SPEAKER_07: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
SPEAKER_02: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, sir.
SPEAKER_07: Thank you, sir. Thank you, sir." Whatever you think about Ronald Reagan, they called him the Great Communicator, for a reason.
SPEAKER_02: The unknown soldier, who's returned to us today and whom we later arrest, is symbolic of all our missing sons.
SPEAKER_07: This is him in 1984, during a military funeral at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, at Arlington National Cemetery. On that Memorial Day, Reagan was eulogizing the remains of an unidentified service member from the Vietnam War. The remains would be entombed alongside three other unknown service members from World War I and II and the Korean War.
SPEAKER_04: It was a big event.
SPEAKER_07: That's our own Joe Rosenberg.
SPEAKER_04: A horse-drawn carriage brought the casket to the tomb past 250,000 onlookers, including hundreds of veterans who emerged out of the crowd to walk behind the remains on their way to Arlington. The most powerful part, though, is when Reagan talks about who this unknown soldier might have been.
SPEAKER_02: Did he play on some street in a great American city? Or did he work beside his father on a farm out in America's heartland? Did he marry? Did he have children? Did he look expectantly to return to a bride? We'll never know the answers to these questions about his life.
SPEAKER_04: As Reagan spoke, etched on the side of the tomb itself were the words, known but to God. It's all really moving, even knowing what we know now. Which is that, although the person being buried that day might have been unknown to the public, a lot about his identity actually was known.
SPEAKER_07: The government likely even knew that he had a family who would like to have his body back. But they buried him anyway.
SPEAKER_04: How to honor unidentified remains has always been one of the great conundrums of war. The Romans were fond of honoring them with an empty sarcophagus. After the Civil War, the Union buried 2,111 soldiers in a mass grave in Arlington that they purposefully built on top of Robert E. Lee's rose garden.
SPEAKER_07: It wasn't until the 20th century that it occurred to anyone to bury a single unknown soldier in a public setting.
SPEAKER_00: This sort of memorialization came about from World War I.
SPEAKER_04: This is Robert Poole. He's a former executive editor for National Geographic, who wrote a book about Arlington called On Hallowed Ground. And he says World War I ushered in an era of total war and mass participation, in which the combatants on both sides were mostly ordinary citizens. Anonymous everymans, often rendered literally anonymous amidst the violence of the Western Front.
SPEAKER_00: Everything about the war, not only the numbers but the nature of it, was dehumanizing. Nobody who went through that war was ever the same again. And there was a British chaplain who was in the worst of the fighting on the front lines named David Railton.
SPEAKER_04: Railton would spend his nights conducting funeral services over the remains of soldiers ripped apart by shell fire, often burying them on the spot, sometimes en masse in the giant craters the shells had left behind.
SPEAKER_00: And while he was there, he thought about how terrible it was that there were these people who were essentially forgotten, buried in their graves, and nobody would ever remember them. And that there should be something better than that for them.
SPEAKER_07: And it was around this time that David Railton came across a temporary grave a few miles behind the front, marked by a cross bearing the name of a regiment and the words, an unknown British soldier. And he realized.
SPEAKER_04: If you had a mass grave with 2,000 people in it, then it's a mass grave with 2,000 people
SPEAKER_00: in it. It's not an individual who had a life. Something about having a particular person makes it more real, more human.
SPEAKER_07: After the war, Railton advocated for a grave bearing the body of a single soldier to bring the impossibly large tragedy down to a human scale.
SPEAKER_04: The soldier's anonymity would allow each person who came to the grave to project whatever was most important to them onto the mystery. It didn't matter if you wanted to honor all those who served or merely those who died, those who volunteered or those who were drafted, or even whether you were for the war or against it. Everyone was free to mourn in their own way.
SPEAKER_07: Sure enough, when Britain dedicated the grave of an unknown warrior in Westminster Abbey in 1920, it was an overnight success. The dedication alone attracted so many mourners, the line for viewing lasted ten days.
SPEAKER_04: And Britain's unknown warrior wasn't the only one.
SPEAKER_00: Britain, France, Romania, Italy, everybody at the same time jumped on this idea.
SPEAKER_04: Over 50 countries would end up building similar memorials, in part because the formula was so easy to follow. All you needed was the body of a single unknown soldier.
SPEAKER_07: The American memorial is especially beautiful. It sits at the top of a hill that overlooks the rest of Arlington Cemetery, and starting in 1937, it has been watched over day and night without a single interruption by a lone guard forever marching back and forth in front of the tomb.
SPEAKER_04: No one knows which service the remains are from, so instead of soldier or sailor or marine, they're simply referred to as the unknown. In fact, anything that narrows the scope of who this person could be, including where exactly they were found, is purposefully withheld from the public in order to make sure that they represent everyone who fought. The tomb has become one of the Washington, D.C. area's biggest tourist attractions.
