On Hallowed Ground (34 page)

The first sign that things would be different came on the morning after Kennedy’s funeral. When the cemetery gates swung open
that day, thousands of visitors poured up through the hills to pay their respects, a pattern which would repeat itself in
the weeks and months ahead. Before Kennedy’s funeral, about two million people visited Arlington annually; in the year after
it, the number swelled to seven million. Citizens swarmed over the site—to sing hymns, to pray, to conduct obscure religious
rites. One woman brought a bottle of holy water, shook it over the eternal flame, and watched in horror as the cap flew off
and doused the fire. A soldier from the Old Guard, standing nearby, whipped out his Zippo, restarted the flame, and reassured
the visitor. “There, Ma’am,” he said. “And I won’t tell if you won’t tell.”
⁹⁸

Day after day, mourners left mountains of flowers and trinkets, which had to be carried away by the truckload. Most came just
to stand and stare at the simple grave before moving on. A few seemed to forget where they were, sitting on nearby headstones,
picnicking, making too much noise, and complaining when they were admonished for it.
⁹⁹
The never-ending stream of visitors tramped past the president’s tomb at the rate of three thousand an hour, forming long
lines down the hill from Lee’s mansion. The crowds grew on weekends, when fifty thousand citizens routinely came to visit
the new national landmark in the year following Kennedy’s death.
¹⁰⁰

The combination of foot traffic and autumn rains transformed the ground around the president’s plot into a quagmire. Workers
threw up stanchions to create waiting lanes and walkways, which were layered with tons of gravel. The gravel began to disappear,
piece by piece, into pockets and handbags for souvenirs. More stone was trucked in; more vanished.
¹⁰¹
The Old Guard deployed sentinels to provide some semblance of order during regular cemetery hours, establishing a temporary
command post and shelter for its soldiers in a school bus commandeered from Fort Myer.
¹⁰²

“Nobody was prepared for the increase in visitors,” said John C. Metzler Jr., who took his father’s old job as superintendent
of Arlington in 1991. “Everything was trampled. There was no planning for traffic or crowd control. It took a few years to
sort it out.”
¹⁰³

Seeing that a permanent, well-planned gravesite was called for, the Kennedy family and Arlington officials began work on a
new gravesite almost as soon as the president had been settled at Arlington. The new parcel, designed by architect John Carl
Warnecke of Washington, covered a 3.2-acre plot incorporating a terrace carved from the hillside, with curving walkways and ample room for visitors.
Located a few yards downhill from the original grave, the new site preserved the view the president had admired, on the axis
between the Lee mansion and the Lincoln Memorial. Excerpts from Kennedy’s speeches were chiseled into low-lying walls around
the grave, which was outfitted with a new, re-engineered eternal flame. Fed by a permanent natural gas supply, the new torch
was set in a five-foot disk of stone, framed by massive paving blocks of Cape Cod granite and equipped with a constantly renewed
electrical spark to keep the fire burning through wind and rain. Work on the new site began in 1965 and was finished in July
1967 at a cost of $2.5 million; most of the money came from federal appropriations, but the Kennedy family contributed $632,000
toward the project. As construction neared completion, the president was quietly exhumed after cemetery hours and installed
in his new resting place. There he joined two of his infant children, who had been reinterred previously from Boston and Newport, Rhode Island. His brother Robert, assassinated in 1968, came to rest on the terrace that year, his grave marked
by a simple white cross.
¹⁰⁴

As years passed, the flood of tourists diminished but the Kennedy grave remained a magnet for pilgrims, drawing almost four
million visitors annually—more than the Tomb of the Unknowns, the Robert E. Lee Memorial, or other popular sites at Arlington.
Like other landmarks, the Kennedy tomb occasionally attracted the deeply troubled: a veteran who fatally stabbed himself while
horrified onlookers watched in 1972; thieves who made off with the cross from Robert Kennedy’s grave in 1981; an immigrant
who drifted into the locked cemetery on a rainy night, fell into the eternal flame, and suffered a fatal heart attack in 1982;
vandals who tried to dig up one of the paving stones from the terrace in 1997 but abandoned the venture when they realized
that the rock, weighing 500 pounds, was too heavy a trophy.
¹⁰⁵
These were the exceptions; most visitors came in peace, pausing for reflection under the maturing locusts, hollies, and cherries
sheltering the president’s tomb before wandering off to explore other parts of Arlington.

