Read On Hallowed Ground Online
Authors: Robert M Poole
On Hallowed Ground (37 page)
Blassie was “almost certainly” buried in the Tomb of the Unknowns, the report said. His identity had been known for decades,
and the government had deliberately hidden this information from his family and the public, CBS reported.
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Pat Blassie spoke for her family: “The trail of documents concerning Lt. Blassie leads to the Tomb,” she said. “We want to
know the truth. We want to bring Michael home.” The family then asked the impossible: They wanted the tomb opened. They wanted
the remains submitted for mitochondrial DNA testing, a relatively new procedure unknown at the time of Blassie’s death.
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The CBS report sparked outrage from the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion—the same groups that had lobbied
for selection of a Vietnam Unknown, now complaining that the Blassies threatened to violate the most sacred site at Arlington.
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“It’s not sacred if we know the name of the person you have there,” Pat Blassie retorted.
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“It’s an honorable place to be, but not for a known soldier. That’s not what the tomb was meant for …
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Either put his name on the tomb or disinter him for DNA testing.”
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Two powerful lawmakers from Blassie’s home state, Sens. John Ashcroft and Christopher S. “Kit” Bond, asked for an explanation
from William S. Cohen, secretary of defense under President Bill Clinton. At a Pentagon press briefing on the afternoon following
the CBS story, the agency’s spokesman was peppered with questions about Blassie. Why had he been hurried into the tomb? Would
the grave be opened? When? Had others been misidentified? Faced with the family’s high-profile appeal, the objections from
veterans’ groups, the outrage on Capitol Hill, and the prospect of a public relations disaster, the Pentagon did what it often
does at such times: it ordered a study.
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Cohen named Rudy deLeon, the respected and cool-headed undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, to head up a
senior task force investigating the matter. “The last thing we expected was that we were going to exhume the remains from
Arlington,” deLeon said recently. “That was the last resort.”
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Instead, deLeon mounted a fact-finding mission with three goals: to establish that the casualty known as X-26 was indeed the
man entombed at Arlington; to find a paper trail and evidence linking him to the 1972 crash in Vietnam; and to determine if
new DNA testing could provide a foolproof identity if the grave was exhumed. DeLeon met privately with Johnie Webb, who helped
fill gaps in the documentary record with the purloined papers he had copied in 1984. Webb also dropped the bombshell that
he had placed the relevant physical evidence in Blassie’s casket. From John Marsh, deLeon learned of the political pressures
that had mounted within the Reagan administration as Unknown candidates fell by the wayside, leaving six tiny bone fragments
to stand for all who fought and died in Vietnam.
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“In every other war,” deLeon said, “there were so many sets of unidentified service members that you could just arbitrarily
pick a set of remains and there was no history. With Vietnam, everything was different. There was difficulty in finding a
set of remains that could not be identified. What we discovered in our task force was a full inventory of the flight materials
recovered with this set of remains,” deLeon said. “We got Captain Hess’s memo from the preinterment period. We got information
from all of the primary sources. When this was done, I felt that indeed all of the data we had on X-26 told us that those
were the remains at Arlington. Then the next question was whether the DNA testing could be conclusive. We were satisfied that
it could be.” So on April 23, 1998, deLeon recommended that the tomb be opened, based on the following rationale:
The Tomb is a national symbol in which the entire nation has a heartfelt interest. Unfortunately, the current controversy has raised questions concerning the integrity of this national symbol. It requires us to reconcile two competing interests—the sanctity of the Tomb and our national commitment to return unaccounted for servicemen to their families. By taking action to resolve this controversy, we can preserve the integrity of the Tomb and fulfill our responsibility to the families.
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A few weeks later, on May 14, 1998, the Unknown of the Vietnam War was exhumed. William Cohen presided at ceremonies, saying
that the disinterment was taken “with profound reluctance” but for good cause. “If advances in technology can ease the lingering
anguish of even one family, then our path is clear. We yield to the promise of science, with the hope that the heavy burden
of doubt may be lifted from a family’s heart.”
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By this time, Pat Blassie had no doubt. “I knew it was Michael before they opened the tomb. I knew the DNA would prove it.
It was the only conclusion you could reach based on the evidence.”
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By June 28, 1998, DNA tests confirmed a match for Michael Blassie.
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He was flown home to St. Louis for a military burial with full honors at the Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery. This time,
his name was inscribed on his tombstone.