SPEAKER_07: But in 1956, we made one small, seemingly innocent change to the formula of the unknown that would end up proving tricky.
SPEAKER_04: We began adding a new set of unidentified remains for every subsequent war. World War II, Korea, and eventually Vietnam. Each war would get their own unknown.
SPEAKER_07: Which made sense. There were lots of unknowns to choose from, at least at first.
SPEAKER_00: In World War I, there were something like 1,648 unknowns. World War II, the unknowns were 8,526. Korean War, 848. And then the last war in which we had an unknown, Vietnam, 4.
SPEAKER_04: Thanks to improved battlefield evacuation tactics, the Vietnam War produced only four sets of unidentified remains that could potentially go into the tomb. And then, as more information about those remains was discovered...
SPEAKER_00: It was down to three, then down to two, then down to one. One set of remains for all of Vietnam, who was unknown.
SPEAKER_07: That single set of remains, the one Reagan eulogized in that moving ceremony in 1984, which was presented to the public as the Unknown Soldier, was referred to internally as X-26. But his actual name was Michael Blasi.
SPEAKER_06: There's not supposed to be favorites in families, right?
SPEAKER_04: This is Patricia Blasi.
SPEAKER_06: But the firstborn just has something about them.
SPEAKER_04: Michael Blasi was Patricia's oldest brother. He was the oldest of five, actually, in the Blasi family. So growing up in St. Louis in the 1960s and 70s, she looked up to him.
SPEAKER_06: He was actually very good at anything that he did.
SPEAKER_04: Patricia says that Michael was constantly bouncing between activities, mastering each one before moving on to the next. School, music, sports.
SPEAKER_06: You know, I think he could have done whatever he wanted to. But then he received an appointment to the Air Force, and he fell in love with flying at the Academy.
SPEAKER_04: At flight school, Michael was assigned to fly a ground attack aircraft known as the A-37, dubbed the Dragonfly, or sometimes the Supertweet. It was designed to fly low over its target. Pilots loved it because that close to the ground, with the landscape rushing by, the sense of flight, of speed, of combat was heightened.
SPEAKER_07: To the uninitiated, of course, all these things made flying the A-37 downright terrifying.
SPEAKER_06: But I don't remember Michael ever saying anything about being afraid of it. And so once he graduated, it was off to pilot training, then from there it was off to survival training, and from there it was off to Vietnam. And I remember seeing him get on the aircraft in St. Louis, and I remember him looking back and waving to us with that beautiful smile. And I just remember thinking, oh, we'll see him again. I think we all did.
SPEAKER_07: By 1972, when Michael Blasey was deployed, America's military presence in Southeast Asia was shrinking rapidly. There were fewer than 25,000 U.S. servicemen left in Vietnam, as opposed to over 500,000 who had been deployed by the late 1960s.
SPEAKER_10: The war was, in effect, winding down, but it was still dangerous and there was still a lot of combat going on.
SPEAKER_04: This is Bill Thomas. He's a reporter who wrote about Michael Blasey for the Washington Post. And he says that the American servicemen who remained behind were stretched thin. They had to do a lot with a little. And that meant Michael was going to see a lot of combat.
SPEAKER_10: He arrived in Vietnam in January of 72.
SPEAKER_04: And by May of 1972?
SPEAKER_10: He had flown something like 130 missions. So virtually almost every day, he had at least one combat, sometimes two combat missions.
SPEAKER_04: The A-37 that Michael flew had a good record up to that point in Vietnam. Only a few had gotten hit. But when they were hit, things could get ugly fast.
SPEAKER_10: Because it could take all kinds of fire. I mean, you're flying 400 feet in the air and you get hit, you're not going to be able to parachute out of the plane. So that made it very dangerous.
SPEAKER_04: Michael would always take off and land from a protected air base near Saigon. But his missions had him flying over a lot of dangerous places. And the most dangerous was arguably a town in South Vietnam called Anh Lạc.
SPEAKER_07: In 1972, Anh Lạc was occupied by the South Vietnamese military, along with a handful of American advisers. But it was under siege by an invading North Vietnamese army.
SPEAKER_10: The siege lasted a very, very long time. It went on for months. And I encountered a guy who was in Anh Lạc, Chris Calhoun. And as he described it, it was like a scene out of Apocalypse Now. The city of Anh Lạc was totally leveled.
SPEAKER_11: It looked like Hiroshima.
SPEAKER_04: This is Chris Calhoun. He was stationed in Anh Lạc as an army ranger during the majority of the siege. And he often resorted to analogies as a way of explaining just how awful it was there. At one point, he described the South Vietnamese wounded with their meager medical support as looking like something out of the Civil War. Anh Lạc was completely cut off from the rest of the world.
