The Repository Last Known Position

Vietnam's Unknown Soldier: How 6 Bones Got a Name

October 20, 2026 · Runtime 12:24 · Watch on YouTube

On Memorial Day 1984, President Reagan placed the Medal of Honor on the casket of the Unknown Serviceman of the Vietnam Era and accepted the flag as his next of kin. The Unknown was six bones recovered near An Loc in 1972, first designated Believed To Be Air Force 1st Lt. Michael J. Blassie and later reclassified as Unknown X-26. In May 1998 the Tomb of the Unknowns was opened, and mitochondrial DNA from his mother and sister gave him back his name.

Chapters

  1. 0:00 Arlington, 1984
  2. 0:44 An Loc, 11 May 1972
  3. 1:26 Six bones
  4. 1:51 Believed To Be
  5. 2:15 X-26
  6. 2:57 The Vietnam Unknown
  7. 4:29 The questions
  8. 4:55 Opening the Tomb
  9. 5:32 A test that did not exist in 1984
  10. 7:25 Whose families?
  11. 8:11 The double-blind test
  12. 8:51 The name
  13. 9:35 Jefferson Barracks
  14. 10:03 The empty crypt
  15. 11:03 Still digging
  16. 11:32 The account

Transcript

Arlington, 1984 0:00

Arlington, Memorial Day 1984: the Vietnam War's Unknown Soldier, with no name. The President placed the Medal of Honor on his casket and took the flag as his next of kin.

Fourteen years later, the tomb was opened, and DNA from a mother and a sister said who he was. We followed the case through the government's own record: the crash, six bones, a file number, and a test that ruled out six families.

A word on what you are seeing. The film of the 1984 funeral is the White House Television Office's. The laboratory footage is the military's DNA laboratory in later years, not the 1998 test itself. No human remains are shown.

An Loc, 11 May 1972 0:44

On the eleventh of May 1972, near An Loc, about sixty miles north of Saigon, an American A-37B Dragonfly was shot down. The town was under siege that spring, and the A-37 was a light attack jet.

The pilot was First Lieutenant Michael Joseph Blassie, of the 8th Special Operations Squadron. He was twenty-four, from St. Louis. He had entered the Air Force Academy in 1966 and was commissioned in June 1970.

Recovery attempts began at once. But the jet had come down in an area held by enemy forces, and no one could examine the crash site.

Six bones 1:26

Five months later, a South Vietnamese Army patrol reached the wreck. It recovered a pelvis, an upper arm bone, and some ribs. Six bones in all.

With them were the remnants of a flight suit, a life raft, pieces of a parachute, and part of an Air Force holster. The museum's list of the objects also includes the chain of an identification tag.

Believed To Be 1:51

The remains were given a designation that the military uses for exactly this situation. Believed To Be. Believed To Be Lieutenant Blassie.

Press reports in 1998 said an identity card had been found with him. They disagree about where it was lost. It is not on the museum's list. Whatever went missing, it did not reach the laboratory.

X-26 2:15

At the laboratory, the bones told a different story. The analysis suggested they were not a compelling match for Blassie's age and height. Other data, of unknown origin, suggested they could not be his.

So the physical evidence said one thing, and the forensic analysis said another. The Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii had no alternative. It designated the remains Unknown, and gave them a number: X-26.

Press reports in 1998 put that decision at an Army review board in 1980. They also said the older analysis described a man older than Blassie, with a different blood type.

The Vietnam Unknown 2:57

Meanwhile, the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington held Unknowns from the First World War, the Second, and Korea. There was no Unknown from Vietnam yet.

A 2010 history of the case quotes the Secretary of Defense writing to the President in March 1984. There was one set of remains that could not be identified, although not as complete as they would like.

On the seventeenth of May 1984, at Pearl Harbor, a Marine sergeant major who held the Medal of Honor designated the Unknown Serviceman of the Vietnam Era.

The frigate USS Brewton carried him to Alameda, in California. He was sent to Travis Air Force Base on the twenty-fourth of May, and arrived at Andrews, outside Washington, the next day.

