reconnaissance team located the crash site and recovered remains and personal effects, including Blassie’s wallet, which, in addition to ‘1,000$ RVN and $5.00 MPC’, contained his Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) Form 5 ²⁵ and identification card. ²⁶ As critical material evidence, these items, however, were not turned over when the remains were delivered to the mortuary facility near Saigon 5 days later. A report insinuates the mistake lay with a drunken South Vietnamese officer, head of the reconnaissance team, but the blame remained buried in the circumstances of a foreign war and an overstretched mortuary staff. ²⁷

It was nevertheless an important omission. The absence of the MACV Form 5 and the ID card, supposedly lost in transit, introduced a pivotal element of doubt, and the staff at Tan Son Nhut (TSN) determined that it was not possible to make a positive identification. In a Memorandum for Record, Deputy Chief of the Joint Personnel Recovery Center (JPRC), Major Donald Lunday recorded the results of a phone conference with Mr Rogers of the USA Mortuary, TSN:

Mr. Rogers also stated that the BTB remains of LT Blassie had been received at the Mortuary, however, there are not sufficient remains for a positive ID. All that was recovered was four ribs, one pelvis, one humerus, a small portion of NOMEX flight suit, a raft, ammo pouch and part of a parachute. ²⁸

Thus, rather than being sent home to his family in St. Louis, Blassie’s remains were instead labeled ‘Believed To Be (BTB)’ and stored at the TSN mortuary for several years until they were eventually transported to CILHI. This conclusion – procedurally, if not scientifically, sound – opened the door for additional, more problematic misreadings. A forensic examination at CILHI in 1978 yielded a trace hair on a fragment of the flight suit, the blood-typing of which erroneously excluded Blassie. Well before the advent of DNA analysis, blood-typing was an imperfect line of evidence at best, especially when chain-of-custody errors had already been introduced into the case. The CILHI staff also had to grapple with ambiguous osteological findings. Working with minimal diagnostic skeletal elements – that is, the right humerus and right innominate (pelvic bone) – the forensic examiners estimated the remains’ stature and age at death to be outside those of the associated BTB (Blassie). ²⁹ They thought the remains belonged to a taller, older individual (Matthews, 1998). ³⁰

The final stage in disaggregating the individual name from the remains occurred as the DoD sought to clear its docket of lingering unresolved cases. On 28 April 1980, Blassie’s case, along with other unidentified remains, underwent a review by the Armed Services Graves Registration Office (ASGRO) to evaluate its status. By that point, the initial compelling circumstantial evidence connecting Blassie to his bones had been so eroded by mismanaged material evidence and misread forensic data that the board (made up of military officers, not forensic experts) opted to delete the name association. The tie to identity now cut, the remains were no longer ‘BTB’ those of 1stLt Michael J. Blassie; rather, they had become an official unknown with an associated X-file.

It was that final act that opened the door to Blassie’s eventual selection for the Tomb. Of the four sets of remains, in many ways X-26 was the safest, untainted by the problematic associations of the other three candidates (desertion, misidentification, and possible non-American). Despite being removed bureaucratically, the hint of the former ‘name association’ lingered, as CILHI commander Johnie Webb himself signaled in his original memo to the Army. But the laboratory had run out of options and arguments. With the three other candidates ruled out, the remains once known as ‘BTB’ 1stLt Blassie represented a fitting fulfillment of the charge, an ideal embodiment of American military service and sacrifice. A graduate of the Air Force Academy and a decorated pilot, ‘Michael’, as his cousin would explain, ‘bled Air Force Blue’. ³¹ And so, 4 years later, despite serious misgivings about the potential someday to identify the unidentifiable, ³² Webb and his staff acquiesced to the Reagan administration’s demand to produce a Vietnam Unknown, and X-26, candidate Number 4, was interred in Arlington.

Unmaking the Vietnam Unknown

Flash forward to the second scene, May 1998, when the crypt is opened and the Vietnam Unknown removed – an extraordinary, for some highly contentious, act spurred by the spotlight of national media and the forceful pleas of the Blassie family. It had been a long, circuitous path to the decision to disinter. Beginning in the mid-1990s, rumors surfaced about what some called ‘the worst kept secret in the Pentagon’. Formal allegations of the known identity first emerged in an article published by Vietnam veteran and activist Ted Sampley (1994):

In 1984, as a result of the US government’s eagerness to lay to rest a Vietnam Unknown Soldier, it interred the remains of a missing American serviceman that today can be identified and accounted for through the U.S. government Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii (CIL-HI). … The entombment of the Vietnam Unknown was at the very best premature and at the worst a politically expedient attempt to further close the books on the POW/MIA issue.