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The story did not end there. A few weeks after Blassie’s reburial in St. Louis, Cohen announced that he was withdrawing the
airman’s Medal of Honor, based on complaints from the American Legion and the Medal of Honor Society. “The Medal of Honor
is something very, very special, “said Phil Budahn, a spokesman for the Legion. “It simply was not awarded to this particular
hero.”
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Cohen determined that the Legionnaires had a point, since President Reagan had presented the award to the Vietnam Unknown
as a symbolic figure, not to Blassie as an individual; thus the medal remains at Arlington, where it is displayed in a glass
case with other trophies overlooking the amphitheater terrace.
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Out on the plaza, a marble slab covers the Tomb of the Vietnam Unknown, vacant since Blassie left it, but with a new inscription
for all of those lost in Vietnam: “Honoring and Keeping Faith with America’s Missing Servicemen, 1958–1975.”
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Given the innovations in forensic science, improved record keeping, better recovery methods, and enhanced investigative techniques,
it is almost certain that Michael Blassie will be the last of the Unknowns. Some of his comrades from Vietnam, scattered through
four hundred boxes of unidentified remains, still occupy shelf space in the Hawaii laboratory, where experts hope that further
sleuthing and new science will eventually provide names for other missing warriors.
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“Unidentified doesn’t mean unidentifiable,” said Johnie Webb, who still haunts the Central Identification Laboratory as a
senior advisor to the commanding officer. “We’ve got DNA samples from most of them—we just haven’t found a match yet.”
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THE BIG 757 CAME SILENTLY, and so low that it almost grazed the roof of the four-story Navy Annex building on the edge of
Arlington National Cemetery. Darrell Stafford, the cemetery’s interment foreman, watched in disbelief as the jet swooped toward
him, head-on.“Look! Look! Look!” he shouted to three coworkers, who had just been discussing setups for the day’s remaining
funerals.
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“I know where he’s going—it’s the Pentagon,” Stafford thought. In that instant of sinking recognition, he made a decision
to run away from the Pentagon and toward the plane. “He goes over. He’s pouring on the power. Then it’s
Boom! Boom! Boom!
Everybody flattened on the ground. It was like somebody had just put a heat lamp on the back of your neck—the heat was that
intense. I kind of peeked over my shoulder to see this big old ball of flame, hundreds of yards in the sky, just a big fireball.”
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Stafford remembers the morning of September 11, 2001, with perfect clarity: a cool, sunny day carrying an intimation of autumn;
the nose of the jet edging into view; the shining turbine blades whirling inside the engine cowlings; the bronze sheen of
the fuselage lumbering into view; the blast, the heat, and the thick green cemetery turf showered with glass, plastic, and
a million other bits of debris from the impact of American Airlines Flight 77 slamming into the west face of the Pentagon
at 529 miles an hour.
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The day claimed the lives of 2,993 people in New York City, Washington, and Pennsylvania, plunging the nation into a messy period of conflict with multiple enemies, shifting battlefields, hit-and-run
attacks, and no clear prospect of a traditional armistice to mark the end of hostilities, which continue to this day. It was
not the “long twilight struggle” President Kennedy had foreseen in 1961, but the phrase seems eerily apt. However one characterizes
this state of affairs—as a “global war on terror,” which President George W. Bush termed it, as an “overseas contingency operation,”
in the preferred wording of President Barack Obama, or “asymmetric warfare,” as Gen. David Petraeus and other professionals
call it—the consequences of September 11 have been seen, felt, and heard at Arlington each day since the shadow of Flight
77 passed over the cemetery.
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For months after the disaster, the sounds and dust of reconstruction drifted across Arlington from the charred black gap
in the Pentagon’s west face, even as men and women from the building’s wreckage were identified, borne off, and buried in
Section 64, within sight of the place where they died. Uniformed service members, sent off to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan,
returned to lie in Section 60, where young families gathered to hear the sound of Taps, collect their folded flags, and sometimes
to linger as Darrell Stafford’s crews reverently close the earth over another grave.
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Now and then Stafford glances up from his work to track a jet’s progress across the sky. “I look at things a little differently
now,” said Stafford, a lean, soft-spoken man in dark blue coveralls with his name on the pocket. He has worked at Arlington
for twenty-seven years, in that time digging many a grave and watching the planes hustling in and out of the airport just
downriver. “I’d see them in the wintertime when it was cold and I’d be like a kid thinking, ‘I’ll bet they’re going to Florida
where it’s warm. Wonder where they’re going while we’re freezing?’ You know? Now I wonder, ‘Where is he going? Is he coming
this way?’ I’m very conscious of flight patterns and what doesn’t look right in the sky. Maybe it bothers me more than I realize.”