SPEAKER_11: We got food and ammunition by parachute drop every day. We were under constant shell fire.
SPEAKER_04: Chris's duty, in the midst of all this chaos, was to call in airstrikes.
SPEAKER_07: And it was Michael Blasi's squadron that was providing the air support. They were flying bombing runs over Anh Lạc nearly every day.
SPEAKER_04: Michael and Chris never actually spoke one on one. Their time there didn't quite overlap. But Chris did get to know a lot of Michael's squadron mates really well.
SPEAKER_11: And we would talk on a radio. They'd read me Stars and Stripes.
SPEAKER_07: Stars and Stripes is the U.S. military's independently run daily paper.
SPEAKER_04: Why would they read you Stars and Stripes?
SPEAKER_11: Well, it was my only contact with the outside world. But in Anh Lạc, they would be over us almost 24 hours a day. And they kept the North Vietnamese off our backs. So these were people who I owed my life to.
SPEAKER_07: And it was on one of these bombing runs, keeping the North Vietnamese off their backs, that Michael Blasi flew his 132nd and final mission.
SPEAKER_04: We'll never know exactly what happened on May 11, 1972. Witnesses recall that day's fighting as being particularly intense and chaotic. So a lot of what we do know comes from Blasi's commanding officer, who was flying in a plane alongside Blasi's.
SPEAKER_10: And he said, the thing he remembered most of all was how bright everything was.
SPEAKER_04: The sky would have been filled with various planes and helicopters, each going after a separate target. But also tracer rounds being fired from multiple enemy aircraft guns.
SPEAKER_10: And they were taking ground fire the whole time. But because they were flying into the sun, they couldn't see where it was coming from. So this just added to the confusion of the battle.
SPEAKER_07: And somewhere in the midst of the blinding sun and the chaos and confusion, Michael's plane was hit by ground fire.
SPEAKER_04: And remember, Michael's plane was designed to fly low. When he got hit, he was no more than 500 feet above the ground.
SPEAKER_10: And he had lost control of the plane.
SPEAKER_07: Blasi's plane began straining fuel, inverted, and then disappeared into the jungle below.
SPEAKER_10: And there was no distress signal, which indicates that the pilot had probably been killed instantly.
SPEAKER_04: Michael's plane had crashed deep in North Vietnamese-held territory. A helicopter team tried to get to the crash site. But due to heavy enemy fire, they had to leave after just a few minutes, empty-handed. After that, there didn't seem to be any way to get to the site or find out exactly what had happened. Michael Blasi was declared missing in action and presumed dead.
SPEAKER_07: The Blasi family was informed that Michael's body would not be coming home.
SPEAKER_06: But with, I don't, it's the strangest thing that when there is no body, there is no gathering.
SPEAKER_04: When Michael died, it wasn't the first time Patricia had had to deal with the loss of a close family member. Both her parents came from big families, lots of aunts and uncles, lots of funerals. And she says that any time someone passed away, they processed it by gathering together at the funeral and just talking about the person's life, who they were, how much everyone missed them. But this time, without a body to place beneath the tombstone, the family opted not to have a funeral.
SPEAKER_06: I mean, there was a memorial gathering, but it was, it still wasn't the same. We didn't talk about it. We didn't, everyone just was, it was, I remember it's just like quiet. And then it was just like, well, we'll go on with our lives and try to be normal. Well, it wasn't normal.
SPEAKER_04: Patricia says that Michael's death, or rather the not talking about Michael's death, ended up putting a strain on her parents' marriage. They later separated and Patricia joined the Air Force, eventually attaining the rank of colonel. Life, in other words, went on, even as the topic of Michael sat undiscussed and unfinished.
SPEAKER_06: It was just sort of put on over on a shelf. This thing that we didn't get to deal with, and it didn't resurrect itself until 26 years later after he was killed. We realized where he was.
SPEAKER_07: In 1994, more than two decades after Michael had been killed, both Patricia and her mother received a phone call from a complete stranger.
SPEAKER_06: And he said, I'm Ted Sampley, and I am a former Green Beret who served in Vietnam.
SPEAKER_04: Ted Sampley has since passed away, but back then he was sort of this minor celebrity who championed the cause of Vietnam POWs and MIAs. He was convinced the government wasn't telling veterans everything it knew, and he was calling Patricia with an outlandish theory about Michael's death.
SPEAKER_06: I mean, there wasn't anything in his voice that was like angry or, you know, he was just matter of fact. But he said, I started researching who was shot down on May 11, 1972 and, and you know, what was found with them and would that be on a fighter aircraft?