In the same report, Sampley (1994) went on to detail the connection between 1stLt Blassie’s case and that of the unknown, X-26, concluding that the CILHI ‘should be able to right this wrong by determining through DNA if [Blassie’s] remains’ were in the Tomb. Here was the first hint that a scientific means existed to resolve the controversy – a new technology of identification – to know definitively what had been unknowable a decade before. Sampley’s allegations were subsequently picked up by more mainstream journalists, including Vince Gonzales from the CBS News, who, after an 8-month investigation into the matter, ran a report in January 1998 detailing the government’s handling of the case. ³³ The Blassie family soon fell into the public spotlight, forced to explain and, to some, defend their request to the Pentagon that the Tomb be opened and the remains examined. Echoing Johnie Webb’s memo to the Army 16 years before, family spokesperson, Michael’s sister Pat Blassie spelled it out: ‘If it’s Michael, he is not unknown. He might be unidentified, but he’s not unidentifiable. And we want to bring him home’ (CNN, 1998).

With pressure mounting, the DoD decided at last to disinter the remains for analysis. On 14 May 1998, the national monument was closed to the public, the sentinel charge of the Old Guard temporarily disrupted, and the marble slab atop the crypt removed. The disinterment marked a significant break from the past: this time, it would be board-certified forensic experts, not military personnel or mortuary staff, who would evaluate the evidence, and at their disposal they had the important new tool in DNA testing.

Having been transmogrified from an unnamed set of remains, lying in storage in a forensic laboratory, to the catalyst for ‘ghostly national imagining’ (Anderson, 2006: 9), the scant bones of the Vietnam Unknown once again underwent a metamorphosis of social significance. For the next 6 weeks, the remains would occupy that liminal space between the sacred and profane, simultaneously the object of national reverence as the honored Unknown, yet subject to scientific inquiry into the individual presumptive identity of 1stLt Michael J. Blassie. As with any rite of passage, ritual helped ensure a smooth transition from one realm to the next. Once removed from the crypt, the casket was draped with an American flag, and the following day, after Secretary of Defense William Cohen delivered brief remarks before the monument, a small procession of cars and Honor Guard departed the cemetery for Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP). ³⁴

There, the remains ‘lay in state’ in an entirely different fashion. Where military ritual left off, scientific protocol picked up. Padlocks and laboratory regulations safeguarded the remains from a different threat of contamination – any intrusion, physical or procedural, into the evidentiary chain of custody that ensured the legitimized production of scientific knowledge. Having overseen the disinterment, CILHI anthropologist David Rankin performed the initial forensic anthropological review, cataloging and describing the skeletal elements present, while his colleague, another CILHI forensic anthropologist Dr Bob Mann, and the director of Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory (AFDIL) looked on to verify protocol. ³⁵ After his preliminary analysis, Rankin then prepared each bone in an evidence bag as a potential sample to be cut and analyzed by AFDIL. The ‘Evidence/Property Custody Document’ and accompanying CILHI ‘Preliminary Analysis’ form capture the urgency of the moment: ‘The mtDNA [mitochondrial DNA] samples were hand-carried by the CILHI anthropologist to the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory (AFDIL) and signed over to their custody on 14 May 1998 at approximately 2300 hrs’. ³⁶ Working late into the night, staff from all three agencies and the Department of Army shepherded the remains and associated material evidence through the channels of custody and analysis.

Internally, the answer came swiftly. Six samples had been cut from the remains, and ‘to insure blind testing’, additional samples were submitted to AFDIL from an unrelated CILHI case. ³⁷ It is important to note that Blassie was not the only individual potentially associated with the remains: CILHI scientists determined that nine other unaccounted-for American servicemen had been lost in the same approximate location (An Loc, South Vietnam) during the same 1-month period (26 April to 24 May 1972) and therefore needed to be definitively excluded. Thus, AFDIL requested and received mtDNA samples, ‘family reference samples’, from maternal relatives of seven of the nine missing men. ³⁸ The results were conclusive. Mitochondrial DNA analysis matched the Unknown’s sequence to the samples provided by Michael Blassie’s mother and sister.