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Stafford had little time to reflect upon the events of September 11 before he was drawn into the investigation and its aftermath.
Within minutes of the crash, a military police officer came by to search for clues. He collected Stafford for the short walk
across Columbia Pike to the Pentagon, where a column of black smoke coiled into the sky, wounded workers staggered to aid
stations, and FBI agents began interviewing any eyewitness they could grab. Stafford was one of them.
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“They wanted to know if I could see the pilot,” Stafford recalled. “I told them all I saw was the plane coming in and that’s
when I started scrambling for my life. I wasn’t looking to see who the pilot was.” That seemed to satisfy the agents, who
sent Stafford back across the road to Arlington, where he was soon busy with the morning’s funerals, even as sirens wailed
in the background and workers picked through the smoldering rubble a few hundred yards away. “Some of my guys were so scared
they left right after the plane hit,” Stafford said. “One jumped in his car and didn’t stop until he got to North Carolina.
But we continued to bury that day with the staff we had. We finished the last funeral about two or two-thirty that afternoon.
That was just the beginning for us.”
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For the next several months, Stafford and his colleagues at Arlington would be burying many of the victims of the Pentagon
attack. Of 189 who died in the crash, 125 were uniformed service members, civilian workers, or contractors—all at their desks
when the plane hit; the remaining 64 fatalities were passengers aboard Flight 77. In addition, five hijackers were killed.
Before the end of September, Stafford’s crews began peeling back the turf for the first Pentagon victims. More came in October,
November, and December.
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Most of the Pentagon fatalities—sixty four—were laid to rest in Section 64, a low-lying part of the cemetery on its southeastern
edge, affording a clear view of orderly white gravestones climbing the green hills all around, with the tan hulk of the Pentagon
breaking the near horizon.
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“Normally, somebody dies, we don’t know them and we weren’t there,” said Stafford. “But because of the crash, I felt connected
to them. Everybody who came from there,” he said, nodding toward the Pentagon, “I felt like I knew them. You recognize the
name when you’re burying them.”
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Stafford helped bury Army Lt. Col. Kip Paul Taylor in Section 64 a month after the attack. The thirty-eight-year-old Michigan
man, a major before his posthumous promotion, served as military assistant in the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for
Personnel, in the Pentagon’s outer ring. Taylor’s office took a direct hit from Flight 77, leaving very little of him or his
personal effects intact. “There was nothing left of his office,” his sister Ann Zaenglein told USA Today. But on the morning
of the attack, Taylor left something that would be remembered by many in the days ahead, a string of e-mail messages to friends
about his happy marriage to Nancy Melvin Taylor, their joy in their two-year-old son, Dean, and a father’s great expectations
for a second child, due in a month. Luke Taylor was born right on schedule, on October 25, just after his father was buried
at Arlington.
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While Nancy Taylor was hospitalized for Luke’s birth, doctors discovered that she had cancer. She survived two more years
before joining her husband at Arlington. Their sons, then ages four and two, were taken in by Kip’s brother and his wife,
who still care for them.
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The Taylors’ grave is in a quiet, lonely part of the cemetery, placed well away from the heavily visited Kennedy memorial
and the Tomb of the Unknowns. The Taylors lie among the graves of others killed in the Pentagon attack; surrounded by a wide
swath of turf, their stones form a sort of island, standing together, just as they died together. A few steps away, near the
intersection of Patton Drive and Marshall Drive, a black granite marker, notable for its understated dignity and modest height,
lists the names of all who died at the Pentagon on September 11. Among those named are the five who could not be found, now
represented by unidentified remains gathered into one casket and buried on September 12, 2002, beneath the five-sided memorial
stone.
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The black stone in Section 64 was a reminder that this conflict was unlike traditional wars, in which forces faced enemies
on more or less equal terms until one side got the upper hand and dictated peace terms. In the 9/11 attacks, a small, elusive
enemy had struck indiscriminately at civilians and uniformed service members alike, sacrificing their own lives and exacting
terrible bloodshed from an adversary of superior strength. The sneak attacks on Washington and New York were the most devastating since Pearl Harbor, but the asymmetric tactics were hardly unprecedented. Similar
methods had been used by kamikaze pilots in World War II, by Viet Cong fighters in the Vietnam conflict, and most memorably
by a terrorist attack on the Marine Corps barracks in Beirut on October 23, 1983.
