Late Bradenton veteran played role in identifying the Vietnam Unknown

Editor’s note: This is the ninth in a series of Vietnam War stories shared by Manatee County residents in conjunction with the PBS documentary “The Vietnam War” by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick.

Retired Col. William C. Parnell was a haunted man.

He could never shake the memory of the partial set of skeletal remains of an American pilot shot down during the Vietnam War near Cambodia.

A South Vietnamese Army patrol had found the remains at a crash site in 1972, as well as an ID card, dog tags, a wallet containing a family picture, part of a flight suit, and the remnant of a pistol holster.

The Vietnamese patrol turned the remains and the other crash site items over to Parnell, who was then an Army captain serving as an operations office at An Loc.

He read the ID card. It was for Air Force Lt. Michael Blassie.

Blassie had died about six months earlier, on May 11, 1972, when his A-37 jet was shot down outside An Loc.

Parnell wrapped the remains and the other items found at the crash site in plastic and held them overnight.

Soon after, he turned them over to the Saigon mortuary, along with the ID card and other items. The remains were eventually sent to a search and recovery center in Thailand before being forwarded to the Army’s central identification lab in Hawaii.

There the facts become contradictory. There were reports that the remains became separated from the identifying items.

But in a 1978 report, the chief anthropologist made a controversial conclusion: The skeletal remains could not be Blassie’s because they did not match the age, height and weight listed on his ID.

In 1984, the unidentified remains of an American killed in the Vietnam War were interred at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery.

There was political pressure to include an unidentified Vietnam War soldier alongside those from World War I, World War II and the Korean War.

Somehow, Parnell always felt that those Vietnam remains belonged to Blassie.

It took a pair of CBS reporters, correspondent Vince Gonzales and reporter Eric Enberg, to unravel the mystery.

They worked from a 1994 article by former Green Beret Ted Sampley in the U.S. Veteran Dispatch, asserting that the remains in the Tomb of the Unknowns were Blassie’s.

Their investigation led them in 1996 to the living room of William and Elizabeth Parnell, where Bill Parnell, a retired colonel, told them about the remains that he wrapped in plastic during the Vietnam War.

“All these TV cameras were there,” Elizabeth Parnell recalls. “All I did was serve them coffee.”

The report by Gonzales and Enberg aired in 1998, telling the nation the identity of the remains in the crypt.

The remains were exhumed later that year, and through DNA testing, confirmed as Blassie’s.

William and Elizabeth Parnell moved to Lakewood Ranch in 1997. He passed away in 2009 at age 73. Agent Orange was listed as a contributing factor.

“Somehow Bill knew. He was never happy about this. He never let up on it. Every soldier needs to go home. He couldn’t live with it,” Elizabeth Parnell said recently.

In 2007, Elizabeth Parnell shared the story with the East Manatee Republican Club.

She still has a copy of an email from her husband in 2007, when he offered a refresher before her talk with the club.

“The young pilot was U.S. Air Force First Lieutenant Michael Joseph Blassie. He was shot down north of An Loc in May (I believe) 1972. We recovered his remains in October/November 1972 as I recall. Somehow the ID tags, ID card and other things were separated from his remains and he ended up in the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery in, I believe, 1983 or so. In 1996 I was called by CBS News asking about his recovery. And the rest his history,” Bill Parnell wrote.

Bill Parnell, who served several tours of duty in Vietnam, was very frustrated with the war, Elizabeth said.

“It was awful. They would go out and kill, and get killed. You would do the same thing over and over again, and you wouldn’t move forward,” she said.

“He was always restless. He always kept moving. He said you can’t hit a moving target. That carried over into his personality,” Elizabeth Parnell said.

After the DNA testing confirmed the identity of Michael Blassie’s remains, the family had them removed and reinterred at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery in Missouri.

And what of the crypt for the remains of the Vietnam Unknown?

It remains empty.

“The crypt cover has been replaced with one that has the inscription “Honoring and Keeping Faith with America’s Missing Servicemen, 1958-1975,” according to arlingtoncemetery.mil, the Arlington National Cemetery website.

This story was originally published September 24, 2017 at 3:50 PM with the headline "Late Bradenton veteran played role in identifying the Vietnam Unknown."