While the strength of the DNA evidence was compelling – the matching sequence was ‘unique to the mtDNA database used by AFDIL and relatively rare within the general population’ ³⁹ – it was nevertheless only one line of evidence. The scientific director at CILHI, Dr Thomas Holland, also had to conduct a forensic anthropological examination of the remains. He would have to address the same disparity in age and stature raised in the earlier osteological analyses of the ‘BTB’ file, as well as in David Rankin’s assessment following the disinterment, which had itself been peer reviewed by Bob Mann. Holland traveled to the AFIP to conduct his examination of the remains. Notably, the remains stayed in Washington, and CILHI personnel – first Rankin and then Holland – were the only individuals with access to them. Concern about the high-profile nature of the case and strict protocols surrounding the chain of custody demanded that the remains be kept under lock and key at AFIP throughout the period immediately following the disinterment and before the final identification. ⁴⁰

Given the paucity of diagnostic skeletal elements present, it was remarkable that estimates of age and stature were even possible. Both Rankin and Holland based their respective age estimates on the innominate (also known as the os coxa), which in this case, though slightly eroded, had intact areas of the pubic symphysis and auricular surface. ⁴¹ Rankin estimated the Unknown remains to be 30 to 40 years old; Holland more closely approached the possible margin of error: ‘my own analysis of the innominate suggests that an age of 25–35 years is reasonable’. ⁴² Age was in the ballpark.

Stature likewise proved a challenging trait to assess because the forensic anthropologists had only the right humerus on which to base their evaluation. Though a long bone, in comparison to the femur or tibia, for example, the humerus is a less reliable basis of analysis; it is less tightly correlated with stature than the leg bones, which contribute more directly to the individual’s living stature. In the end, Holland argued that the remains fit within a supportable margin of error:

Lieutenant BLASSIE is listed as a 24-year-old Caucasian male who stood approximately 72 inches tall. The stature estimate (69.0 inches) derived from the humerus using the White formula has a standard error of 1.8 inches (4.57 cm); thus 1Lt BLASSIE’s recorded status falls within two standard errors (65.4-72.6 inches). ⁴³

The incongruity in both age and stature reflected a basic principle of human variation – that is, Blassie was simply a statistical outlier in the natural span of human variation as expressed in skeletal elements.

In 1978, 2 years before the ASGRO board review that so altered the course of Blassie’s posthumous fate, CILHI forensic staff had insufficient evidence to overcome their doubts about the identity of the ‘BTB’ remains. No teeth had been recovered; no dental records could be consulted. DNA testing was not yet available. Thus, despite significant circumstantial evidence, the weight of the difference in age and stature, coupled with the inconsistent blood-typing, was too great for the CILHI scientists to overcome, and they stuck with the more conservative conclusion of maintaining the BTB designation. It was a safe, passive course of action. The 1980 decision, on the other hand, by the ASGRO board, composed of three nonscientific (military) personnel, to disassociate Blassie’s name from the remains was an active course; it interpreted the ambiguity of evidence within a framework of an absolute not a tendency. Doubt therefore became grounds to act, to strike the name and designate Blassie’s remains unknown. ⁴⁴

The stages of scientific analysis that took place during those 6 weeks in the spring of 1998 signaled how profoundly the US government’s forensic facilities and staff had changed over the two decades. Once the forensic anthropological and genetic testing had undergone the rigors of its internal peer review process, CILHI’s Scientific Director Tom Holland sent the complete identification packet to three outside, board-certified forensic specialists for additional review. Holland had implemented this practice of external consultation several years before the Blassie case as a measure to ensure the scientific integrity of the identifications produced by the laboratory. In late June 1998, three notable figures in the field of forensic odontology and anthropology were called upon to complete the review: Dr Lowell Levine, Director of the Medicolegal Investigation Unit of the New York State Police Department; Dr Hugh Berryman of Middle Tennessee State University; and Dr P. Willey of California State University at Chico. Levine tackled the 1980 board decision head-on, stating, ‘it is my opinion that deletion of name association based upon that hair was totally inappropriate’. ⁴⁵ Concurring with the skeletal analysis by Drs Holland and Rankin, which ‘suggests that the individual in question was slightly older and slightly shorter than 1stLt Blassie should have been’, Levine argued that ‘[t]hese slight inconsistent findings would not exclude the possibility that the remains are those of Lt Blassie’. ⁴⁶ The subtext was clear: variation in human skeletal morphology and development should have been taken into consideration when the remains were still associated with 1stLt Blassie, and later when the remains were being considered for selection as the Vietnam Unknown.