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On that cool, crisp morning by the Mediterranean, a single suicide bomber crashed a yellow Mercedes-Benz truck laden with
explosives into the Marine outpost near the city’s airport, producing a blast that the FBI described as the largest non-nuclear
explosion since World War II. Equivalent to 12,000 pounds of TNT, the discharge collapsed the barracks, killing 241 service
members, all part of the multinational peacekeeping mission to Lebanon; another 58 victims, most of them from French military
services, died in a similar attack minutes later. The Marines, lightly armed and forbidden to take the high ground surrounding
their position for fear of sparking a larger conflict, had been sitting ducks for the terrorist assault that day. They suffered
220 fatalities, more single-day losses than at any time since their fighting on Iwo Jima in 1945. Calling the Beirut massacre
the saddest day of his presidency, President Ronald Reagan withdrew the Marine battalion from Lebanon three months later.
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By that time, many of those killed in the bombing had been brought back to Arlington for burial. Most of them—nineteen Marines
and two sailors—were laid to rest alongside one another near Eisenhower Drive in Section 59 of the cemetery, where they were
seen off to the strains of the Navy Hymn, a flourish of swords, and the high-precision ceremony of which the Marines are justifiably
proud. True to their motto,
Semper Fidelis
, “always faithful,” the Marines have not forgotten the comrades lost in Beirut. A cedar of Lebanon, like the one depicted
on that nation’s flag, was planted in Section 59 a year after the bombings; now the tree spreads its arms over the graves
of the fallen. And even after a quarter century, comrades, friends, and family return to Arlington each year on the anniversary
of the attack to read the names of the dead, salute the fallen, and consider the long chain of events the 1983 attack set
in motion. “This loss is not in vain and we will not break faith with them in the tasks we have ahead,” said Marine Lt. Gen.
Jan C. Huly, speaking at such a ceremony in 2003.“We did not know they would be the first casualties—among the first—in the
war on terrorism.”
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The tragedy in Beirut convinced Osama bin Laden, then unknown to the larger world, that the United States could not withstand
a drawn-out fight with determined opponents. In an interview with ABC News in 1998, the al-Qaida founder pointed to the Marines’
abrupt withdrawal from Lebanon as a sign of weakness in Americans “ready to wage cold wars but unprepared to fight long wars.”
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He was wrong about the Marines, who continue to suit up and go to work in a dangerous world, just as their comrades from
other services have done since the Beirut bombing.
That suicide attack of 1983 set the pattern for the bloody years to follow—in the first bombing of the World Trade Center, which killed six in 1993; in the bombing of the Khobar Towers apartment building in Saudi Arabia, which killed twenty in 1996; in the coordinated bombings of U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, which killed 223 in 1998; in the bombing of the U.S.S.
Cole
in Yemen, which killed seventeen in 2000. All, except for the World Trade Center assault of 1993, produced new casualties for Arlington; all followed the same tactical model; all were prelude to the September 2001 attacks, which brought the reality of asymmetric warfare forcefully home and prompted the deployment of U.S. forces to Afghanistan and Iraq.
This strange new war—waged on two fronts, under harsh conditions, against a backdrop of tribal antipathies—was unlike any
conflict the United States had known before, a state of affairs illustrated by the war’s earliest combat casualty and the
first to be honored at Arlington: not a uniformed soldier but a CIA officer, Johnny “Mike” Spann, killed in prison rioting
in northern Afghanistan on November 25, 2001.
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Spann, a former Marine Corps captain, was a member of the CIA’s paramilitary Special Activities Division. He had been questioning
suspected Taliban terrorists at a temporary prison near Mazar-e Sharif when hundreds of inmates staged an uprising and seized
weapons from an armory maintained by the Afghan Northern Alliance, allies of the United States. A fierce firefight ensued,
raging for most of three days. By the time the melee ended, hundreds of inmates and dozens of Northern Alliance soldiers had
been killed. Among the dead was Spann, thirty-two, shot in each temple. Official government reports attributed the agent’s
fatal wounds to the firefight, but after carefully examining his son’s body in a Virginia funeral home, Spann’s father believed
that he had been dispatched execution-style. A detainee later transferred from Afghanistan to Guantánamo told FBI interrogators
that Spann had sparked the rioting by shooting a prisoner who threatened him; another Guantánamo inmate suggested that Spann
had been killed by friendly fire when the North Alliance sent in thousands of troops to quell the riot. Because of the confused
struggle at Mazar-e Sharif and the spy agency’s reluctance to reveal details of its operations, the truth may never be known.
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