Just as Kennedy inspired a new generation while he was alive, he also influenced thousands of Americans by his example in
death. At the time of Kennedy’s funeral, about four thousand people were buried at Arlington each year; afterward, demands
for interment jumped to seven thousand annually.
¹⁰⁶
Like the burials of Gen. Montgomery Meigs and distinguished Civil War officers in the previous century, Kennedy’s widely
watched funeral made Arlington a prestigious venue for final honors. The sudden increase in burial requests meant that Arlington
would be full by 1988, with no space for new interments unless the cemetery tightened burial restrictions. After 1966, therefore,
new interments were limited to those who died on active duty, retired with a disability or twenty years of service, or won
high military honors—rules that still apply at Arlington. At the same time, Arlington planned for a columbarium to hold cremated
remains and preserve space for traditional in-ground burials.
¹⁰⁷
The cemetery proceeded to develop two hundred acres of land from South Post of Fort Myer, which would provide space for new
burials well into the twenty-first century.
¹⁰⁸

“Kennedy’s funeral prompted these changes,” said John C. Metzler Jr. “It was a milestone, one of the most significant events
in our history.”
¹⁰⁹

For Capt. Michael Groves, twenty-seven, a popular officer who commanded the Honor Guard Company at Fort Myer, the stress of
planning and staffing Kennedy’s funeral proved too great a burden. Ten days after the president’s interment, Groves collapsed
at his dinner table, dying of a heart attack. Comrades from the Old Guard, already saddened by Kennedy’s death, were stunned
by the sudden loss of Groves, a respected young soldier who had betrayed no sign of ill health.
¹¹⁰
“We’d lost a popular President,” said Pfc. William W. Morris, “but Mike Groves was one of us, a great leader, and a friend
to many in the company.” With other members of the Old Guard, Morris pressed his best uniform that December, polished his
medals to a high sheen, and solemnly carried his young captain to the grave, in Section 30 of Arlington, long before such
a funeral seemed reasonable.
¹¹¹

For John C. Metzler Jr., who had been a sixteen-year-old watching his father preside over President Kennedy’s funeral, the
occasion reinforced his decision to join the Army and serve in Vietnam. When he returned from overseas, Metzler went to work
for the Veterans Administration, moved back to the superintendent’s lodge, and oversaw another Kennedy funeral at Arlington—this
time for Jacqueline, who was buried beside her husband in 1994. “Never in a thousand years did I imagine that I would come
back to finish what my father started in 1963,” said Metzler, standing on the hill above the grave.
¹¹²

The fractious Black Jack continued his career as a riderless horse, serving with characteristic flair at services for Gen.
Douglas MacArthur, President Herbert Hoover, and President Lyndon B. Johnson before retiring in 1973. The horse lived to the
ripe old age of twenty-nine, dying in 1976. Comrades from the Old Guard buried him with honors on the broad turf of Summerall
Field at Fort Myer, not far from the stables; his grave is marked by a bronze tablet and a horseshoe-shaped hedge.
¹¹³

President Kennedy’s death marked the end of one era and the beginning of another. In Vietnam, the escalating war would draw
more American troops into the struggle, including some of the best officers from the Old Guard. Among those who eagerly joined
the fight was fresh-faced, patriotic 1st Lt. Sam Bird, who had so ably headed the casket team for Kennedy’s funeral. Promoted
to captain, Bird led a combat company in fierce fighting until 1967, when his helicopter came under heavy enemy fire. Several
rounds hit Bird, including one that blew away a quarter of his skull. By some miracle, Bird survived the brain injury, living
another seventeen years. He was greatly diminished but still proud of the way his men had performed for President Kennedy
in November 1963.
¹¹⁴

