The Power of the Nameless

The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency has announced that it intends to petition the Army for permission to disinter and attempt to identify the Korean War Unknown at Arlington National Cemetery.

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Advances in DNA science make identification increasingly likely. DPAA reports that it holds family-reference samples for 94 percent of the roughly 7,400 Americans still missing from the Korean War. The proposal is honorable in purpose: to restore a name to a fallen service member and, perhaps, give a family a long-denied answer.

I nevertheless believe the Korean War Unknown should remain unknown.

My connection to the Tomb is personal. During my Air Force career from 1985 to 2008, I regularly performed military funeral honors at Arlington and, on several occasions, sounded Taps at the Tomb during Air Force wreath ceremonies. I later met members of the Tomb Guard, researched Sgt. Frank Witchey – the bugler at the 1921 interment – and contributed my arrangement of Goin’ Home to the 1998 disinterment ceremony for the Vietnam Unknown. I have been an associate member of the Society of the Honor Guard Tomb of the Unknown Soldier for over 20 years. I do not speak for that organization.

Those experiences taught me that the Tomb is not simply an unresolved burial. It is a national sanctuary whose meaning rests in part on anonymity. Identification would restore one biography. Preserving anonymity allows one person to continue representing thousands whose names are known but whose resting places are not.

The question is therefore not whether identification is good, or whether families deserve answers. Both propositions are compelling. The question is whether the Korean War Unknown should now be treated primarily as an unresolved forensic case or as a person entrusted with a singular national role.

I have read extensively about the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, including “The Unknowns: The Untold Story of America’s Unknown Soldier and World War I’s Most Decorated Heroes Who Brought Him Home” by Patrick K. O’Donnell, Robert M. Poole’s “On Hallowed Ground”, and “Sacred Duty: A Soldier’s Tour at Arlington National Cemetery” by Tom Cotton. Yet books can take us only so far. I have visited the Tomb countless times and witnessed the changing of the guard and wreath ceremonies that are performed with the utmost precision and dignity. There is a feeling that comes over you when standing near the Tomb that is difficult to put into words. It is powerful, solemn, and almost tangible.

Against that background, I offer my thoughts on DPAA’s announced proposal to disinter the Korean War Unknown and make an identification.

For many families whose loved ones were missing in action and whose remains were never recovered, the Tomb became more than a national memorial. It was a place to search for answers, seek solace, grieve, and perhaps find some measure of peace. Accounts survive of mothers who were convinced that the soldier beneath the marble sarcophagus was their son. They did not merely hope that it might be true; they believed it with certainty

Mothers’ Day ceremonies at the Tomb during the 1920s and 1930s drew hundreds of mourners. For bereaved families, the Unknown Soldier could stand for the son, husband, father, or brother who had never returned. Because he represented no one by name, he could represent them all.

That is the source of the Tomb’s enduring power. It holds not only the remains of an unidentified American service member but also the grief, love, unanswered questions, and collective memory of a nation.

The World War I Unknown was interred on November 11, 1921, and the World War II and Korean War Unknowns were interred in the same ceremony on May 30, 1958. The Vietnam Unknown was laid to rest on May 28, 1984.

Lieutenant Colonel Charles Whittlesey, the commander of the Lost Battalion during the Argonne offensive in October 1918, was awarded the Medal of Honor for his leadership during that campaign. The Lost Battalion’s story is a remarkable tale of survival against long odds. Whittlesey was an honorary pallbearer at the interment of the Unknown Soldier on November 11, 1921, at Arlington.

Whittlesey was a deeply sensitive man who had spent the three years after the armistice constantly answering letters from grieving mothers and visiting wounded veterans in hospitals. Close friends revealed that during the ceremony, Whittlesey became utterly consumed by the haunting conviction that the unidentified body inside the casket might actually be one of his own missing men from the Argonne Forest. After the service concluded, Whittlesey turned to his close friend and fellow Lost Battalion officer, Captain George McMurtry, and somberly remarked, “I should have never come here.”

Fifteen days after acting as a pallbearer for the Unknown Soldier, Whittlesey sailed to Cuba on the S.S. Toloa and stepped off the deck into the Atlantic Ocean. In a final, tragic parallel, because his body was never recovered from the sea, Whittlesey himself remains “missing”—rendering his own legacy permanently intertwined with the spirit of the Unknown Soldier he helped lay to rest.

