In March 1921, the United States Congress approved the burial of an unidentified American service member at Arlington National Cemetery, to stand for the dead of the First World War. Four candidates were exhumed from different cemeteries in France, and one was chosen. The interment took place on 11 November 1921, Armistice Day, with President Warren Harding presiding.
The point of the tomb was anonymity. Whoever lay there was deliberately, permanently unnamed — every soldier who could not be named, represented by one who never would be. A sentinel began guarding the grave, and apart from a break during the Second World War, that guard has been continuous ever since. In 1958 the grave became the Tomb of the Unknowns, and unknowns from the Second World War and Korea were placed alongside it.
Then, on Memorial Day in 1984, a fourth crypt was added for an unknown serviceman from Vietnam.
For fourteen years he lay there as a symbol. Then technology caught up with the symbolism.
In May 1998 the body was disinterred so that mitochondrial DNA testing could be attempted. Mitochondrial DNA passes down the maternal line essentially unchanged, which makes it a peculiar kind of evidence: it is not a fingerprint, unique to one person. It is a lineage marker. It identifies you through your mother's mother's mother, and it can therefore be matched against any living relative on that same line.
The military had such a family. First Lieutenant Michael Joseph Blassie of the U.S. Air Force had been shot down over South Vietnam in 1972, and his remains had been classified as unknown. On 30 June 1998, Secretary of Defense William Cohen announced that the DNA comparison had confirmed the identification. On 11 July 1998, Michael Blassie was buried again — this time under his own name, at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery in Missouri.
The inscription on the tomb's face reads that here rests in honoured glory an American soldier known but to God. That is the most careful phrasing available for the situation: it does not say the man is unknowable, only that he is, at present, unknown — and the men who chose those words could not have anticipated that the qualifier would be tested within their grandchildren's lifetime.
Today, the Vietnam crypt at the Tomb of the Unknowns is empty. It is covered with a slab. The other three unknowns remain, and there is now a practical reason they will probably never be disturbed: the families of the missing from the First and Second World Wars and Korea are largely gone, which means the matching side of the equation no longer exists.
The reversal is worth sitting with. The entire purpose of the tomb was to make a claim that could not be falsified: this person cannot be identified. That claim held for fourteen years, and then it came apart — not because anyone remembered him, but because a technology that did not exist when he was buried could read something he had inherited from his mother and match it to a family that had never stopped being available.
Two things had to line up for that to work, and they are easy to confuse with each other.
The first was the physical trace: mitochondrial DNA, sitting inert in bone for twenty-six years, doing nothing, requiring no maintenance. The second was the living counterpart: a mother's line, and a family willing to be tested. Remove either one and the identification does not happen. The trace alone is just chemistry. The counterpart alone is just a family wondering.
There is a tempting conclusion here that the case does not actually support — that so long as you leave enough physical material, you will eventually be recovered. Blassie is the rare clean success, and what made it clean was the second half of the equation. For the three unknowns still at Arlington, the material is there. The counterpart is not.
For most people, the counterpart will not exist a thousand years out. No maternal line, no family register, nobody who can be tested against. That is what makes what you write down, in your own voice, about your own life, the part that has to carry the weight — not the physical trace, but the account of who the trace belonged to. The physical evidence tells a future reader that somebody existed. Only the account tells them who.
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