As Holland had himself, all three external consultants agreed that the DNA evidence was the most crucial element of the identification, indeed, in the words of Dr Willey, ‘the key to the identification’. ⁴⁷ While two of the three cautioned that a DNA consultant should have been included in the external review process, each of them supported the identification. ⁴⁸ The DNA results provided CILHI with the means to overcome the doubt introduced by the ambiguous, limited evidence of the skeletal remains; the circumstantial evidence correlating the incident location with the recovered remains likewise gained strength through the compelling mtDNA match between Blassie and his maternal relatives. The lines of evidence converged around Blassie’s genetic signature.

When set side by side, the selection and (de)identification of the Vietnam Unknown evoke the differences in technologies of remembering and identification characterizing the different periods in time. The set of remains designated as X-26 became the Vietnam Unknown because state officials in the Reagan administration foregrounded evidence of presumed unknowability while backgrounding glaring uncertainties and the potential for scientific advance. The decision to do so reflected not only the material limitations of forensic science at that moment but also the structural limitations of a laboratory beholden to military commanders rather than a broader scientific community. Underwriting the decision, the politics of memory in the early 1980s compelled an anonymous (if not entirely unknown) occupant for the Tomb over an empty crypt. Conversely, though resulting from the same thorny set of circumstances surrounding the original selection, the disinterment and identification of 1stLt Blassie were made possible by levying a different set of evidentiary claims. In this instance, state officials, specifically DoD authorities, foregrounded the technoscientific evidence of individual identity presented by DNA testing while backgrounding insinuations of past negligence or malfeasance. Naming Michael J. Blassie nevertheless became a means to celebrate the biotechnological potency of the state, which could care for its missing and its unknown service members decades after their death.

In its public framing of Blassie’s identification, the DoD fell back on the rhetoric of scientific progress, an ironic twist on the position it took in the early 1980s when Pentagon officials pressured Major Webb and the laboratory to produce an Unknown. Its press release extolled the advances of forensic genetics and the government’s expertise that enabled Blassie’s identification: ‘The identification was made possible by the use of mitochondrial DNA comparison and forensic examination using state-of-the-art technology not available in 1984’ (Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense, 1998a). DNA appeared as the infallible means for establishing identity, a ‘truth machine’ whose probabilistic nature was rhetorically downplayed in favor of imputed certainty (Aronson and Cole, 2009; Kreimer, 2005; Lynch et al., 2008). ⁴⁹

The disinterment and identification of the Vietnam Unknown held profound implications for the technology of remembering. Cast as transformational, DNA testing promised to change how the nation would commemorate future wars and their missing, honoring the fallen not through anonymous symbols but by individuated narratives of collective loss. Upon the public disclosure of 1stLt Blassie’s identity, Secretary of Defense Cohen remarked, ‘It may be that forensic science has reached the point where there will be no other unknowns in any war’ (Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense, 1998b).

Individuating technology, individuated remembrance

Show me the manner in which a nation cares for its dead and I will show you with mathematical exactness the tender mercies of its people. (British Prime Minister William Gladstone)

If the days of memorializing national honor and sacrifice through unknown and unnamed war dead had passed, what would take its place? While seizing on the singularity of the moment, Cohen’s pronouncement reflected the shifting technologies of remembering and identity already well underway by the time 1stLt Blassie was reburied in Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery in St. Louis. Advances in forensic science, not only in genetics but also in anthropology, had already quickened the pace of identifications. Furthermore, the DoD mandate for ‘the fullest possible accounting’ was gradually stretching the arch of investigation and repatriation efforts back to the Korean War and WWII, in addition to its historically more concentrated efforts on Vietnam MIAs and POWs. ⁵⁰

The increased capacity to identify individual sets of recovered remains made personalized loss central to the technology of remembrance: the collective category of the fallen epitomized by identical, flag-draped coffins or symmetrical white tombstones gained new strength through narratives of the individual people who fought and died for their country. This development depended on parallel shifts in the technology of identification. Advances in forensics meant that anthropologists and geneticists required smaller and smaller fragments of human remains to yield conclusive identifications. In addition to more traditional methodologies, technoscientific tools at the forensic specialists’ disposal have developed significantly in recent years. For example, 5 years ago, the geneticists at AFDIL needed a minimum of 2 g of bone in order to produce a DNA profile. Now they are able to do so with 0.5 g. This follows odontology’s success with minimal remains: provided the antemortem dental charts exist, odontologists can identify a person from a single tooth recovered. Of most recent note, advances in radiographic comparative analysis allow Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) anthropologists to identify remains by clavicles (Stephan et al., 2011), and Central Identification Laboratory (CIL) scientists have begun limited use of isotopic analysis as a supplemental line of probative evidence. ⁵¹ Their results in turn produced more public and publicized portraits of individual servicemen returned home.

