That wish may now be fulfilled. On Jan. 20, Jean, a widow in her 70s who lives in Florissant, Mo., heard from the Defense Department confirming recent reports that remains which could be Michael's were already interred—not in a marked grave but in the symbolic resting place of all fallen troops, the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery. Her four remaining children—daughters Judy, 46, Mary, 43, and Pat, 39, and son George, 36—were with her when the call came. "Don't jump to conclusions that it's Michael," cautioned Pat, who then added, beaming, "Can you believe it? The trail leads to the tomb!"
The Pentagon has yet to announce whether it will grant the family's request to exhume the bones for DNA testing. But having come this far, Jean Blassie is hopeful, and with reason. She first toyed with the idea that the remains could be Michael's in 1991, after reading an extract of Susan Sheehan's A Missing Plane (1986), a book that suggested the Vietnam Unknown Soldier might be identifiable. Then two weeks ago a CBS news report followed up on a July 1994 article in the U.S. Veteran Dispatch newsletter that said the remains were most likely Blassie's. Now, says Jean, "our whole aim [is] to bring Michael home and to know the truth."
The story linking Blassie's death, at 24, with the bones in the Arlington tomb began on May 11, 1972. Blassie, an ace pilot known among his Air Force pals for his quiet charm and obsession with racquetball, was flying his 132nd mission in just 5 months when his A-37 jet was hit by ground fire over An Loc, 60 miles north of Saigon. "He was supposed to be coming in right behind me," recalls James Connally, now 60, who flew ahead of Blassie that morning. "I had a glimpse of him flying low. In the next half-second he was rolling. I saw no parachute, no ejection seat. He was obviously killed in the crash."
Five months later a South Vietnamese patrol found Blassie's identity card, some money and shreds of a flight suit in the area, along with six human bones. Because troops in Vietnam often gave their papers to others to hold, the military didn't consider ID cards conclusive proof of identity; there were no dental remains to examine, and DNA testing didn't yet exist. So when the bones arrived at military labs in Hawaii they were listed as "believed to be" those of Michael Blassie.
The Blassie family was never informed about the remains and never thought to question the military's original finding. It was tough enough, after all, even to mention his name. "I couldn't talk about [him] for a year," George Blassie says of the older brother who drilled him on multiplication tables and spent afternoons playing soccer with him in the yard. "For Mom, it was 10."
In 1980 the Defense Department, without explanation, reclassified the remains as "unknown" and gave them the number X-26. About that time, Vietnam veterans were pressing the federal government to honor a 1973 statute to bury an unknown soldier from the war.
Although more than 2,400 troops were then listed as missing in Vietnam (52,012 died), only three or four sets of remains were classified "unknown." In the middle of the 1984 election campaign, the bones marked X-26 were selected for burial. Though the move mollified veterans groups, not everyone was satisfied. "The lab in Hawaii was strongly opposed to any [designation of] an unknown soldier," says Bill Bell, who was chief of the Defense Department's POW-MIA office from 1991-92. "This was a decision based on political pressure, not on science."
More than 110,000 mourners filed past the gray metal coffin containing the bones as it lay in state in the Capitol rotunda before the burial ceremony on Memorial Day weekend of 1984. "About him we may well wonder...as a child, did he play on some street in a great American city?" then-President Ronald Reagan asked in his eulogy. "Did he work beside his father in a farm in America's heartland? Did he marry? Did he have children?"
Jean Biassie is convinced she knows the answers. Born in St. Louis, Michael Biassie called his father, George, a wholesale meatcutter who had served in the Army Air Corps in WWII, "a guiding influence throughout my life." (He died, at 71, in 1991.) As a teenager, Michael excelled at sports and earned a music scholarship to the Catholic St. Louis University High, where he played bassoon and saxophone in the band. He set an example for his siblings and relentlessly badgered them to follow. "He instilled in us the desire to do our best," says George. "I can remember him saying to the girls, 'Let's get in shape, get out there and get running.' "
At the Air Force Academy, he majored in psychology and captained the soccer and tennis teams. "Mike was wherever a hotshot with a racket needed an attitude adjustment," says former Academy cadet Bill Emmer, now 48 and a Northwest Airlines pilot, who named his only son after Biassie. "You didn't have to be related to this guy to love him."
After graduating in 1970, Biassie went into flight training and "expected to go to Vietnam," says Emmer. He accepted his assignment with relish. "Mike truly believed in the war," says Peter Fertig, his former roommate at the Air Force barracks in Vietnam. When he wasn't flying, Biassie would often trudge two miles through the steamy heat to a racquetball court and at night discuss postwar plans over a cold beer. "Mike was scared at times," says Fertig, "but he always went up thinking that he would come back." It certainly sounded that way in a letter he wrote to a girlfriend before he died: "I'll keep on living to fight," he wrote, "as long as there's a fighting reason to live or for others to live."
The next move in the case is up to the Defense Department. Jean Biassie has written to President Clinton to reinforce her request for a DNA test. If Blassie's identity is eventually confirmed, "The next step is bringing Michael home," says sister Pat. "We're just waiting for a resolution." Meanwhile several Republican senators have called for an investigation into the questions of political expediency surrounding the burial. That part of the mystery doesn't interest Jean, who harbors no bitterness toward the government for withholding information. "A lot of mistakes were probably made," she says. "But we're not looking back; we're just looking forward."
ANNE-MARIE O'NEILL
MARY M. HARRISON in Florissant, ROCHELLE JONES in Washington and ULRICA WIHLBORG in Los Angeles
- Contributors:
- Mary M. Harrison,
- Rochelle Jones,
- Ulrica Wihlborg.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