13

THE LAST UNKNOWN

MEMORIAL DAY OF 1984 BROKE hazy over washington, with low gray clouds and weeping skies evoking the oppressive atmosphere
familiar to so many who had served in Vietnam. “Mekong weather,” recalled one veteran among the two hundred fifty thousand
well-wishers who crowded the capital’s streets to watch a flag-covered caisson make the familiar, measured journey down from
Capitol Hill and across the river to Arlington for a state funeral.
¹

After more than a decade of uncertainty and bitterness, the nation was finally honoring the Unknown of the Vietnam War—the
long, star-crossed conflict that continued to stir argument for years after the last U.S. troops had withdrawn from Southeast
Asia. Some three thousand guests had taken their seats on the marble benches of the Arlington amphitheater, where President
Ronald Reagan strode to the podium, squared his shoulders, and launched into an overdue tribute to the Vietnam Unknown and
those who had served with him.
²

“The Unknown soldier who has returned to us today … is symbolic of all our missing sons,” said Reagan. “About him, we
may well wonder as others have: As a child, did he play on some street in a great American city, did he work beside his father
on a farm in America’s heartland? Did he marry? Did he have children? Did he look expectantly to return to a bride? We may
never know the answers to those questions about his life. We do know, though, why he died. He saw the horrors of war and bravely
faced them, certain his own cause and his country’s cause was a noble one … Today we pause to embrace him and all who
served us so well in a war whose end offered no parades, no flags, and so little thanks.”
³

As Reagan spoke, a sultry breeze stirred American flags in the colonnade behind him. Before him sat reminders of the war’s
cost—a man with a black eye patch, a squadron of young veterans in wheelchairs, a scattering of others sitting with crutches
or canes at the ready. Near the front of the arena a line of warriors occupied an honored place, some streaming tears that
threatened to stain the pale blue ribbons around their necks, from which hung the Medal of Honor. Several hundred others in
the audience had never served in Vietnam but nonetheless carried deep wounds from the conflict; their loved ones were among
the twenty-five hundred men still missing in action,
⁴
eleven years after Americans ended their involvement in the war.
⁵

To reassure this last group, Reagan promised that the government would continue searching for their lost brothers, fathers,
and husbands, no matter how long it took or where it led. “An end to America’s involvement in Vietnam cannot come before we
have achieved the fullest possible accounting of those missing in action,” he said. “Our dedication to their cause must be
strengthened with these events today. We write no last chapters, we close no books, we put away no final memories.”
⁶

Coming full circle, Reagan turned back to the man of the hour, whose flag-covered casket occupied center stage. “Thank you,
dear son,” said Reagan, his voice cracking, “and may God cradle you in His loving arms.” The president, tucking his speech
cards in a pocket, crossed the stage and draped the Medal of Honor on a velvet stand at the foot of the Unknown’s bier. Then
the nameless hero of Vietnam was decorously borne away by eight white-gloved comrades who slow-marched him from the apse of
the amphitheater and out onto the terrace overlooking Washington, where Reagan joined mourners for final honors. The muddled weather prevented a flyover by F-15 fighter jets that day, but
this did not keep a joint services color guard from gliding across the terrace with battle ribbons streaming. Nor did it dampen
the Old Guard’s artillery battery, which uncorked a thundering twenty-one-gun salute that shook the earth and answered itself
in echoes from the hills. The Army Band, all shining brass and gold braid, rolled the drums and sent a majestic version of
“America, the Beautiful” sailing out over the cemetery. Pallbearers from the uniformed services lifted the Unknown’s flag
from his casket, tugged the ensign free of wrinkles, folded it into a taut triangle, and passed it to Maj. Gen. John L. Ballantyne
III, chief of the Washington Military District, who in turn presented it to President Reagan. Accepting the flag as the Unknown’s next of kin, Reagan
nodded his thanks to General Ballantyne, entrusted the flag to Arlington’s superintendent, and paused for a last look at the
Unknown. Then Reagan turned for home, having put in a performance considered to be one of his most affecting.
⁷

