Lab wants to reunite GIs with Vietnam dog tags

By William Cole
Advertiser Military Writer

Since 1973, the Army's Central Identification Laboratory Hawai'i has recovered and identified the remains of 704 unaccounted-for U.S. service members from Southeast Asia.

But the lab based at Hickam Air Force Base now has a mystery on its hands that scanning electron microscopes, mitochondrial DNA analysis and X-rays can't solve.

The lab has 1,444 dog tags from Vietnam that it would like to reunite with their owners, if those owners really exist.

It's a big "if." A quarter-century after the Vietnam War drew to a close, U.S. dog tags — fake and real — are a cottage industry and hot seller alongside Zippo lighters, bayonets, bullet casings, binoculars and other memorabilia that's snapped up by American, French and Australian tourists.

When Bob Mann, a senior anthropologist at the lab, obtained the dog tags in Ho Chi Minh City in 1994, he didn't think they weren't real, but safeguarded them anyway.

"I always saw them on the street and thought, these are fake dog tags, they are reproduced, and thought nothing of them," said Mann, who has made more than 40 trips to Vietnam since 1992.

Stamping machines and blanks used to produce U.S. dog tags were left behind, and in curio shops in the bigger cities "you can find dog tags in 10 minutes by the hundreds," Mann said.

Some are real, he believes. Many are not. Elvis A. Presley has turned up on some.

But recent publicity over attempts to reunite recovered dog tags with the soldiers who sweated, fought and died with them left Mann and the identification laboratory with second thoughts.

The lab has now launched its own effort to return any real dog tags it has to rightful owners, as well as gather what information it can to figure out how troops and their identifying tags went separate ways. CILHI's Web site provides a list of the names.

Although the identification laboratory primarily searches for, recovers and identifies unaccounted-for soldier's remains, it comes across enough artifacts — including dog tags — to make the return a part of its efforts.

"We're not saying they are real or fake," Mann said of the rectangular metal tags. "What we're trying to find out is, are they real or fake, and what is their history. For thousands of dog tags to end up on the street — how did this happen? Nobody really knows."

Some soldiers wore the tags, which listed name, service or Social Security number, religion, blood type, and sometimes, even gas mask size, in their boots so they wouldn't jingle.

"A lot were probably lost in the field when soldiers were tromping through mud," Mann said.

But it's also easy enough for Vietnamese entrepreneurs to re-stamp names from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., which can be found on the Internet.

Florida businessmen Jim Gain and Rob Stiff were on a business trip to Vietnam in January when they spotted about 600 U.S. dog tags for sale in a back-alley market in Ho Chi Minh City. They were so shocked at what they saw, they returned in May and bought the bunch for $180 — some for as little as 13 cents.

They've reunited at least a dozen with veterans or their families. In July, the men returned a tag bearing Lance Cpl. Allan George Decker's name to his mother at the cemetery in Orlando, Fla., where he is buried. The 19-year-old was killed in 1968 in Quang Nam Province.

The pair have their own Web site.

What the identification laboratory does know is that the names it has match up with soldiers who went home, rather than those who were listed as missing in action. Some are rusty or bent, or have remnants of tape or rubber bands stuck to them. All appear authentic.

Mann ended up with the 1,444 dog tags in 1994 after an American woman was approached in the city of Hue by a Vietnamese couple who said they had some dog tags and remains of American MIAs.

The woman started scribbling down Social Security numbers, but realizing how difficult the task would be, bought the lot, said Ginger Couden, a spokeswoman for the identification laboratory.

The woman contacted a U.S. MIA office and met with officials in Ho Chi Minh City. Mann said the tags still are at the lab. The remains eventually were identified as being that of elderly Vietnamese.

Now Mann would like to see some finality for the dog tags.

"I'm waiting to hear from soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines," he said. "If they say, 'That's my dog tag,' we'll send it back to them."

Reach William Cole at wcole@honoluluadvertiser.com.