He lay at the Capitol. Then, on Memorial Day, an Army caisson carried him to the amphitheater at Arlington.

President Reagan presided. He presented the Medal of Honor to the Unknown, and accepted the flag as next of kin.

His words that day are in the presidential record. We write no last chapters. We close no books. We put away no final memories.

He ended by speaking to the Unknown directly. Thank you, dear son. May God cradle you in His loving arms.

The casket went into the crypt for the Vietnam Unknown, on the plaza of the Tomb. The six bones from An Loc had become the nation's symbol of all of its missing from that war.

The questions 4:29

The questions did not go away. A veterans' newspaper raised them in 1994. On the nineteenth of January 1998, CBS News reported that the Unknown was most likely Michael Blassie.

The next day, the Pentagon reopened the case, prompted by complaints from Blassie's family. In April, a Pentagon working group recommended that the remains be disinterred.

Opening the Tomb 4:55

On the thirteenth of May 1998, workers put up a privacy fence around the Tomb. During the night, the stonework was removed, and the casket was taken out of the crypt.

At a ceremony on the fourteenth, the Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, said: We disturb this hallowed ground with profound reluctance. If advances in technology can ease the lingering anguish of even one family, then our path is clear.

A tri-service honor guard escorted X-26 to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, in Washington.

A test that did not exist in 1984 5:32

What had changed since 1984 was not the bones. It was the laboratory. The test the Pentagon was about to use had not been available when the Unknown was buried.

The polymerase chain reaction, which copies tiny amounts of DNA, was invented in 1985. The Defense Department founded the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory in 1991. In 1995, the Defense Science Board approved one kind of DNA for identifying skeletal remains.

The laboratory had already done it once. In 1993, its scientists published a case of remains returned from Vietnam, twenty-four years after death. The sequence from the bone was identical to the mother's, and to two sisters'.

And it was unique. Compared against more than 650 known sequences, it matched none of them.

That kind is mitochondrial DNA. It is inherited only from the mother, and shared with all of a person's siblings and maternal relatives.

Each cell has one nucleus, but many mitochondria, so it carries more than a hundred copies of mitochondrial DNA. And it does not degrade as fast as nuclear DNA. In old bone, it is often what survives.

What the laboratory reads is not the whole molecule, but its most variable stretch: two regions called HV1 and HV2, about 610 base pairs in all, in a 2005 description by the laboratory and NIST. We could not find the sequence of X-26 itself in the public record.

But it cannot name a stranger. It can only compare. A sequence from the bone is checked against samples from living maternal relatives. The test is not infallible, officials said in 1998. A match lends credence.

Whose families? 7:25

So the question became: whose families should be asked? Investigators knew where the remains had been found. They looked for every American lost within twenty-five miles of that place.

And here the record does not agree with itself. In May 1998, the Pentagon spoke of nine families. The Army's medical museum says ten reference samples, from the maternal relatives of seven servicemen. In 1999, the department said seven.

The Washington Post, the day the result was announced, wrote of eight other possible candidates, one of whom had no living relative to give a sample. Nine men on the list, by that count, and fewer families that could be tested.

The double-blind test 8:11

The test was designed so that no one could steer it. Samples from X-26, and a second set of bone samples from similar parts of the skeleton, were sent to the laboratory.

Each case was analyzed separately. None of the scientists knew whose bones either case was. It is called a double-blind study.

The second case matched none of the families. X-26 excluded six of them. And it matched exactly two samples: the ones given by Michael Blassie's mother and sister.

The sequence came from a small piece of the upper arm bone recovered near An Loc in 1972.

The name 8:51

On the thirtieth of June 1998, the White House announced that DNA testing had positively identified the Vietnam War Unknown as Air Force First Lieutenant Michael J. Blassie.

Cohen said that forensic science may have reached a point where there will be no other unknowns, in any war.

Even the date has three versions. A history of the case says the tests confirmed the match by the twenty-eighth of June. The announcement came on the thirtieth. A casualty database lists the formal identification on the eighth of July.

