Burial Mix-Up Keeps Vietnam War Deaths Alive for 3 Families

For three decades, Mary Jellison visited her Marine son’s grave--to mourn and cry, to place American flags and his favorite yellow tea roses next to his black marble headstone.

She had lost her handsome, brown-eyed son in Vietnam 29 years ago, to a hero’s death at the tender age of 20. His mother’s only solace was that her child’s body was returned home for burial.

Or so she thought.

On a raw, gloomy April day, cemetery workers lifted a mud-splotched casket from the frozen earth. A week later, forensic experts tentatively confirmed the news that the Marines first broke to her two years earlier: A mistake had been made. The soldier she buried in this Indiana soil apparently wasn’t her son, Mark Warren Judge.

But if it wasn’t him, who was it? And how could such a heartbreaking error occur?

The explanation provided by the Defense Department served only to plunge two more families into excruciating limbo:

It believes that the exhumed casket held another Marine, Cpl. William Berry, who died with Judge on a bloody September morning in 1967.

And in a tragic domino-like scenario, it suspects that Lance Cpl. Kenneth Plumadore, a third Marine whose body was thought to have been obliterated in ferocious fighting, is buried in California--in Berry’s grave.

A singular action in 1986 sparked the discovery of the unprecedented three-way mix-up: Vietnam returned a set of deteriorating bones to the U.S. government that the military later identified as Judge.

But rather than offering comfort, the repatriation has anguished three families and left them mistrustful and suspicious of the motives of the country that their loved ones fought and died for more than a generation ago.

So many mistakes were made in Vietnam. This was yet another gut-wrenching error.

As the final pieces of this 30-year-old puzzle fall into place, the likelihood that Mary Jellison never buried her son has left her reeling.

“I just felt so sad, thinking I had my son 29 years,” she said. “Then I thought, ‘You’re not the only mother in the world that didn’t get your son back.’ You just have to live with that. You just have to accept it and go on.

“It gives you a funny feeling, to look to where your son’s tomb was and think, ‘Maybe I won’t be coming out here anymore,’ ” she said. “It gives you a sick feeling thinking you may not have a grave to go to at all.”

*

On that blustery April day at Concordia Gardens Cemetery, a Lutheran pastor read a prayer before the exhumation:

“Give all those here today the strength, knowledge and wisdom to find the answers to our many questions. Grant us peace and healing of the wounds still evident from that horrible war so many years ago.”

The day marked the first time since the ordeal began that the three families of the Marines, strangers all, had come together.

Now, they share scars, as well as memories, of three young men whose eager, boyish faces seem frozen in time.

Jellison, a youthful-looking, 71-year-old grandmother, smiles sadly when she thinks of her lanky son, who worked as a grocery clerk while in high school and then returned home to study at his maple desk until 3 a.m.

“He was the best son a mother could have,” she recalled, reminiscing how he always urged her to save money. “He was so grown up. I always feel guilty. He was never a kid. He had a 40-year-old head on 18-year-old shoulders.’

Pat Plumadore remembers her brother Kenneth as a popular, towering kid whose friends say he was destined to be a Marine, an avid outdoorsman who got an M-21 rifle for his 16th birthday, enlisted at 17 and was a Vietnam casualty at 18.

And Fred Berry remembers his older brother, William, as a born athlete who excelled as a track-and-field star in high school and also loved to hunt and fish.

A Vietnam veteran who joined the Army after William’s death, Fred Berry found it especially difficult witnessing the exhumation of the casket that apparently holds his brother.

“It just brought back a lot of memories that were hidden away,” the soft-spoken lumber mill worker said. Still, he had traveled nearly 2,000 miles from his Roseburg, Ore., home to be there.

The twisted root of this turmoil is Operation Kingfisher, a search-and-destroy mission near the Con Thien fire base in the Quang Tri Province, in Vietnam’s demilitarized zone.

According to the Pentagon, PFC. Judge, assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment, was the point man, taking the brunt of the first machine-gun fire when hit by the enemy on Sept. 21, 1967. (His bravery earned him the Navy Cross, posthumously.)

Survivors say the Marines were surrounded in a “pinwheel” ambush as machine-gun fire and grenades rained down and the enemy closed in on the Americans, trapped in knee-high grassy, open fields.

The fighting was so intense that the Marines were forced to withdraw. They returned nearly three weeks later, piecing together and taking to an Army mortuary in Da Nang the decomposed remains of all but one of the 15 dead comrades left behind--raising the possibility that the Vietnamese may have captured one of the men.

And that’s where the accounting process began to go awry.

Of the 14 bodies, 12 were positively identified. But Defense Department records note “considerable difficulty” in identifying two sets of remains. Finally, it was determined that they were Judge--Jellison’s son by a prior marriage--and Berry.

