Operation Just Cause... ...for as long as it takes
Sent in by Steve Golding
We all remember the somberness in which SecDef Cohen decided to open the Tomb of the Unknown Soldiers to remove the Vietnam Unknown remains for mitochondrial DNA testing. It was a hard decision to make according to Cohen but he had to weigh the rights of the families to know over what he termed as the desecration of a national shrine. I submit that this national shrine was desecrated long before the decision to disinter Michael Blassie was made.
There is an interesting story in the June, 1999 issue of VIETNAM MAGAZINE entitled, "IDENTIFYING THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER," by Roxanne Spanfelner as told to her by Colonel Christopher D. Calhoon, US Army [Ret.] Calhoon puts to rest two questions that I will delve into. Calhoun was the person responsible for calling in for air support during the battle for An Loc. It was during this battle that Michael Blassie was shot down.
The A-37 aircraft was shot down farther into enemy territory than most other sites. The people who made the decision to go to the crash site along with Calhoun were South Vietnamese 52nd Regiment commander, Colonel Dung and battalion commander Major Nguyen.
In October a patrol headed two kilometers to the edge of the regiment lines and then moving carefully behind enemy lines 2-1/2 to 3 kilometers to the crash site. The patrol reported back to Calhoun the next day and handed him a plastic bag containing the pilots remains and Calhoun rememvers seeing "indisputable" identification in the form of a wallet that they handed him. Calhoun remembers this because the wallet contained money and pictures alongwith identification and Calhoun found it remarkable that the money would remain. The remains reached the mortuary at Bien Hoa and was signed for by Captain Michael Hess.
With the nearing of the end of US involvement in the Vietnam War, Calhoun went home and never gave the remains another thought for more than 25 years. In 1994, Ted Sampley of the US Veteran Dispatch, contacted the Blassie family and told them that the body in the tomb belonged to their loved one, Michael.
Pat Blassie, Michael's sister who works in the Air Force Reserve as a public affairs officer, stated, "Personally, I blew it off," after contacting Air Force Casualty and were told that there was nothing to substantiate Sampley's claim. How was it that the wallet and identification became separated when the chain-of-custody had not been breached? Calhoun recalls that fall day in 1972 when he waded through a mob to hand the crew chief aboard the helicopter the wallet and plastic bag containing the pilots remains.
"A Huey or an occasional Chinook came in only once a week because the risk was too high," said Calhoun. "When one landed, it was utter chaos. It got mobbed by refugees and South Vietnamese deserters from Loc Ninh." But Calhoun recalls handing over the remains and wallet to the crew chief of the UH-1 bound for Bien Hoa. And he thought that would be the end of the young pilots story. But it wasn't.
Calhoun had assumed that the remains of the pilot had been sent home to the family. Afterall, it was cataloged and identified as Michael Blassie at An Loc. Why did it leave An Loc for home and never arrive? Somehow the remains became separated from the ID and there is evidence to indicate that this did not happen while the remains were still at An Loc.
In 1982, Calhoun cruised into Honolulu to take Marines aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Tarawa. No sooner had the ship docked than two CIL-HI (Central Idenficiation Lab-Hawaii) officers arrive in a staff car, inviting Calhoun to headquarters. They volunteered no reasons and he did not ask.
"I didn't know what it was all about, but they definitely tracked me down for a purpose," said Calhoun. At CIL-HI, two high-ranking officers escorted him to a room with tactical maps of An Loc covering the walls. Strategically placed pins marked the A-37 crash site and An Loc headquarters. For more than three hours, what was more like an interrogation rather than an interview continued. "The whole tone was extremely intimidating, with you're-in-trouble undercurrents," related Calhoun. Of the questions asked: "Did you know going beyond regiment lines was against policy?" seemed to indicate that they already knew the answers. One of the officers pulled out Calhouns original staff journal from An Loc, opened it to the exact date of the October 1972 recovery mission and showed Calhoun the journal entry where he had described putting the remains on the helicopter.
Calhoun confirmed that it was his handwriting, but seeing his original staff journal blew him away. It was unbelievable to him that they had his regiment journal in their possession and he had no idea how it got there. Next they showed him photographs of various remains and asked if he recognized them. Some he recognized and some he didn't. Blassie's remains he did not recognize.
"I never actually looked at the remains when the patrol brought the bag to me, " he explained. Calhoun already had the identification card and nothing could have been gained by checking inside the bag. When the CIL-HI agents finished asking him questions, they called Washington and put him on speakerphone with somehone who Calhoun thought was a Senate staffer. Calhoun was asked basically the same questions again. Calhoun now believes that the phone call was to someone from the office of the Secretary of Defense. Calhoun did not ask about the call or to whom he was speaking. He was just glad to get out of there.
By 1982 there were only four sets of unidentified remains at CIL-HI. Pressure mounted from veterans organizations, including the American Legion, to find an unknown soldier from the Vietnam War. Many disgruntled Vietnam Veterans saw this foot-dragging as another slap in the face. Meanwhile, the National League of POW/MIA Families countered the veterans' pleas to entomb an unknown. "The major problem is they could be interring someone who might eventually be identified," a league spokesman told reporters at the time.
Pat Blassie said there were other reasons aside from the physical evidence, to believe the remains were Michael's. "We have testimonies of US Army officers Calhoon and Parnell, and many US records that had Michael's name attached to those remains for all those years," Pat said. "During that whole time, the chain of custody of those remains was never broken. With all this, how could I think it was anyone else?" Incidentally, Blassie was the only fighter pilot listed as "KIA/BNR," (Killed in Action/Body Not Recovered), within more than a 2,000-square-mile radious of the unknown's recovery location.
It all came together for Calhoun in February 1998 while he was reading a magazine as he waited his turn at a dentists office. "I was reading a story in Time involving the Vietnam Unknown and it all came back--the recovery, my 1982 interview--and I just knew," Calhoon says. He figured that the government knew too, Blassie was in the tomb.
Unafraid of speaking the truth, Calhoon now offers his opinion that the placement of a Vietnam War unknown inside the tomb was a politically expedient move. "If you think back to 1984, we'd had a war that for all practical purposes we lost. It generated a lot of hurt and we couldn't put it to rest," Calhoun says.
In my opinion, this shows a number of things. The USG knew that it was interring already-identified remains as those of an unknown, thus desecrating a national shrine. It also shows that the League's executive director, Ann Mills Griffiths, was not accurate last year when she put out "Fact Sheet: Vietnam War Tomb Of The Unknowns" on June 12, 1998. Griffiths, claims that once the 1983-84 League Board of Directors were fully briefed, "the 1983-84 League Board of Directors supported interment."
That statement has been shown to be inaccurate in that Ann Hart, one of the 1983-84 Board of Directors of the League, wrote to Griffiths telling her that if Griffith's recalled, the BOD specifically forbid Griffiths from attending the interment ceremony. The League's spokesperson at the time quoted in this piece shows that the League membership was concerned about the interment.
If the government would inter remains that were identifiable, without the benefit of mt-DNA testing, due to political expedience, what else has the USG done in the name of political expedience?
Would they have covered up leaving men behind? You decide!