Later that evening, after the flags had come down and the crowds had dispersed, cemetery workers lowered the Unknown into
the ground, where he would rest beside his comrades from World War I, World War II, and Korea. Just before midnight a marble
slab was hoisted into place over the new crypt and sealed flush with the plaza; its simple inscription, “1958–1975,” was a
reminder that the undeclared conflict in Vietnam had been the longest war in American history.
⁸

Reagan’s appearance at the cemetery helped smooth raw memories of Vietnam and reinforce the pride of those who served there.
Since the time of his election in 1980, he had worked toward this symbolic moment at Arlington, which would bury not only
an individual but also, with luck, the war’s divisive legacy.
⁹
In 1973, as America withdrew the last of its forces from Vietnam, Congress authorized the entombment of an anonymous serviceman
from the conflict,
¹⁰
and workers at Arlington readied a new crypt for him.
¹¹
But the tomb remained empty as the years piled up, through the reunion of North and South Vietnam in 1976, through President
Jimmy Carter’s pardoning of Vietnam-era draft evaders in 1977, through President Reagan’s dedication of the black-walled Vietnam
Veterans Memorial on the National Mall in 1982.
¹²

By this time the number of unidentified war dead had been whittled down to just four candidates out of more than 47,000 killed
in combat.
¹³
Some specialists held out the hope that each of those remaining four could have their names restored by further investigation.
Forensic medicine had developed to the point that science might render obsolete the nation’s long tradition of honoring Unknowns
from each war.
¹⁴

Even though few suitable candidates from the Vietnam conflict were available for Unknown honors, veterans continued to press
for a new tomb at Arlington, in part to justify their sacrifice in an unpopular conflict. “Vietnam veterans for the most part
interpreted, in their accustomed way, the decade of delay in seeking and interring an Unknown comrade as yet another of the
many real or imagined insults and omissions they have endured for their participation in our nation’s first true bastard war,”
Joseph Rehyansky wrote in the
National Review
. Reagan sought to erase those insults, which set him on the path to that unforgettable Memorial Day of 1984.
¹⁵

The journey might have ended then and there, with the Unknown resting in marble splendor “until the second coming of Christ,”
in the phrase of a Marine Corps chaplain who conducted prayers that day.
¹⁶
But just as the fighting for Vietnam was seldom predictable, so with the war’s aftermath. Fourteen years after Reagan’s appearance
at Arlington, the unthinkable happened: the Tomb of the Vietnam Unknown was broken open, not to the rousing call of Gabriel’s
trumpet, but to the prosaic shriek of a diamond-tipped saw biting through granite. As the clock ticked toward midnight on
May 13, 1998, workers made their way through ten-inch-thick paving stones and into the tomb, lifting the heavy marble marker
away, prizing the lid from the Unknown’s vault, and bringing his steel casket up into the night. When the chill morning of
May 14 arrived, so did a military band, which struck up “Amazing Grace” to announce the next, wholly unexpected leg of the
Unknown’s journey. Covered in a new flag and bundled into a hearse, he was driven to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, where his meager remains were prepared for DNA testing. Much to the relief of one anguished family and the disappointment
of others, those genetic tests provided a name: the Unknown was Lt. Michael J. Blassie, a twenty-four-year-old Air Force pilot
shot down over An Loc, South Vietnam, in 1972.
¹⁷

That forensics officer, Johnie E. Webb Jr., was a Vietnam veteran and a major commanding the army’s Central Identification
Laboratory in the early 1980s when his Pentagon superiors began squeezing him to find an Unknown. “There was a lot of pressure
to get a Vietnam Unknown,” recalled Webb, who still serves as a civilian in the Pentagon’s Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command,
which oversees operations of the Central Identification Laboratory at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii. “All the pressure was
coming to bear on me,” said Webb. “I was the guy who was not in agreement with what the White House was trying to do.” He
described his tug of war over Michael Blassie as the most trying period of his long military career.
¹⁸