SPEAKER_04: His evidence was circumstantial and his logic was long winded.
SPEAKER_06: But he said, I believe your brother's in the tomb of the unknowns.
SPEAKER_07: That the body from Vietnam that President Reagan had buried with pomp and ceremony in 1984 wasn't unknown at all. That it was in fact, Michael.
SPEAKER_04: At first, Patricia didn't know what to make of any of this. As far as she knew, Michael's body had never even been recovered. And remember, she herself was in the Air Force. So after getting off the phone with Sampley, she called up the Air Force Casualty Office and asked, could this be true? Could Michael be in the tomb of the unknown soldier?
SPEAKER_06: And they said, by no means is there anything to substantiate that your brother's in the tomb? And I said, well, you know what, thank you very much, because that is the craziest story that I could ever imagine that a known soldier was in the tomb of the unknowns. I mean, that's the crazy is it's just, it just didn't make sense.
SPEAKER_01: I thought this is the best example of internet conspiracy garbage I've seen to date. This is Vince Gonzalez.
SPEAKER_04: He was a young reporter at CBS Denver when he accidentally came across a post Ted Sampley had made on the internet about his theory that Michael Blasi had been buried in the tomb of the unknowns. This was in 1997, three years after the phone call with Patricia. And he says, yeah, of course, at first he totally dismissed it.
SPEAKER_01: And I thought, I'm going to print it out. I'm going to show it to college classes when I visit and say, this is why we say don't believe everything you read on the internet. And I did that. I printed it out, had it on my desk at CBS. And then one evening I sat down and started reading it. And I thought, well, maybe I should check this out.
SPEAKER_07: Sampley had no direct evidence proving that Michael Blasi was in the tomb, but that didn't make him wrong.
SPEAKER_04: Whatever was known about the remains of the Vietnam unknown had never been revealed. It was all part of the effort to make sure that the unknown could represent everyone who ever fought in the war.
SPEAKER_07: But Sampley had come across some secondhand accounts suggesting that America's only set of unknown remains from Vietnam had been recovered from an aircraft that had been shot down in 1972. And he had only been able to find one missing plane that fully matched the description. Michael Blasi's.
SPEAKER_04: What still made it hard to believe was that the government was not supposed to bury anyone in the tomb if there was a chance he could be identified like this. So Vince called a few sources in the military, not asking any hard questions, just wondering, almost kind of embarrassed. Could the government possibly bury a known person in the tomb of the unknowns and not tell anyone?
SPEAKER_01: One conversation in particular told me there was an attitude within some parts of the military that might allow something like this to happen. I called up a researcher in the Pentagon and I tried to talk really around the issue. I didn't want to let them know what I was working on. But I finally said, what if you could figure out who this was? What if we could go in and identify this person and give them back to his family? And his response was, oh, that would never happen. I said, but that would be the truth. And he said, well, the truth doesn't matter. He's not a human being anymore. He's a symbol in America's most sacred military shrine. And we would never let that happen. So I wrote down the truth doesn't matter on a Post-it note, stuck it to my computer console. And I thought, if there's a chance you could figure out who this is and give him back to his family, you should do it.
SPEAKER_04: Vince began filing FOIA requests, trying to get his hands on any government document he could about Michael Blasi.
SPEAKER_01: But there were things I wanted that only family members could get where you needed an affidavit. So that was when I reached out to the Blasi family.
SPEAKER_04: Vince got in touch with Patricia and laid out his case, fact by fact, pattern by pattern.
SPEAKER_06: And Vince and I started talking and I called my mom and I said, you know what? It's somebody. And if it's Michael, you know, we need to pursue it.
SPEAKER_04: Which eventually gave Vince the leeway to file yet another FOIA request. Nothing special, just some documents related to Michael Blasi from an Air Force base in Texas.
SPEAKER_01: Not mentioning the tomb, not mentioning the unknown soldier, just asking for anything with Michael Blasi's name in it. And I got back this really thick envelope, padded envelope, which is more than I think I'd gotten back from any other request. And I was actually back in Denver at that point, sitting in the newsroom and I opened it up and I was paging through it page after page and going, oh my God, this is it.
SPEAKER_04: Because this wasn't just some small file containing a good lead or a tantalizing clue.
SPEAKER_01: These were military documents showing the entire unknown soldier selection process.
SPEAKER_04: When combined with his earlier research, the documents Vince Gonzalez, now held in his hands, painted a nearly complete picture of what the government knew regarding the identity of the unknown soldier. Starting with something very important that they had known almost from the beginning.
SPEAKER_07: That Michael Blasi's remains had been recovered in Vietnam and that they'd been recovered by Chris Calhoun, the Army Ranger stationed in An Loc.