The fact that forensic science’s ability to read and translate individual identity (Smith, 2008, in press; Wagner, 2008) occurs on an increasingly molecular level through progressively more sophisticated tools signals not only political support but also congruent social values, the coproductive articulation of natural and social orders (Jasanoff, 2004). As Marilyn Strathern (2005) has argued, the emphasis on the uniqueness of individual human genetic makeup reflects and reinforces Western liberalism’s insistence on the primacy of the individual:

Western (Euro-American) imagery routinely represents individuality through people’s unique and single bodies, echoed understandings of the unique genetic template … The perception of individuality and the value of individualism go together, and the significance of the unique genetic template is repeated over and over again. (p. 20)

Identifying individuals, no matter how fragmentary the remains, in turn produces individuated narratives of past sacrifice and honor that nevertheless hold broad, collective appeal. A recent example from JPAC’s CIL attests to the emotive force that draws together seemingly disparate groups of people around the symbol of a fallen, missing now identified and returned, service member. In June 2011, Dwayne Spinler, the son of fighter pilot shot down in Laos during the Vietnam War, traveled to the laboratory to collect the remains that had been recovered at his father’s crash site. After touring the facility, meeting with forensic staff who had worked on his father’s case, and partaking in the chain-of-custody transfer, the son served as the military-appointed special escort and accompanied his father’s remains to mainland. ⁵² A few days later, he and the rest of his family buried those remains with full military honors in a small town in western Minnesota before hundreds of mourners, the majority of them complete strangers, who had gathered to memorialize a fallen hero come home. The Minnesota Star Tribune carried the story:

Now tiny Browns Valley, population 600, expects to double its size for a day this month, when Darrell Spinler’s remains return home for a full military funeral.

Spinler’s parents have since passed away, and no close relatives remain in Browns Valley. But the town, a farming community in Traverse County on the border with South Dakota, is bracing to accept a long lost hero back home.

‘We’ve just been trying to do what we can. If we get 600 visitors, it could make a real mess in town. We’re just trying to coordinate traffic control and making sure everybody’s got a place to go’, said Jeff Cadwell, the city administrator. (Brunswick, 2011)

Captain Spinler’s remains had lain lodged in a riverbank in Laos for some 40 years, entirely unrecognized. Detailed research and painstaking forensic archaeological and odontological efforts by JPAC’s CIL restored a name to a tiny fragment of a person, allowing those remains to return to a community of mourners who had assembled through bonds of kinship and affect, the shifting technologies of remembering and identification on full display.

In an article written for the United States Military Historical Collection website, the son, Dwayne, described the funeral assembly:

We met many people who knew my father as a child, in high school, or college. We were grateful for the stories they shared of their time with him. We also met people from the area who had never met him but knew of him. Others had never heard of him until recently. Many came to pay their respects while some just knew they needed to be with us but did not really know why. (Spinler, 2011: 28)

Reflecting on the entire process of recovering, identifying, and commemorating his father, he concluded, ‘Family is not limited by genetics or marriage. You can find family anywhere’ (Spinler, 2011: 34). While both powerful and telling, his point nevertheless downplays an important specificity: however ephemeral, the highly localized nature of the community convened in the duty of assuaging much delayed grief. Vietnam veterans riding in on motorcycles from across the state, childhood playmates, friends of the family, residents of the town, total strangers touched by the story, all became members of a temporary community dedicated to the care of a fallen soldier returned home. They came together to commune in sorrow, an act, as Durkheim (1996) explains, that fortifies the living in the face of death’s rupture (even such delayed rupture); for ‘to commune in sadness is still to commune, and every communion of consciousness increases social vitality, in whatever form done’ (p. 405).

