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I found the following article on this page and on the next while reading the P.O.W. NET biography for Richard Allan Fitts in the process of doing research about Michigan POW/MIAs and thought they should be displayed on their own to help explain why it can be so hard to identify remains when they are found and how mistakes are made (or covered up in some cases).
Please do whatever you can to help bring all of our POW/MIAs back home!!!!
Johnnie Parrish always wondered whether that was really his brother, Army Master Sgt. Frank C. Parrish, buried in Rose Hill Cemetery in Cleburne, Texas.
When the Army returned Sgt. Parrish's remains for burial in May, 1973, more than five years after he was reported captured in a Viet Cong ambush and summarily executed, Johnnie Parrish thought the forensic evidence a bit flimsy.
The forensic "experts" had based their identification of Sgt. Parrish on three pieces of evidence: (1) the remains had been found near where Sgt. Parrish and his Vietnamese strike force had been ambushed; (2) photographs of Sgt. Parrish supposedly corresponded with X-rays of the skull, even though the skull had neither jawbone nor teeth; and medical equipment like that which Sgt. Parrish carried was found near the ambush site. "But my mother and dad and everybody else accepted," Johnnie Parrish told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Eventually, Johnnie Parrish also accepted it, however reluctantly. "The thing that hurt me is that in 1973, the Pentagon said to me, 'You can accept or reject it, but this is final. This is concrete proof,' and I didn't like the attitude," Johnnie Parrish said.
Then, in early January this year, Johnnie Parrish drove from his home in Joshua, Texas, to the Rose Hill Cemetery to attend a funeral ceremony for an old friend. After the ceremony, Parrish decided to visit the grave of his younger brother. What Johnnie Parrish discovered at his brother's gravesite shocked and angered him. His brother's grave had been opened and the remains removed.
Johnnie Parrish had accidentally stumbled onto a government-endorsed grave robbery. The U.S. government was trying to hide a mistake it made 17 years earlier when it incorrectly identified the remains of Sgt. Parrish. They were trying to hide it from the Parrish family and hide it from the public. Without the proper permits, without telling anyone in the family, the government had come in and robbed Sgt. Parrish's grave and sent the remains to Hawaii. "Man, I am as mad as a wet toad," Johnnie Parrish said after viewing the desecrated grave, chastizing employees at the Crusier-Pearson-Mayfield Funeral Home in Cleburne, which handled Sgt. Parrish's burial and the exhumation of the remains.
Johnnie Parrish had been warned by the funeral home in December, 1989, that the government may have made a mistake in identifying his brother's remains. Parrish requested that he be kept informed of the progress of the case and was promised by funeral home employees and an unidentified government official that he would be. But the next thing Johnnie Parrish heard about his brother's case was when he looked into the empty grave.
The government began furiously backpedaling on the Parrish case when a Pentagon informant leaked information to the U.S. Veteran News and Report about the mixup of remains and subsequent attempts to cover up the mistake through grave robbery. According to information obtained by U.S. Veteran News and Report, the U.S. government obtained neither the permit required for exhumation of the remains originally believed to be those of Sgt. Parrish nor the permit necessary for transportation of the remains. "The Army is under the impression that all necessary state requirements would be met by the funeral home," said Major Lois Faires, a spokeswoman for the Pentagon. Officials at the Crusier-Pearson-Mayfield Funeral Home refused to comment on the case.
But Johnson County Clerk Robby Goodnight confirmed that neither the exhumation permit nor the transportation permit had been obtained. Faires said the mixup in remains was unusual. "This is extremely rare that something of this nature occurred," she said. Faires told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that she knew of only one other case in which the wrong remains had been sent for burial.
But Ted Sampley, chairman of Homecoming II, said he knows of at least 10 cases in which it has been proven that the wrong remains were sent for burial. "And we don't know how many they have managed to hide," said Sampley.
Perhaps the most infamous case of an incorrect burial involves Marine Sgt. Ronald Ridgeway, one of nine Marines the government thought it had buried in a mass grave in St. Louis in 1968.
