Vietnam vet has reunited with dog tags

Vietnam vet has reunited with dog tags

By Michael A. Smith
The Daily News

Published September 20, 2009
DICKINSON — Paul Amason assumed the e-mail was a scam. The sender offered to return a U.S. Army dog tag Amason had lost in Vietnam.

Amason had been in Vietnam, all right. He’d been there the hard way, as a machine-gunner and later a rifle squad leader in the 23rd Infantry, better known as the Americal Division.

He’d soldiered in and around the huge U.S. base at Chu Lai in 1967 and 1968.

Still, he was suspicious.

“I didn’t recall losing any dog tags,” he said recently from his Dickinson home.

But that was a good time and a good place to lose things more important and memorable than a dog tag.

“It wasn’t one of my big priorities to worry about my dog tags while over there,” he said.

So Amason replied to the offer, expecting to get a sales pitch or some other come-on.

What he got was a list of questions.

Where had he been in Vietnam? Had he ever been to Da Nang? Did he wear his dog tags around his neck or laced into his boots?

Amason answered the questions and a few days later got a Fed-Ex package.

Inside was a dog tag he’d worn in Vietnam.

“I knew right away it was a dog tag I was issued during basic training,” he said.

Every Tag Tells A Story

Dog tags are the most personal of a soldier’s issued gear. He may sleep with his rifle, but it’s only his on loan. Sooner or later, Uncle Sam will demand it back.

In hard times, the Army may even salvage and reissue his boots. Socks, skivvies and dog tags are about all he can count as truly his.

And the dog tag is in a class by itself.

Tags are issued in pairs. One on a long chain meant to be worn around the neck, hence the nickname. One on a short chain attached to the long chain, meant to be removed should the need arise.

Made of stainless steel, they are meant to be more durable than the man himself. They can’t be shattered or incinerated, won’t turn to ashes and dust.

Punched into the steel are: first name, last name, middle initial; a service or Social Security number; blood type; religious preference.

Dog tags exist to speak for the soldier when the soldier can no longer speak for himself.

They exist to tell a story.

The dog tag punched “Amason, Paul G.,” which returned to its rightful place after 41 years missing in action, had more than one story to tell.

Cottage Industry

The e-mail that started Amason’s dog tag on its trip home came from the Joint Prisoners of War, Missing in Action Accounting Command based at Hickam Air Force Base, Oahu, Hawaii. That unit’s mission is to search for, recover and identify the remains of Americans gone missing during World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Cold War and the first Gulf War.

It’s a full-time job. The numbers of missing are staggering: World War II, 78,000, although 43,000 of those are beyond the unit’s reach, entombed in sunken ships or otherwise lost at sea; Korea, 8,100, a number equal to about half an infantry division; Vietnam, 1,800.

The tag arrived with a letter telling this story: An American tourist traveling in Vietnam had bought 500 GI dog tags from a street vendor in Hue, north up the coast from Chu Lai. The tags wound up with the unit at Hickam, which tracked Amason down.

The implications of that story are profound, the questions many, some sinister.

If dog tags speak for the soldier when he can’t, what were these trying to say?

The first explanation, from the unit’s public affairs office, was this: When the United States pulled out of Vietnam in 1975, it left everything, including the machines and blanks for making dog tags.

Vietnamese now troll the Internet for information about Vietnam veterans, make fake dog tags and sell them to unwitting tourists.

It has become a cottage industry.

It’s a plausible story, but it begs a question: If most of the dog tags turning up in Vietnam are fake, how did the accounting command know Amason’s was real?

‘Not The Case’

It’s a plausible story, and also false, said Robert Mann, a forensic anthropologist who now heads the accounting command’s forensic academy and who spent years doing field work in an effort to find, identify and bring the missing home.

“I spent 10 years walking back streets all over Southeast Asia,” Mann said. “And that is not the case.”

Mann said he has examined about 3,000 dog tags and has yet to find a fake.

He estimates that 99 percent of those turning up in shops in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia are authentic.

“They were issued to and worn by men in combat,” Mann said.

Moreover, Mann said after interviewing as many as 40 shopkeepers through the years, he doubts Southeast Asia was left littered with machines for making the tags.

“I have not been able to find a single machine,” he said. “And I have some pretty smart people working for me.”

Mann said he has even tried to special order machine-made fakes, with no luck.

“I’ve offered them $20 to make a fake one, and they can’t do it,” Mann said. “They want to, because they need the money, but they can’t do it. They can handstamp them, but they look fake.”

Mann and his team use everything from trained eyes and common sense (Wayne, John D.’s dog tag may very well be a fake) to an electron-scanning microscope to analyze the tags.

Third, the information on dog tags — which sometimes included gas mask sizes and the dates of tetanus vaccinations — is not available on the Internet, Mann said.

The truth is, there’s no need for the Vietnamese to punch out fake GI dog tags, because plenty of real ones exist, he said.