SPEAKER_11: You know, I don't really know exactly what went down, but I do know that everything pointed to me.
SPEAKER_04: Now remember, Calhoun didn't know Blasi personally, but he was friends with a bunch of the other pilots in Michael's squadron. They were the guys reading the newspaper to Calhoun over the radio. And it was on one of those lonely nights, just chatting, that they started telling him about Michael.
SPEAKER_11: The only thing I knew is they asked me that one of their squadron mates had been shot down. They gave me the coordinates and they wanted to know if we could get the body back.
SPEAKER_07: This was in October of 1972, over five months since Blasi's plane had disappeared into the jungle. They knew they were asking a lot.
SPEAKER_11: So I think if that rapport wasn't there, then the request would have never come and I would have never acted on it.
SPEAKER_04: Chris took the matter to his regimental commander, who assembled a special South Vietnamese patrol, dressed up as the enemy.
SPEAKER_11: In North Vietnamese uniforms with North Vietnamese weapons, and they went out in no man's land and they found the wreckage. And they brought back to me what was left of the remains of Michael Blasi in a black plastic bag.
SPEAKER_04: The remains did not consist of much, just six bones. But they also brought back other evidence, an uninflated life raft with serial numbers, a parachute, part of Michael's flight suit, and critically, his wallet.
SPEAKER_11: And that was in good shape. Pictures of him, pictures of his family, pictures of his sister.
SPEAKER_07: There was no question the remains were Michael's.
SPEAKER_04: Chris then handed the bag with everything in it off to the crew chief of the week's one outgoing helicopter. But he got the bag.
SPEAKER_11: The crew chief got the bag.
SPEAKER_04: And when you saw the remains go away in the chopper, I mean, what was your-
SPEAKER_05: Well, we were sending him home to his family.
SPEAKER_11: We were doing what was right. And of course those South Vietnamese risked their lives to get his body from that wreckage. And he deserved to go home.
SPEAKER_04: After that, Chris had just assumed that Michael's remains would be returning to his family.
SPEAKER_07: But according to Vince's documents, that's not what happened. The remains, along with the survival gear, would eventually arrive at the Army's Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii, but not before the wallet, containing the ID that could link the bones to Blasi, went missing.
SPEAKER_04: Even though he knew about the missing wallet, the head of the lab, using now outdated techniques, determined that the remains did not match Michael Blasi's physical description. Instead, they were simply designated as BTB, believed to be Michael Blasi. Without a positive match, due to Army policy, the Blasi family could not even be told that any remains had been found.
SPEAKER_07: Meanwhile pressure began to mount in the Pentagon to place a veteran from Vietnam in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
SPEAKER_04: It was politics, but it was also patriotism.
SPEAKER_01: There was a crass political angle to do this, to make nice with the Vietnam veterans. There was also a feeling of we need to get someone in that tomb so the nation can heal around this issue. But by the 1980s, there was only one set of unidentified remains left.
SPEAKER_04: The ones labeled, believed to be Michael Blasi. So in 1980, the lab was ordered to strip the remains of their formal connection with Blasi and give them the anonymous designation, X-26. And in 1984, with the Reagan administration eager to put someone on the tomb before Election Day, they were told to prepare X-26 for burial.
SPEAKER_01: And I spoke with technicians at the Army lab later who said we gave them every answer possible to say don't do this. The technology is coming. This is not an unknown set of remains.
SPEAKER_04: The lab technicians told the Pentagon that new DNA-based technology was being developed that would allow the remains to be conclusively identified. They also pointed to the artifacts like the flight suit and the life raft and a record of the missing wallet, all of which suggested that the remains were most likely Blasi's.
SPEAKER_01: But the push to put a Vietnam unknown in the tomb overrode that. And a general from the Army was sent to tell them everybody better get the hell out of the way. And that's when Michael Blasi went into the tomb.
SPEAKER_02: My fellow Americans, Memorial Day is a day of ceremonies and speeches. Throughout America today we honor the dead of our wars.
SPEAKER_07: And it's when President Reagan, who may not have known that any of this had happened, gave a speech at a burial in Arlington invoking a powerful mystery.
SPEAKER_02: Did he marry? Did he have children? Did he look expectantly to return to a bride? You'll never know the answers to these questions about his life.
SPEAKER_04: The file that Vince discovered 13 years later in 1997 showed that there had never been any mystery at all. Armed with the documents, he teamed up with veteran CBS correspondent Eric Engberg. They talked to anyone they could find who was involved in the unknown selection process. And when they felt they were ready, they presented their findings to Patricia Blasi.
SPEAKER_06: And I asked my mom to call a family meeting. And we sat down and we looked at the documents together and we discussed, you know, what should we do?
