The making and unmaking of an unknown soldier

Abstract

For 18 years, from 1984 to 1998, the Vietnam crypt of the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery housed the remains of a soldier whose anonymity helped shoulder a nation’s grief and fuel its memory. They were those of First Lieutenant Michael J. Blassie, an Air Force pilot shot down over hostile territory in southern Vietnam in 1972. On 14 May 1998, Blassie’s then-unrecognized remains became the only set at the memorial to be disinterred and identified – an act that signaled an important shift in forensic practice and the state’s means of commemorating its missing and unknown members of the military. Tracing the story of the Vietnam Unknown’s (de)identification, this article examines the gradual though foundational reframing of the connection between national memory and identity expressed through care for those who ‘made the ultimate sacrifice’. Whereas memorials of the past, such as the Tomb of the Unknowns, emphasized collective or anonymous groupings of war dead in articulating national identity, the changing technology of identification, particularly brought about by advances in DNA testing, has enabled individuated memorializing. Naming each dead soldier, returning each set of remains to surviving families, no matter how partial or delayed, personalizes the ideals of sacrifice and honor embodied in the fallen soldier and invites localized, communal remembrance. The shifts in technology and memory that have rewritten the story of the Vietnam Unknown not only altered modes of national commemoration, but also lay bare the connections between how war itself is waged, death justified, and a nation defined through its care for war dead.