The chain of events that brought Blassie to Arlington was set in motion by the bleating of a Klaxon summoning pilots to duty
at the Bien Hoa Air Base at dawn on May 11, 1972. Blassie rushed to his A-37 Dragonfly attack jet, strapped himself into the
seat, and zoomed northwest toward An Loc in formation with Maj. Jim Connally, the flight commander who piloted an identical
Dragonfly that morning. Each plane, known for its lightness and maneuverability, was equipped with a Gatling gun, fourteen
rockets, and two five hundred–pound napalm bombs; the napalm was meant for enemy antiaircraft emplacements near An Loc, a
strategically situated city of thirty thousand close to the Cambodian border and about sixty miles northwest of Saigon.
¹⁹

Under siege by North Vietnamese ground troops for more than a month, An Loc stubbornly held off its attackers, in part with
air support from pilots such as Blassie, a decorated veteran of 132 combat missions. Connally led the attack on May 11, whizzing
in low over enemy guns, releasing one bomb, and pulling up to open the way for Blassie. When the ground debris cleared, Blassie
put his jet into a dive and dropped toward the target, but he was intercepted by antiaircraft fire. His jet began spewing
fuel, rolled over, and slammed into the earth with a tremendous explosion.
²⁰
Connally circled and watched carefully. He saw no sign of a parachute, no sign of life on the ground below. He continued
circling, swooping in to repel enemy ground troops, until Cobra helicopters arrived for search-and-rescue operations. “The
team pulled out after determining that Mike indeed had gone in with the aircraft,” Connally reported to Blassie’s family shortly
after the crash.“However, no attempts were made to pull anything out of the wreckage, because the helicopters were caught
in a murderous hail of fire. I orbited over the crash site until the last hope faded and all other aircraft departed the scene.”
²¹

Fierce fighting around An Loc marooned Blassie’s wreckage for more than five months, while his parents and four siblings in
St. Louis pored through letters of condolence from friends and comrades, grieved over his disappearance, and hoped for some
word regarding his fate. None was forthcoming. “We didn’t hear a whole lot for a period of time,” said Patricia S. Blassie,
who was fourteen when her brother vanished. “They told us they couldn’t recover him but they knew he was killed.”
²²

Blassie’s comrades waited for an opportunity to resume their search. Unable to reach An Loc by chopper, they finally dispatched
allies from the Armed Forces of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), who disguised themselves as Viet Cong to comb through the
area. Walking some thirty miles into the volatile An Loc region, a reconnaissance patrol from the 48th ARVN Regiment made
their way to the coordinates of Blassie’s crash and found what they described as an A-37 wreck on October 11, 1972. With it
they found what remained of Michael Blassie—four ribs, one humerus, and part of a pelvis, or six of the 206 bones each of
us is allotted in life. From the same site, the ARNV team recovered physical evidence—Blassie’s military identification card
with his picture, remnants of his flight suit, an ammunition pouch, a parachute fragment, a holster for a signal marker, a
piece of his pistol holster, a life raft, a wallet, and a small amount of local currency.
²³

Packing the remains and evidence away, the ARVN patrol made its long return trek through the jungle to a remote rendezvous
point, where Army Lt. Chris Calhoun and other American advisors were waiting to meet them. Calhoun, taking charge of the airman’s
remains and other evidence, was struck by an incongruity that day—how new Blassie’s wallet looked considering what it had
been through. Calhoun summoned a helicopter, which came beating in over the trees and dropped into the makeshift landing zone.
Two bags were unceremoniously tossed aboard, one containing physical evidence, the other Blassie’s remains. Army Capt. Richard
S. Hess, another ARVN advisor on the scene that day, confirmed the inventory of recovered items and witnessed their transfer
to the Tan Son Nhut Air Base in Saigon. In a later statement, Hess recalled verbatim the details from Blassie’s ID card: “Name:
Blaisse [
sic
], Michael Joseph, 1LT, 6 foot 200 lbs picture showed with mustache, dark hair.” Hess’s recollection would later prove to
be a critical clue linking Blassie to the crash site.
²⁴
The reason? At some point during Blassie’s journey from An Loc to Saigon, his wallet, identification card, and money disappeared,
never to be recovered.
²⁵