Today, advances in genetic science have given us a remarkable ability to reach into the past and restore names to the nameless. Through DNA analysis and forensic genealogy, the Department of Defense can identify casualties from wars fought many decades ago. That ability raises a difficult question about the Unknown from the Korean War: If identification is now possible, should we attempt it?

The impulse to identify the dead is honorable. Every fallen service member was an individual, with a name, a family, and a life that should not be forgotten. Identification can restore a person’s story and give surviving relatives long-awaited answers.

But the person interred as an Unknown also occupies a unique public role. An unknown service member does not stop being an individual; rather, in anonymity, that individual assumes an additional symbolic identity. The Unknown becomes a representative of every service member who entered battle and never returned, as well as every family denied the certainty of a recovered body and a marked grave.

That role cannot be separated from the reality of unresolved loss. Across generations, war has left families without remains to bury. Their loved ones disappeared at sea, in jungles, in aircraft, or on distant battlefields. Many have no grave to visit and no final answer. At Arlington National Cemetery, there are sections devoted to those missing or whose remains could not be recovered. Their headstones are marked “In Memory of.” These are true cenotaphs, empty gravesites that honor a service member.

The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier gives those families a place where private grief can enter the nation’s public memory. Because the service member’s identity is unknown, no bereaved family is excluded by another family’s biography. The Unknown might have come from any region, race, religion, economic class, or family history. Anonymity does not make the person beneath the stone less human. It allows that person to bear a meaning larger than any one life story.

Identification would bring deserved recognition and perhaps peace to one family. But it would also change the memorial’s character. Once the remains are linked to a particular name, face, hometown, and family, the grave becomes the resting place of a known individual primarily. It may still inspire national reverence, but its universality would inevitably change. The identification of the Vietnam Unknown illustrates both sides of this dilemma. In 1998, DNA testing established that the remains were those of Air Force First Lieutenant Michael Blassie. The identification brought long-denied recognition to Blassie and meaningful closure to his family. That outcome deserves respect.

The Vietnam crypt did not lose all symbolic meaning when it became empty; its inscription continues to honor America’s missing service members from that war. Nevertheless, an empty crypt and an occupied grave of an Unknown do not carry precisely the same meaning. One commemorates absence. The other asks the nation to stand in the physical presence of someone who remains, perhaps by deliberate national covenant, unnamed.

The question, then, is not whether identification is good or whether families deserve answers. Both propositions are compelling. The question is whether the Korean War Unknown should be understood primarily as an unresolved forensic case or as a person entrusted with a singular national role.

In most circumstances, the nation should use every responsible means available to identify its missing service members. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, however, is not an ordinary burial site. It is a collective sanctuary created around the meaning of anonymity. Preserving that anonymity is not a rejection of science, nor is it indifference to the claims of family. It is recognition that this particular resting place serves a purpose no identified grave can fully serve.

A nation needs names. It also needs symbols that can hold what cannot be resolved. It is the essence of Faith. The Unknown Soldier gives physical presence to all those who remain missing and offers every bereaved family a place within the nation’s remembrance.

By allowing the Korean War Unknown to remain unknown, we do not deny the person beneath the stone an identity. We honor the extraordinary representative duty that person has carried in death: to stand for all whose names are known to their families, but whose resting places remain unknown to the nation.

Jari Villanueva, MSgt (retired)

Sources:

Bigler, Philip. Tomb of the Unknown Soldier-A Century of Honor. Quicksburg VA: AppleRidge Publishers, 2019

Cotton, Tom, Sacred Duty: A Soldier’s Tour at Arlington National Cemetery, New York: Harper Collins, 2019

Mossman, B.C. Stark, M.W. The Last Salute: Civil and Military Funeral, 1921-1969 Washington DC: Government Printing Office. 1971

O’Donnell, Patrick K. The Unknowns-The Untold Story Of America’s Unknown Soldier And WWI’s Most Decorated Heroes Who Brought Him Home. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press,2018

Poole, Robert M. On Hallowed Ground-The Story of Arlington National Cemetery. New York: Walker and Company,2009

Links to related articles

https://tombguard.org/news/article/the-tragedy-of-heroism-charles-w-whittlesey

https://www.tapsbugler.com/burial-of-the-unknown-soldier/

https://www.tapsbugler.com/frank-witchey-tomb-bugler/