He recalled being in a shop that had about 1,000 dog tags in a plastic container when a man a came in with 20 more in a plastic bag. The man who had found them was a scrap-metal dealer. The shopkeeper bought them on the spot, and Mann bought them from her for $1 apiece.

“There’s a cottage industry, all right,” he said. “But it’s in selling real ones, not making fake ones.”

Left In Country

More than 7 million Americans served in Vietnam, Mann said. Each probably left something there. A lot left dog tags.

Some lost a tag when they lost a foot or a leg, Mann said.

“Marines especially wore one on their boots thinking the boot might survive for an identification better than having it around the neck,” he said. “There was some sense in that.”

A lot of troops probably got separated from their dog tags at field aid stations or hospitals after being wounded. Amason said he thought that’s how his got lost.

Some probably lost tags jumping over fences or crawling through brush.

“Guys had a lot of sets made while in (the) country,” Mann said.

Amason had three sets. That’s one way he knew the found tag was real.

Religious preference on dog tags typically is something broad like “Protestant” or “Catholic.”

But when Amason was being processed into the Army he asked for the words “Assembly of God” to be stamped into his, which is what the found tag said. His later tags were stamped “Protestant.”

As well as helping vet the authenticity of tags, such details tell us something about the experience of combat and how individuals respond to it, Mann said.

“I interviewed a man one time who told me he could tell about when the tag had been made by the religious preference on it,” Mann said. “The set he had when he got to Vietnam said ‘Methodist.’ The second set said ‘Atheist.’ The last set said ‘No Preference.’”

‘They Need To Come Home’

Some of the tags turning up years after the war are far more than interesting artifacts, Mann said.

“Some of these guys died over there, and these dogs tags are going back to their families,” he said.

And sometimes the implications are even more profound.

“Sometimes a dog tag is linked to someone who is missing,” he said. “It may have come from a lost grave or a crash site. It’s a clue that could lead us back to that grave or crash site.”

Mann said he thought that only one missing service man had been found, so far, by tracking a dog tag back to its source.

Chasing dog tags is neither Mann’s nor the unit’s main mission. He has official help at it now, but once it was something he did at night and on weekends with help from his wife.

He did it out of a simple sense of duty, summed up in a simple explanation:

“They need to come home,” he said.

The Tourist’s Story

Andrew Wietecha went to Southeast Asia as a tourist, not a soldier. He had planned to spend three months traveling and scuba diving. But in Vietnam, he found a mission. Or maybe it found him. Like a lot of the Americans who preceded Wietecha to that country, he accepted the mission reluctantly, from a sense of duty, and did the best he could.

One day while strolling around a smallish town called Hoi An, a little south of Chu Lai, Wietecha, 31, saw a few dozen dog tags for sale in a curio shop. He was conflicted.

“I didn’t want to promote the trafficking of war material,” he said. “But I felt very strongly that they were real and should be repatriated to the U.S. government.”

Wietecha, who lives near Grand Rapids, Mich., finally decided that buying the dog tags was the “lesser of two evils.”

There were 46 in that first group, including one for “Amason, Paul G.,” Wietecha said.

Once he made that first buy, he saw dog tags everywhere. He bought all he saw. He bought so many he stopped trying to keep notes.

He bought about 400 in Hue alone, he said.

When it was time to leave Vietnam, Wietecha had bought 530 dog tags for about $1,600.

He thought he probably would have trouble leaving the country with the tags, so he turned them over to the U.S. Embassy in Ho Chi Minh City, which once was called Saigon.

The Soldier’s Story

Dog tags can tell us who a soldier was but nothing of his story. His dog tag won’t tell you that Paul G. Amason is a war hero, for instance. Neither will Amason, it turns out, unless you ask.

He was from Seadrift. He was 19 years old when his boots first touched the soil of South Vietnam. It was December 1967. He spent a little less than 10 months in the country.

He earned two Bronze Stars with “V” devices — the letter stands for Valor — and two Purple Hearts in that short tour of duty.

He was shot through the hand in an ambush outside a village so small even he can’t recall the name. One Purple Heart.

“They shot us up pretty good,” he said.

He left the safety of a rice paddy dike and returned into the field of fire to save a wounded friend who could not save himself. One Bronze Star.

Surrounded with his unit by North Vietnamese Army regulars and Viet Cong in a valley near a place called Tam Ky, he was shot through the shoulder. One Purple Heart.

Wounded and bleeding, he led his squad out of that snare to safety. One Bronze Star.

The second wound earned Amason a trip back to the States. He left the Army in 1970 with the rank of sergeant.

He moved to Dickinson in 1977 and has been there since, with his wife, Linda, raising children and working in construction, including 24 years with Brown and Root.

The dog tag brought back memories.

“All bad,” Amason, now 61, said laughing.

“No. No not all bad.”

Ellie