The story of Captain Darrell Spinler’s disappearance and recovery thus offered an opportunity for kith and kin and strangers alike to remember an individual instance of service and sacrifice within a grander national discourse of commemoration. In contrast to the Tomb of the Unknown, where the sense of collective identity and belonging derives from not knowing and therefore imagining – ‘he could have been my classmate, my grandson, the boy from down the block’ – the personalized narrative of the war hero at long last returned stirs a different but equally powerful response from the people gathered for the highly localized commemoration and burial. A neat enfolding of means and ends, individuated memory invokes the very ideals for which service members such as Darrell Spinler were supposedly sent to war – to protect and preserve individual freedom.

In his book, 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration, David Simpson (2006) analyzes the New York Times’ series, ‘Portraits of Grief’, with its ‘snapshot’ epigraphs of victims of the World Trade Center attacks. He notes that the leveling out of personal ‘quirks and rough edges’ is not merely a matter of ‘memorial decorum’; rather, a pattern emerges that encourages a sense of connectedness (Simpson, 2006: 37). In an editorial, one of the series’ authors explains,

We recognize the archetypes that define the ways these stories are told. The tales of courtship and aspiration, the ways these people relaxed and how they related to their children – these are really our own stories, translated into a slightly different, next-door key. (Simpson, 2006: 37)

In the case of the identified and returned MIA, the stories of courage, service, honor, and sacrifice, told and retold through myriad media, may not be ‘our own stories’ – what Simpson (2006) deems ideologically grounded narratives of a ‘universal human instinct’ (p. 38) – but rather stories of national ideals enacted through ordinary yet extraordinary lives.

Embedded in these individual epigraphs of recovery, repatriation, and identification is also a narrative of science’s triumph. The US military’s application of forensic innovations and expertise has outstripped the erosion of time and effects of physical landscape, making manifest the extent of the government’s exacting care for families such as Captain Spinler’s surviving relatives. For indeed, there is no other state that goes to such lengths to recover fallen soldiers from foreign soil and return them to still grieving families. ⁵³ JPAC’s forensic anthropology laboratory dedicated to this task is the largest facility of its kind in the world, the first forensic anthropology laboratory to be certified by the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors’–Laboratory Accreditation Board. ⁵⁴ The DNA extraction and analysis procedures developed at AFDIL to reattach individual names to unnamed remains of American service members have led advances in forensic genetics across the globe, postwar Bosnia included (Wagner, 2008: 256, 299). The efforts, simply put, are unprecedented and unparalleled; they reflect the state’s heightened commitment to fulfilling its end of the social contract that declares, ‘Until They Are Home’, through an increasingly biologized definition of ‘accounting’ for the missing. ⁵⁵

Therefore, the Vietnam fighter pilot joins the infantryman who perished in a North Korean prison camp and the Marine shot on the beach of some South Pacific island. Individuated by science and ensuing commemorations, the war dead from the conflicts of the 20th century nevertheless become enfolded into a totalizing narrative of fallen heroes that speaks as much about the past as it does to the present. Unlike the monuments built to honor the collective fallen through an unnamed and anonymous set of remains or the national cemeteries with their long sweeps of uniform marked death, the work of identifying MIAs enables communities like Browns Valley, Minnesota or St. Louis, Missouri to parse out their grief, communing in sorrow for lost sons and daughters, at the same time that it connects them to the national imaginary.

Conclusion

Upon joining the US military, each person, enlistee and officer alike, is required to provide a DNA reference sample. The Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory stores millions of samples for the unwelcome moment when it is called upon to help identify a deceased service member. Accounting for war dead from current conflicts thus relies heavily on genetic signatures, a metaphorical molecular dog tag, to ensure that the nation need not memorialize its fallen through unknown remains. Echoing the very notion that individual service members fight to defend a nation founded on the primacy of ‘individual rights and freedoms’, memorials to fallen service members celebrate personal stories of honor and glory made tangible through the return of individually identified remains.

Travel to the Memorial Amphitheater in Arlington National Cemetery, where the Tomb of the Unknowns commands silence and respect, and watch the visitors gradually make their way to the marble steps to behold the changing of the guard. Individuated remembering made possible through individuated remains has by no means rendered obsolete the power of that monument. The anonymous symbolic fallen of WWI, WWII, and the Korean War lie in rest beside the empty crypt once occupied by 1stLt Blassie’s bones; neither poorer nor more powerful in symbolic weight because of the disinternment, the Unknowns of these earlier wars still excite the national imaginings of the visiting public. However, they do so increasingly to the backdrop of an individualized tapestry of national memory, fostered by the intertwining technologies of remembering and identification that bring ‘home’ missing service members like Michael Blassie and Darrell Spinler to awaiting families, communities, and publics.