U.S. ‘Dog Tag’ Found on Body, Nicaragua Says

A government army patrol fighting U.S.-backed rebels in northern Nicaragua found an identification tag “typically employed by the U.S. Army” on the body of a slain guerrilla, Defense Minister Humberto Ortega said Saturday.

Ortega said that he presumed the man carrying the “dog tag” was an American citizen.

The metal tag, reproduced on paper in a Defense Ministry communique, bore the name Roger Patterson and the identification number 419-96-7523.

Interviewed in Alabama

Nicaragua, however, did not produce a body to go with the tag and today’s Montgomery, Ala., Advertiser carries an interview with Patterson, who it said is alive and well in Selma, Ala.

Patterson said he had served in a U.S. Army motor transport company in Honduras in top secret operations near the Nicaraguan border from September to December of 1983, but had not been in Nicaragua. He said he still has his dog tags. “The only thing I left behind was a set of jungle fatigues,” he said.

Patterson said that in August, 1984, after more than five years in the service, “Army doctors diagnosed me as a paranoid schizophrenic” when he had a nervous breakdown during a tour in Germany.

“I don’t know how any of this happened,” he said. “I’ve been trying to go on 100% disability and have been treated at a veteran’s hospital since I returned to Selma.”

In Washington, a Pentagon spokesman said that a man named Roger E. Patterson with the military serial number 419-96-7523 served in the Army from July, 1979, until November, 1984, when he was discharged at Ft. Rucker, Ala.

The Marxist Sandinista government here maintains that the rebels, known as contras, are mercenaries in the service of the Reagan Administration.

President Reagan is seeking $14 million in funds from Congress for the rebels, whom he refers to as freedom fighters. Until last April, the guerrillas got covert funds from the CIA.

The dog tag Nicaragua said it found listed its owner’s blood type as O-positive and his religion as Baptist.

“You will hear more about the discovery of the dead American personality,” Ortega said. “This is more evidence of the irresponsible policy of the North American Administration. The toll of American blood shed in our conflict is rising.”

The Defense Ministry report said that the wearer served with a rebel brigade named after Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, the Reagan Administration’s former ambassador to the United Nations and an advocate of military pressure on Nicaragua. Reporters who visited one of the contra border camps on the Honduran-Nicaraguan border recently were told that the rebels had named a unit after Kirkpatrick.

The Defense Ministry said the dog tag’s wearer died during a March 27 battle with a Sandinista counterinsurgency battalion in north-central Nicaragua near the town of Waslala, about 100 miles northeast of Managua.

By Saturday afternoon, the U.S. Embassy in Managua said that it had not yet been notified officially of the claimed death of an American.

In Tegucigalpa, Honduras, a spokesman for the largest rebel group, the Nicaraguan Democratic Force, denied with “absolute certainty” that any U.S. citizen fought with its forces inside Nicaragua.

“The only thing that occurs to me is that he could have been a gringo volunteer (with the Sandinistas) and they are trying to make him one of ours,” said Indelecio Rodriguez, a member of the force’s directorate.

In the United States, the head of an organization that has sent American volunteers to fight with the contras said he knew of no one named Roger Patterson.

“I can honestly say that I do not know the individual,” said Tom Posey, head of Civilian Military Assistance, an Alabama-based organization. “It sounds like a phony to me.”

Posey said that American volunteers had on occasion gone into Nicaragua with the contras but that they were instructed to remove any identification that might reveal them to be Americans before going in.

The Washington representative of the Nicaraguan Democratic Force said that no Americans fought with their troops.

“I deny it categorically,” he said. “I don’t care what Tom Posey says. I don’t know who his people are fighting with.