SPEAKER_04: Patricia wanted to go public with Vince and CBS. Her older sister, Judy, if anything, was even more eager to blow the lid off the whole thing. But George, the youngest brother, balked. Michael was buried in a place of honor, he pointed out. Maybe he could stay there and serve as the unknown for everyone else whose loved ones had never come back. But the tiebreaker was Michael's mother, Jean.
SPEAKER_06: She's a very it was a very patient woman. And she listened to all of the opinions of, you know, her children, her living children and waited until we were done with our bantering or whatever. And she just looked at us and she said, I want to bring my son home.
SPEAKER_03: This is the CBS Evening News.
SPEAKER_09: Tonight, the results of an ION America investigation lasting over half a year. Is it possible the government knows the identity of a Vietnam war casualty buried at the tomb of the unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery, but deliberately kept it secret from the public and even his own family?
SPEAKER_08: A seven month CBS News investigation has found evidence of a long running cover up.
SPEAKER_04: What followed wasn't just one story on the evening news. It was more like a blizzard of stories.
SPEAKER_02: There are significant new developments tonight in the exclusive story that CBS News first broke on this broadcast in January.
SPEAKER_09: CBS's Vince Gonzalez uncovered new evidence. An update tonight of our exclusive ION America investigation.
SPEAKER_01: I think we did 15 or 18 pieces on this. It just was nonstop. And tonight, as Eric Engberg tells us, there's more.
SPEAKER_04: Because CBS and the Blasey family didn't just want the world to know that Michael Blasey was in the tomb. They wanted the Pentagon to do something about it.
SPEAKER_08: Michael Blasey's sister Pat says the family wants the remains tested, even if by some chance they aren't identified as Michael.
SPEAKER_09: Now Congress wants to investigate.
SPEAKER_06: If it's Michael, we want to bring him home.
SPEAKER_01: And at a certain point, they called us up and they said, you're killing us. And a day or two later, they announced the tomb would be opened and the remains were going to be tested.
SPEAKER_07: On May 14, 1998, the Department of Defense disinterred the remains of the Vietnam veteran from the tomb of the unknown soldier.
SPEAKER_04: DNA samples were taken from Michael's mother Jean and his sister Judy and tested against the remains. They were a match.
SPEAKER_06: And after the scientists were finished talking to my mother, we were wrapping things up because my mother had to sign some papers and things like that. And then all of a sudden, a man walked up and said, well, when we opened the tomb to do the DNA test, Michael's artifacts were in the tomb with him. And what would you like us to do with them?
SPEAKER_07: The life raft and other items that had been found at the crash in 1972 had been the only physical evidence, aside from the missing wallet, that could have tied the remains to Michael Blasi. Whether it was to preserve the artifacts or to hide them, someone at the Army lab in Hawaii
SPEAKER_04: had put them where no one would ever think to look, in the casket with Michael. They'd been sitting in the tomb underneath the guards and the crowds and the Arlington soil for 14 years.
SPEAKER_06: They were in a box. And so after we buried Michael in St. Louis, there was a reception. And then once everyone left, we stood around the table and my brother George opened up the box and started pulling out the life raft, portions of his parachute, portions of his flight suit. And I have them with me today. I keep them with me. But I was really glad, I'm really glad to have them.
SPEAKER_07: Today there is no body representing Vietnam at the tomb of the unknowns. And thanks to improved forensics, there will likely never be an unknown from Iraq or Afghanistan or any future war. The military is now in the process of using the DNA from the families of missing veterans
SPEAKER_04: to identify over 650 sets of unknown remains from the Korean War. It's conceivable that they could use the same techniques on the Korean unknown inside the tomb. The unknowns from World War I and World War II are safe for now. But in the era of 23 and me, well, let's just say anything's possible.
SPEAKER_07: If you go to Arlington today, the tomb of the unknowns is still there, minus the remains for Vietnam. The tourists still take pictures on their phones, and the guards still make their rounds in perfect, silent precision, day and night, even when no one is watching. And it really is beautiful. You should go see it. But the heyday of this unique form of remembrance has come to an end.
SPEAKER_04: Does that sadden you? Like does it sadden you that there is no unknown for Vietnam anymore?
SPEAKER_06: I can't say that it saddens me. I can't say that. I respect the tomb of the unknowns. But in order to have an unknown, they made one. They took Michael's name away from him to satisfy something that I understand was very important to our nation. The first thing that you and I did when we met one another over the phone, hi, I'm Patricia or I'm Pat, hi, I'm Joe. A name is very, very important.