Ridgeway was a member of Company B, 1st Battalion, 26th Marines, stationed at Khe Sanh on Feb. 25, 1968, when his unit was ambushed by North Vietnamese regulars while on patrol just outside the base. Although the ambush site was within view of the base, Ridgeway's unit was pinned down by heavy fire and attempts to reinforce it were driven back by the NVA. When the Marine units finally were able to break contact and return to base, they had to leave their dead behind. It was several days before the Marines could attempt to recover their dead because of heavy enemy activity.
When they were finally able to get into the area, the Marines found that repeated harassment and interdiction fires had badly scrambled the remains of their fellow Marines. They recovered what they thought were the remains of nine dead Marines, none of whom could be individually identified.
Among them, according to the government forensic experts, was Ridgeway. Those sets of remains were combined with the remains of nine Navy men who had died in a separate incident and were interred in a mass grave in St. Louis. But, on Jan. 28, 1973, nearly five years after he supposedly was buried, Ridgeway was repatriated from a North Vietnamese prisoner of war camp.
Ridgeway had come back from the dead, much to the chagrin of the U.S. government. Although the relatives of seven of those Marines believed buried in St. Louis found little hope in Ridgeway's return, the wife of one of them, Ruth Brellenthin, thought it entirely possible that her husband, Lance Corporal Michael Brellenthin, might have escaped with Ridgeway.
For five years the government refused to give Mrs. Brellenthin information about Ridgeway's whereabouts so she could question him about the incident. When she finally found him on her own, it was 1978, 10 years after the ambush. Ridgeway told her he had not seen Michael Brellenthin during or after the ambush. But an intelligence report obtained by Mrs. Brellenthin indicated that in late February, 1968, approximately 20-30 U.S. POWs were sighted near Khe Sanh.
According to the report: "Source observed several of the PWs wearing `strange caps.' He described this cap as olive drab in color and made of cloth. Caps described resemble the USMC fatigue cap." Yet, the U.S. government continued to state unequivocally that LCpl. Michael Brellenthin had been killed in action because Ruth Brellenthin could not prove otherwise.
Although the government lacked evidence that Michael Brellenthin was dead, its assumption that he was dead outweighed Mrs. Brellenthin's assumption that he might be alive. "The attitude of the government on these cases," said Sampley, "is that if you can't prove that the remains are not of a particular individual, then they must belong to the individual the government says they belong to."
Even if individuals are able to prove that remains can not be positively identified as belonging to a specific person, the government will not accept that as proof. The only opinion it values in forensic cases is its own.
The case of Air Force Lt. Col. Thomas Hart is a specific example of this. Hart's AC-130 aircraft was shot down in Laos in 1972 with 16 crew members aboard. In 1985, the government told his wife, Anne Hart, that it had found her husband's remains during a crash site excavation in which she had participated.
Mrs. Hart was immediately skeptical, especially when the government said it had identified 13 of the 16 crewmen. Mrs. Hart decided to have her own analysis done on the seven tiny fragments of bone, which could be held in one hand, the government said constituted the remains of her husband.
Dr. Michael Charney of Colorado State University, who has nearly 50 years of experience in anthropology, analyzed the bone fragments. "It is impossible," Charney wrote in his report, "to determine whether
these fragments are from LTC Hart or any other individual, whether they
are from one individual or several, or whether they are even from any
of the crew members of the aircraft in question."
Mrs. Hart refused to accept the remains and sued the government,
challenging its identification procedures. Mrs. Hart's challenge
produced additional criticism of the Army's Central Identification
Laboratory (CIL) in Hawaii and the the techniques it uses in
identifying remains.
Some scientists, including Charney, charged that CIL deliberately
misinterpreted evidence in order to identify remains. They said that
the Army consistently drew unwarranted conclusions about height,
weight, sex and age from tiny bone fragments. "These are conclusions
just totally beyond the means of normal identification, our normal
limits and even our abnormal limits," said Dr. William Maples, curator
of physical anthropology at Florida State Museum.