On the ninth of July, an Air Force honor guard escorted him out of the Institute of Pathology. He began the journey home to Missouri.

Jefferson Barracks 9:35

On the eleventh of July 1998, he was buried with full military honors at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery, near St. Louis, in the same cemetery as his father.

The family asked that he receive the Medal of Honor given to the Unknown. In August, the Defense Department said no. The medal, it wrote, had been a symbolic award to represent all who lost their lives, and it would stay on display at Arlington.

The empty crypt 10:03

Then a rule. In June 1999, the Pentagon announced that no remains would go into the Vietnam crypt unless it could be unequivocally assured, in perpetuity, that they would be forever unidentifiable.

The other Unknowns stay where they are. For them, a Defense official said in 1999, there is no feasible way to do that kind of detective work. There is no short list of names to test against.

On the seventeenth of September 1999, National POW MIA Recognition Day, a new crypt cover was dedicated. It reads: Honoring and Keeping Faith with America's Missing Servicemen, 1958 to 1975.

The crypt is still empty. The Tomb is guarded around the clock, and the sentinels walk past it.

In 1999, the laboratory in Hawaii held about 170 sets of remains from Southeast Asia, still waiting for names.

Still digging 11:03

The search for the missing of that war has not stopped. Joint American and Vietnamese teams still dig in Vietnam today, sifting soil by hand for anything that can be compared against a family's DNA.

And the question has come back to the Tomb itself. In September 2026, Army Times reported that the head of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency said it will petition Arlington to disinter the Korean War Unknown, because the odds of naming him are now high.

The account 11:32

So here is the account. Shot down on the eleventh of May 1972. Six bones, five months later. Believed To Be, then X-26. Buried as the Unknown in 1984. Opened in 1998. Six families excluded, and two samples matched.

For fourteen years, the last known position of Michael Blassie was a crypt that said he could not be known. What named him was a test that did not exist when he was buried, and a mother and a sister who could still give a sample.

Next, a mountain in Laos. In March 1968, eleven Americans at a radar site on its summit were killed and could not be recovered. In 2025, a recovery team went back to the summit. That is the next episode.

Description and sources

We follow the case through the record: the A-37B shot down near An Loc on 11 May 1972; the South Vietnamese patrol that recovered six bones and a pilot's equipment five months later; the Believed To Be designation and the laboratory analysis that did not fit, which turned the remains into X-26; the designation at Pearl Harbor on 17 May 1984 and the funeral at Arlington; the CBS News report of January 1998 and the exhumation of 14 May 1998; and the double-blind mitochondrial DNA test at the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory, which excluded six families and matched the samples of Blassie's mother and sister. The record does not agree on how many families were tested (seven, nine, or eight candidates plus Blassie), or on the date of the identification. Since 1999 the Vietnam crypt has stayed empty by rule, with the inscription Honoring and Keeping Faith with America's Missing Servicemen, 1958-1975.

PRIMARY SOURCES

ARCHIVE PLATES — public-domain documents, with author, date, archive and licence.

  • United States Air Force — 1972 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
  • United States Air Force — 1972-06-18 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain

... and 7 more plates, each credited on screen in the video and listed in this project's manifest.

Last Known Position reads a missing-in-action case through the record that closed it: the loss report, the excavation and the laboratory.

About the material. Film: the White House Television Office's coverage of the funeral of the Vietnam Unknown, 28 May 1984 (via Arlington National Cemetery). Video: Arlington National Cemetery and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (2025-2026); the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory and the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System (2015-2019), which is the laboratory in later years, not the 1998 test; Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency recovery teams in Vietnam and Laos (2024-2025), which are other cases, via DVIDS. Photographs: U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Air Force and National Archives (1968-1999) via Wikimedia Commons. All public domain. No human remains are shown. Diagrams are drawn in code. Nothing here is AI-generated imagery.

The appearance of U.S. Department of Defense visual information does not imply or constitute endorsement. This channel is independent and not affiliated with the U.S. Air Force, Arlington National Cemetery or the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency.

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