SPEAKER_04: Patricia still visits the tomb. She says she's not sure why she does it. But it means that she's gotten to know some of the guards. One of them once told her that their mission, guarding the unknowns, is never really over. But that in Michael's case, just this once, their mission was completed. They were just looking out for him until he could go home.
SPEAKER_03: Joe talks me through the very precise ceremony that has evolved at the Tomb of the Unknown
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SPEAKER_04: Okay, Roman. So when I was a little kid, my parents and I think my grandparents who lived just outside of Washington, D.C., they took me to Arlington Cemetery to see the tomb of the unknown soldier. And I remember it really well, and I have to say the reason I remember it so well and the reason I became interested in the tomb again more recently is not the mysterious soldier in the tomb projecting whatever you want onto his anonymity. It's actually the guard. Huh. And it's not so much the idea of the guard keeping vigil like this solemn duty as much as it is what the guard is physically doing. And what they're doing most of the time is just taking 21 steps to the left, turning, stopping for 21 seconds, then turning and stopping for another 21 seconds, then taking 21 steps to the right, then stopping again, turning again, stopping again, stepping again, over and over and over until there's a guard change every 30 minutes to an hour.
SPEAKER_07: That sounds very, very precise. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05: And actually that's the thing is like you say that, but you have no idea.
SPEAKER_04: Let me sell you on this by just showing you a video of what this looks like. This is from a guard change.
SPEAKER_02: Nice design touch the stripes on the legs really sell the synchronization.
SPEAKER_07: So as regimented as I was imagining it, it is even more so it is like the innards of a Swiss clock, the way that they move together and then they move in time is stunning. Yeah, no.
SPEAKER_04: And, and one of the things I kind of really appreciate it is just the way like if you have like a Swiss clock that is kind of ticking away with precision, it hasn't this way of magnifying the silence around it. Right. There's a kind of weird silence to it. And apparently to get this right, they train and practice for months in a separate facility. Wow.
SPEAKER_07: It's almost meditative. Like you said, like inside of the silence, when you hear the clicking of their shoes and their heels together, you do get this space that's created inside of it. That's very meditative.
SPEAKER_04: The word that just instantly came to mind is like Zen. You watch the marking, marching back and forth and the guards when they're doing it, they don't seem lost in the performance. Instead, at every step, they are totally present. They are completely aware of their surroundings. They are truly doing nothing but this. Unless you start laughing. Oh.
SPEAKER_07: It is requested that all visitors maintain an atmosphere of silence and respect at all times. Holy moly. I don't want to cross that guy at all.
SPEAKER_05: No, it's really terrifying. It just like bursts out of nowhere. This is what happens if you get like kind of too rowdy or you laugh at the tomb of the unknown. And there's more. There's this whole subgenre of YouTube videos of like tomb guards yelling at visitors. Oh good, they deserve it. Let's hear it. So like let's find another one. It's requested that all visitors remain behind the chains and rails.
SPEAKER_05: It's requested that all visitors remain behind the chains and rails. But they can just vary it up. They can vary their tone.
SPEAKER_04: They can switch up the words a little bit. I think it depends on the guard. It depends on maybe their mood that day.
SPEAKER_05: Holy moly. So here's a more Kurt one.
SPEAKER_07: You're behind the rails! Oh I love it. Just let them have it.
SPEAKER_05: And this is one where they reprimand some parents.
SPEAKER_08: Visitors must keep their children behind the trains and rails. Thank you.
SPEAKER_07: Little Billy being yanked back real fast. That happened to me.
SPEAKER_05: There's other videos where you see like people trying to sneak in like kind of behind the rails. And then they move them and then they're yelled at and then they just like they freeze like
SPEAKER_04: like like chipmunks who have been like caught out in the open and then just like just bolted
SPEAKER_05: like they're just terrifying. My favorite comment though is from a YouTube user who said and I quote when I was 10 years
SPEAKER_04: old I made the mistake of sitting down during the changing of the guards and I almost shat myself.
SPEAKER_07: Does any other national monument have something like this where there's this 24 7 ritual? Why in particular is that happening right here?
SPEAKER_04: Well yeah I mean that's a good question because the thing about the tomb is that like the way it is now is not the way it always was. It evolved into all of this kind of pomp and ceremony and spectacle when it was first commemorated in 1921. It was a big moment. I think it was the first like nationwide radio address that the president ever gave was from the commemoration of the tomb of the unknown. But back then it was just kind of this low stone slab. There was no big edifice or anything like that and kind of became a second rate monument for a while. Like people would picnic there and photographers would like because it has a great view of you know of the surrounding area because it's up on this hill and photographers would actually kind of set up shop there and people would like pose on the tomb. Almost like just kind of like a roadside attraction and people but apparently like veterans caught on to this and started complaining about it because they saw that kind of people were just treating it yeah like like entertainment and they were like kind of putting out their cigarettes on it things like that. And so they kind of complained about it to Congress and eventually the government cobbled together the money to post a guard and then starting in 1937 the guard was 24 7. And I've seen competing records on this one some say night since 1937 others say since
SPEAKER_04: 1948 the guard has never left. Even for hurricanes it's stayed there.