Among the egregious errors cited by Charney was a piece of a pelvic
bone that the laboratory mistakenly said was part of a skull bone and
was used to identify Chief Master Sgt. James Ray Fuller, who was on the
same AC-130 aircraft as Hart. Procedures at CIL were revamped shortly
after that, but there continues to be concern about the accuracy of its
work.
There are recurring charges that the U.S. government, in an effort
hastily account for as many missing men as possible, is stretching the
bounds of credibility when it comes to identifying remains.
One such case involves Sgt. Richard Fitts. Fitts was a passenger on a
Vietnamese Air Force CH-34 helicopter near Tchepone, Laos, on Nov. 30,
1968.
The crew of the helicopter was Vietnamese. The American passengers were
part of a team assigned to Command and Control North, MACV-SOG, U.S.
Army Special Forces. The mission was classified then and remains
classified.
Other Americans aboard the aircraft included Sgt. Arthur E. Bader, Cpl.
Gary R. LaBohn, SSgt. Klaus D. Scholz, Major Samuel K. Toomey, Cpl.
Michael H. Mein and 1st Lt. Raymond C. Stacks.
The helicopter was hit by 37mm anti-aircraft fire and crashed in flames
near a stream in heavy jungle. No ground search was initiated because
it was in a denied area. No survivors were seen.
In March, 1988, the crash site was excavated by a joint Lao/U.S.
technical team and human remains consisting of 17 teeth and 145 bone
fragments, none measuring over two inches, were recovered.
On Jan. 3, 1990, the U.S. government announced that the remains of
Fitts had been identified and returned to his parents. That
identification was determined by the government's conclusion that two
of the 17 teeth belonged to Fitts. They were buried in a separate
casket in Boston, Mass.
The remaining 15 teeth and 145 bone fragments were said to be
unidentifiable. But on Feb. 8, 1990, the Pentagon announced the
remaining Americans had been identified and would be buried, along with
the Vietnamese crew, in a mass grave in Arlington, Va.
Fitts' name was included on that tombstone along with the other
Americans because the Pentagon believed some of the bone fragments
belonged to Fitts. "What it amounts to is a mass burial, sort of like
what Stalin did," said Sampley. "If you can't prove it's a particular
individual, just say the remains are unidentified. Don't just stick a
name on it."
But that's exactly what the government did in the case of Master Sgt.
Frank Parrish in 1973. According to Faires, it was decided that the
remains belonged to Parrish because they were of a Caucasian of about
the same age and medical equipment was found nearby. "There was nothing
forensically (proving) it wasn't Parrish," said Faires.
Parrish had been accompanied on the fatal patrol by another Special
Forces team member, Sgt. 1st Class Earl R. Biggs. The Pentagon says his
remains were returned earlier. But the family of Sgt. Biggs must now be
wondering, just as Johnnie Parrish wondered 17 years ago about his
brother Frank, whether it was actually Sgt. Biggs it buried.
As for the remains that were interred in Sgt. Parrish's grave, what
little is known about them, according to government documents, is that
they belonged to an individual who was held prisoner for several years
before being executed.
Was that Biggs? Was it Parrish? Or, was it one of the more than 2,000
men still unaccounted for in Southeast Asia?
The government says it doesn't know and has sent the remains back to
Hawaii for further identification. Who knows what unsuspecting family
they will be sent to next for burial?
Sgt. Frank Parrish was buried for the second time in Rose Hill Cemetery
in January, 1990 in a simple ceremony. There was no honor guard this
time to salute him, no grieving widow to accept the flag that covered
the coffin.
The Army says Sgt. Parrish's widow, who has since remarried, refuses to
comment on the mixup, but that is an excuse the government conveniently
hides behind when it is trying to avoid publicity about an embarrassing
incident.
The families of Biggs and Parrish bore their grief 17 years ago when
they were told their men had died. Now, that grief has been compounded
by inexcusable Army inefficiency.
The families will forever be burdened with the question of whether or
not the remains they buried actually were those of their loved ones.
Paul Warren is a veteran journalist who has covered the POW/MIA issue
extensively.
[ distributed through the P.O.W. NETWORK ]
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