Plumadore was believed to be the 15th man, the missing casualty, and he was declared killed in action. His sister says the family originally was told that no body would be returned.

That’s how things stood until 1986, when Vietnam returned the remains of a Marine buried outside a field hospital. The critically wounded American supposedly had been dragged from the battlefield to a hospital, where he died within days.

The Pentagon first thought it was Plumadore, but dental records ruled him out. The remains didn’t match any of the other men unaccounted for, and sophisticated DNA testing wasn’t available to investigate further. So, for several years, Remains No. 0048-86 were stored at the Army Central Identification Lab in Hawaii.

By 1994, the military said tests indicated that the repatriated remains were those of Judge, and blood samples taken from Jellison and her daughter confirmed a DNA match.

Believing the morticians misidentified the remains after the chaotic 1967 battle, the Defense Department has laid out this theory:

* Mark Judge’s body was the one returned by Vietnam in 1986.

* Berry apparently is buried in Judge’s grave. Jellison says military experts and private specialists told her that Berry’s dental records match the remains in her son’s grave. And Fred Berry says he recently was told something similar.

* Plumadore is probably buried in Yreka, Calif.--in Berry’s grave.

The Defense Department says it regrets the trauma the mix-up has caused and is owning up to its error.

“We’re not trying to cover anything up or to create a problem for any of these families,” said Susan Hansen, a department spokeswoman. “It would have been an easier course of action for the U.S. government not to do anything.”

That candor is appreciated by Ann Griffith, director of the National League of POW-MIA Families.

“As horrendous as it must be for the families involved . . . admitting a mistake of that gravity is not an easy thing to do,” Griffith said.

“It also causes others to wonder how many more mistakes were made. It’s an uncertainty you don’t need.”

For the three families, uncertainty still reigns: The California grave must be exhumed, more tests must be conducted, and a military review board must sign off on the identifications.

It has been an agonizing time for Jellison, a genteel Georgia native who has become a tenacious detective, looking for proof that the body returned to American officials a decade ago was, in fact, her son.

She has filed Freedom of Information requests, traveled to Washington and fired the attorney she was urged to hire, saying he delayed matters. She also has tangled with the Defense Department, accusing them of providing her with incomplete records, and trying to bully her into accepting the body Vietnam handed over.

Jellison has insisted on independent DNA tests before she accepts the remains, but says private labs are reluctant to help because they also do government work.

Fearing that the government was about to dig up the Indiana grave, she moved first with the exhumation and called in local anthropologists, who joined military forensic experts in examining the remains. In addition to the dental identification, she says she was told that the bones appear to be too stocky to be her son.

Jellison has no regrets about her tenacity.

“I was fighting for my son’s respect,” she said. “I couldn’t turn my back on my son.”

Pat Plumadore has been just as aggressive and outspoken in her efforts to clear up conflicting reports about her brother. She has written elected officials and placed ads in veterans magazines, searching for anyone who had seen her brother die.

“We’ve never really had any resolution,” the 50-year-old Syracuse, N.Y., county worker said. “You don’t have the finality of a burial. The grieving goes on and on.”

Pat Plumadore says that over the years she has heard that her brother died in battle, was taken prisoner, could be buried in Indiana--and now may be buried in California. She also says she is outraged that the government didn’t tell her until 1992 that Kenneth may have been taken captive.

Pat Plumadore, who has requested that her brother’s status be changed from killed to missing, thinks that the government wants to say it can account for all three Marines to facilitate relations with Vietnam.

She will travel to California when the grave is exhumed but isn’t optimistic: Mortuary records indicate a 5-foot-8 man is buried there, she says--much shorter than her brother.

“If they do tests and it is a 6-3 Marine, I will be so thankful,” Kenneth’s sister said. “I will thank God for answering my prayers and bringing my brother home.”

Fred Berry too will go to California. A combat veteran, he understands how a mix-up could occur in battle; he knows that men can get left behind. He has no quarrel with the government, but isn’t ready to blindly accept official conclusions.

“They haven’t done anything to me,” he said. “But I’m going to watch them.”

*

When the Marines first approached her in August 1994, Mary Jellison’s heart momentarily brimmed with hope. “I asked, ‘Is my son alive?’ . . . I thought maybe he was an invalid somewhere.”

Now, nearly two years later, she still has not accepted the remains the Vietnamese handed over in 1986.

Jellison wants more tests done, including a facial reconstruction of the skull the Marines say is her son, before she holds a second burial. But even that won’t bring her true peace of mind.

She tries, somehow, to be philosophical about the outcome.

“Whether it be my son or somebody’s else son, I have five plots at the cemetery,” she said. “I would give him a home and call it my son and be hoping and praying it is my son. But how would I know? How will I ever know?”

“It’s almost like you have to accept it and it’s closure, but in your heart, you will always wonder, ‘Is Mark still out there?’ ”