Stolen Identity

You would know when you made it even if you were led there in blindfolds. An upset quiet. No real noise, but a murmur of rustling clothes. Snapping shutters. And the clop…clop…clop of a single pair of shoes.

In May 2008, I won an essay competition for the opportunity to lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier during an eighth grade class trip to Washington, DC.

Tucked away, not facing the city, it’s maybe the most famous place at Arlington National Cemetery. It doesn’t get a lot of wind. In fact, it overlooks a Confederate Memorial of all things.

I had to spend the entire day of the wreath-laying all dressed up in my pleated dress pants and white button-up, shuffling around DC like a stodgy old lobbyist. And I still felt totally underdressed standing next to a guard just before the wreath-laying began.

For 90 minutes at a time, that guard is separated from the rest of the world by a thin rope line, but for now, he was with us four thirteen year-olds. He chatted us up. We said we were from Michigan, and he quipped “I’m a buckeye” with a grin big enough to make up for all those hours he is required to pace back and forth with deadly seriousness. Then we all walked down the steps together.

—

As a child, I was close with my Nonna and her sister Aunt Gaye, who lived 10 minutes down the road, and with my grandparents who lived up north in Cadillac too. But I was obsessed as a child with feeling as close as I could be to the one close relative whom I’d never get to meet. 

My maternal grandfather Giovacchino Dorigo died of cancer in 1973 when my mom was just 10 years old. I grew up hearing a lot about him. Probably because I was obsessed with US history, specifically World War II, as a kid, my first means of connecting with him was by poring over keepsakes from his service as a refrigeration technician on a ship in World War II. 

I’d sit up with my Nonna and Aunt Gaye, with his tiny Navy journal and a map of the Pacific Ocean on their kitchen table, tracing out with a pencil his leapfrog journey. He was at Leyte Gulf and Okinawa. He often visited a place called Enewetak for refueling. He brought home a Japanese rifle that Nonna would never let me touch.

The interest in my Grandpa Giovacchino quickly expanded. I listened more to my family’s stories about him. He became my hero. I tried to model the qualities I would hear attributed to him, like his friendliness, and the way he gave his time. I said I’d never smoke, because smoking killed him. For a few years, I’d wear his broken Timex watch every day. I was probably wearing his watch when I wrote that winning essay for a contest with the prompt “Who is your hero?”

Today, I try to understand the hurt that others live with because of how the pain of his loss affected my own family. I still wear a Timex these days, when I do wear a watch. I was able to quit smoking after a few years of weakness.

I wonder if I was wearing his old watch that day at Arlington.

—

Standing with the WWI mausoleum just ahead of us, Korea to our left, WWII to our right, and a tomb for Vietnam right at our feet, of course I thought,then about my grandfather.

We placed our wreath inches away from that Vietnam plaque and made way for the clop-clop-clopping of the guard to continue.

Little did I know at the time that the Vietnam tomb…was empty.

—

By 1984, government records and identification methods had improved to the point where really only one Vietnam war casualty’s body had not been identified, though it was labeled “Believed-To-Be Michael Blassie” because folks did have a pretty good idea who it was but couldn’t make a 100% ID. 

But while our ability to identify casualties was growing over the 50s, 60s, and 70s, the gravitas of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was growing too. Someone from every major recognized conflict of the modern industrial era was buried in that hallowed spot in Arlington. Except from Vietnam.

To some, it almost felt wrong, especially for our country’s most recent major conflict, where so many soldiers were sacrificed for so long and so controversially. Political and military leaders, antsy to “recognize” Vietnam, overruled researchers who urged that they wait for DNA testing on the horizon. Blassie’s potential identity was stripped and he became Unknown. 

The family was never told what happened to Micnael. The shows Snap Judgment and 99% Invisible recently chronicled how meanwhile, the ambiguous loss of their son left Blassie’s family to grow depressed and estranged from one another. The parents separated some years after his death due to the irreconcilable pain.

But thanks to dogged research, and a family’s need to know what happened, the feds were pushed into re-opening the tomb in 1998. After DNA testing, the body’s name was confirmed. Blassie was buried in St. Louis in the presence of his family.

The family received a box of material recovered with his body in Vietnam. His plane’s life raft, his unused parachute, even some of his flight suit (A wallet with family photos and ID had been found too, but went missing en route to the military’s lab). In the show, Blassie’s sister Patricia emphasized how much it meant to have these effects.

Almost 10 years to the day of his disinterment I stood right there, thinking about my own grandfather. With no knowledge of this drama. Staring at the mausoleum, two slabs simply labeled “1941-1945” and “1951-1953”, and one slab labeled “Honoring and keeping faith with America’s missing servicemen 1958-1975.” That phrase was the only signal that nobody was buried beneath.

Sometimes, a great story waits beneath your feet, known to someone but not yet to you.

—

That atoll that Giovacchino visited most often, Enewetak, was later used for nuclear tests. The blast site is capped today by a concrete dome, with hopes that the land will be inhabitable again in a few years. But rising ocean tides are causing its radioactive fuel to leak into the ocean.

I think the story of the “stolen identity” of Michael Blassie struck me so much because losing that closure ripped through his family and turned their relationships radioactive. Only decades later, things became inhabitable again, after the dome of silence was lifted, and the family could say goodbye to him together.

I believe I’m able to have this relationship with a grandfather I’ve never met in part because my family at least got enough closure to be able to speak of his memory. 

How different things might have been if Michael’s family had gotten to say goodbye some years earlier. How different things would have been if my grandfather hadn’t made it home.

How much - and how little - can be said when you cannot even say someone’s name.