SPEAKER_05: And then the other thing that happened during that time is that they always intended for there to be like a more updated fancy tomb but it just took them forever to get around
SPEAKER_04: to getting the funding ends but eventually they did. And so they built the kind of the giant sarcophagus in 1931. And for that they went to this quarry in Colorado actually to ensure that they got the exact same marble as the Lincoln Memorial. And although it wasn't designed by these guys it was sculpted like the actual physical sculpting is by this like famous set of brothers called the Piccirilli brothers who were these Italian brothers who sculpted like everything they sculpted the Lincoln Memorial. And my favorite is they sculpted the two lions in front of the New York City Public Library.
SPEAKER_05: And then in 1956 that's when we started adding these further unknowns from World War 2 Korea
SPEAKER_04: etc. Yeah. So just built and built and built into this more and more reverent place.
SPEAKER_07: It has the image of an almost timeless tradition when you see it like this. But I actually kind of enjoy the fact that this is something that was you know iterated upon and improved and you know given a little more weight over time.
SPEAKER_04: I doubly appreciate it because I love when something's iterative in the direction of honing towards austerity and elegance as opposed to iterative and feeling like cluttered. Getting more casual or something like that.
SPEAKER_07: It's a fascinating place particularly because of this ceremony makes it all the more special. Have you ever had a chance to speak to one of the guards when you do in the reporting?
SPEAKER_05: I confess I did not manage to reach a guard in time for this coda.
SPEAKER_04: I had bigger fish to fry. I had a story to work on.
SPEAKER_07: There was a 20 year mystery.
SPEAKER_05: But I got the next best thing which is I found that one of the guards did of course a Reddit
SPEAKER_04: ask me anything.
SPEAKER_05: And so of course one of the things is like when you're a reporter and you see an ask me anything thread you're like you go through it hoping someone's going to ask like the question you would ask. And the only question I want to ask is like what is going through your head when you are
SPEAKER_04: marching back and forth. Particularly not during the changing of the guard but just during the long 30 minutes of the long hour. Marching back and forth during this like meditative state.
SPEAKER_05: And so finally someone like asked this right. And the guard responded I wish I could say that while we were doing this job we are just
SPEAKER_04: meditating on what it means to guard the unknowns.
SPEAKER_05: But we are human and we are on duty for long hours. So our minds do wander quite a bit which just was so disappointing to read. Oh but it's really human.
SPEAKER_05: I know but here's the irony which is like I realized that like when I was doing the
SPEAKER_04: story and I was like oh people are free to project whatever they want onto the mystery of the unknown soldier.
SPEAKER_05: I like that's of course my repertory a way of being really conceited and thinking like
SPEAKER_04: I'm above that and I don't fall prey to projecting anything.
SPEAKER_05: But the minute I see the guard I'm like like what do I want to see. Like I'm a reporter at 99 percent invisible who lives in San Francisco. I see like Zen meditation. Like that's immediately what I project onto this guy. And then of course like in the ask me anything thread he's just like no no no our minds wander
SPEAKER_04: we think about whatever what we're going to cook for dinner. Who knows right.
SPEAKER_05: And so you know I guess the tomb has worked its magic on me as well.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah. Thank you Joe. All right.
SPEAKER_07: Thank you Roman. 99 percent invisible was produced this week by Joe Rosenberg edited by Katie Mingle mixed by Sharif Yousif music by Swan real special thanks to Lou Pennebaker and Andy Richards whose interviews were not featured but without whose help this story could not have happened we're especially indebted to Andy Richards book The Flag it's a biography of David Railton the clergyman who first came up with the idea of the tomb of the unknown warrior bubble link on the Web site 99 percent invisible executive producer is Kathy to our senior editor is Lainey Hall Kirk Colestead is the digital director the rest of team includes Chris Barube Jason De Leon and Fitzgerald Gabriella Gladney Martin Gonzalez Christopher Johnson Vivian lay Loshma Don Jacob Maldonado Medina Kelly prime and me Roman Mars the 99 percent invisible logo was created by Stephen Lawrence. We are part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown Oakland California home of your Oakland roots soccer club of which I'm a proud community owner as other professional teams leave the Oakland roots are Oakland first always you can visit us at all the usual social media sites but we do request you maintain an atmosphere of silence and respect at all times you can link to other Stitcher shows I love as well as every past episode of 99 pi and 99pi.org
