Dog Tags Lost and Found In Southeast Asia: An Update

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The April 2002 issue of Vietnam Magazine carried an article about the 1,444 dog tags that an American tourist had purchased from shops and street vendors in Hue City, Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV), in 1994. The tourist — a former Army nurse — hoped that the dog tags might lead to the recovery and identification of some of the then 2,400 (now less than 1,850) American soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who had gone missing in Southeast Asia, and she therefore immediately notified the U.S. MIA Office in Hanoi and turned the dog tags over to members of the Joint Task Force-Full Accounting (JTF-FA; now superseded by the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, JPAC) and its Central Identification Laboratory (CIL), for verification of their authenticity.

Little did the tourist know that her good Samaritan deed would serve as the catalyst for some of the most in-depth research into dog tags to date. As none of the dog tags that she provided proved to be those of Americans missing in action (MIA) in Southeast Asia, they were turned over to scientists at the CIL to determine whether the tags had actually been worn by Americans who served in Southeast Asia, or whether they were fakes created for sale to unsuspecting tourists. Several years of investigation and analysis followed to determine which of the 1,444 dog tags were real and which were not. The situation was further complicated by numerous stories of rosters of U.S. service members, U.S. dog tag embossing machines and U.S. dog tag blanks left behind when the last troops withdrew in 1975. One of the main reasons for trying to trace dog tags to their origin was the hope that they might lead investigators to American crash and burial sites that had yet to be located.

To get to the bottom of what we called the ‘mystery of the dog tags,’ we needed to address four basic questions. First, were the dog tags issued by the United States or were they faked by Vietnamese citizens for the purpose of making a few dollars? Second, were there any fake dog tags among the 1,444? Third, if these dog tags were genuine, how did they end up in Vietnamese hands? Finally, would Americans want their dog tags back after 30 years and, if so, how could we know and how would we locate them so many years after the war? For whatever reason, these relics of war had been left behind, and we wanted to know how and why. We undertook this project with no preconceived notions, not knowing what we would find or learn. We would instead let the evidence speak for itself.

One area of confusion concerning the authenticity of dog tags is the difference between dog tags and dog tag rubbings (or as the Vietnamese call them, ‘paper dog tags’). Some investigators have mistakenly lumped these all into the same category. The difference is that a dog tag is made of metal and, in order to fake it, has to be duplicated using another metal dog tag. To produce a fake dog tag, a fabricator needs not only an original dog tag or a copy of a U.S. duty roster to get the service member’s biographical information, but also a stamping machine and a genuine (not hand-made) dog tag blank of the correct weight, material and design. In comparison, a dog tag rubbing is made by transferring the exact information from a real or fake dog tag by holding it against a piece of paper (often the foil from inside a cigarette pack) or carbon paper, and rubbing it with a pencil or pen. In fact, some paper dog tags are handwritten.

Vietnamese ‘bone dealers’ (a cottage industry for some unscrupulous citizens in Vietnam) produce paper dog tags and turn them over to U.S. authorities along with a small chip of animal or human bone or tooth in the mistaken belief that they’ll receive money or preferential immigration status for their family to the United States. They produce and send in paper dog tags as proof of their sincerity and keep the original dog tags for making future rubbings. The CIL and other government agencies working in the POW/MIA arena receive many paper dog tags each month, and some of the names on them, we’ve been told, have been seen more than 60 times. Over the years we have seen numerous copies of the same paper dog tag through the CIL — ‘Bunk Queer’ and ‘John Mullins,’ for example — but we have not seen more than four metal dog tags from the same individual. The point is that paper dog tags are not the same as metal ones and should not be discussed as if they are; such a comparison is apples and oranges.

The first step in our research was to list as many of the 1,444 names as possible (some were damaged or too rusty to read) on the CIL Web site — now listed as www.jpac.pacom.mil — so that anyone browsing the Web could check to see if his or her name was listed. The reader could then contact the JPAC Web master by e-mail or telephone and answer a few questions that only the dog tag’s original owner or next of kin could know. For example, the veteran might be asked to give the last four digits of his or her Social Security number, or the complete military service number as listed on the dog tag. If the correct information was provided, we mailed the dog tag and a copy of the April 2002 Vietnam article to the veteran, along with a signed letter from the CIL. We return each dog tag to its original owner in the same condition that we received it — dirty, rusty, bent, scratched, or clean and shiny. We don’t want to wash away the dirt, or memories or evidence of what had happened three decades before.

Judging from the many Web sites (for example, FoundDogTags.com, topvietnamveterans.org, canamission.com, VietnamDogtags.com, etc.) and coverage in newspapers and national television shows, including the ‘Oprah Winfrey Show,’ across the United States in the past few years, reuniting lost dog tags with their owners has gained some attention. Unfortunately, and without any apparent basis in fact, some have labeled such reunions as misguided and the recovered dog tags as imitations manufactured by the Vietnamese. Such allegations have cast a shadow on the authenticity of all dog tags coming from the streets of Vietnam. Our research, by contrast, is showing that there appears to be less deviousness at play than some people might think. For example, we compared duplicate dog tags held at the JPAC with those of Cana Mission and Vietnam Dogtags, and found that the information and their features matched, indicating that they were stamped by the same stamping machines — rather than one dog tag having been stamped Stateside and the other one in Vietnam.

In November 2001 we posted more than 1,000 names on the CIL Web site. In January 2002 we got our first response, from a veteran named Dan Clipson who now resides in Oklahoma. Clipson served in Phu Bai from 1969 to 1970, and didn’t remember losing any dog tags. By asking a few questions, we verified that it was his dog tag and sent it to him the next day. A few weeks later we received a letter from him saying, ‘Please know that this is one former American soldier who thanks you for giving back to him a piece of his history….’ We were elated to be able to help Clipson reclaim a piece of his youth, and then waited for the next query; it arrived two months later. Since then we’ve received two or three dog tag queries each month.

Over the next year we verified and returned more than 20 dog tags to veterans living in Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New York, South Dakota, Texas, Virginia and Germany. Twelve had served in the Army, two in the Navy and seven in the Marines. Two other veterans had died after the war, and we sent their dog tags to surviving family members.

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Tags: 20th - 21st Century, Historical Conflicts, Vietnam War

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