PARRISH, FRANK COLLINS
Remains Returned (see text)
Name: Frank Collins Parrish
Rank/Branch: E7/US Army Special Forces
Unit: Company D, Detachment A-411, 5th SFG
Date of Birth: 19 September 1931 (Big Springs TX)
Home City of Record: Cleburne TX
Date of Loss: 16 January 1968
Country of Loss: South Vietnam
Loss Coordinates: 102755N 1060838E (XS252570)
Status (in 1973): Missing In Action
Category: 1
Acft/Vehicle/Ground: Ground
Refno: 0990
Other Personnel In Incident: Earl R. Biggs (remains returned)
Source: Compiled by Homecoming II Project 01 April 1990 with the assistance of
one or more of the following: raw data from U.S. Government agency sources,
correspondence with POW/MIA families, published sources, interviews. Updated
by the P.O.W. NETWORK 1998.
REMARKS: ARVN ADV - UNIT AMBUSHED
SYNOPSIS: On January 16, 1968, SFC Earl Biggs and SFC Frank Parrish were serving
as advisors to a Vietnamese strike force. That morning, they departed with a
camp strike force company from Phuoc Tay on a search operation extending east of
the camp. At 1215 hours, about 16 miles northwest of My Tho, Vietnam, the strike
force was ambushed by Vietnamese communists. Later that afternoon, two companies
were inserted into the same area to look for survivors.
Search efforts were continued until January 18 without the recovery of Biggs or
Parrish. CIDG and LLDB survivors reported that the Viet Cong captured and
summarily executed both Biggs and Parrish. Both men were classified Missing in
Action. The Defense Intelligence Agency further expanded the classification to
include an enemy knowledge ranking of 1. Category 1 indicates "confirmed
knowledge" and includes all personnel who were identified by the enemy by name,
identified by reliable information received from escapees or releasees, reported
by highly reliable intelligence sources, or identified through analysis of
all-source intelligence.
On January 17, 1972, remains were reported in the vicinity of the action which
were determined to be those of SFC Parrish. These remains were recovered and
identified in June, 1973 and returned to Parrish's family for burial. Parrish's
brother, Johnnie, thought the forensic evidence was inadequate.
Government forensics experts had based their identification of Sgt. Parrish on
three pieces of evidence: (1) the remains had been found near where St. Parrish
had been ambushed; (2) photographs of Parrish supposedly corresponded with
x-rays of the skull, even though the skull had neither jawbone nor teeth; and
(3) medical equipment like that which Sgt. Parrish carried was found near the
ambush site.
The Pentagon informed Johnnie Parrish that he could accept it or reject it, but
the identification was final. It was "concrete proof." Parrish's parents
accepted the identification, and eventually, Johnnie Parrish did also, however
reluctantly.
After American involvement in Indochina ended in 1975, reports relating to
Americans missing in Southeast Asia began to be received by the U.S. Government.
There have been reports of other remains having been exhumed by local farmers,
but no confirmation has been possible of their identity. These reports have been
tentatively correlated to several cases of missing Americans.
On Friday, December 29, 1989, members of Frank Parrish's family met with
government officials (a military man named Cole and a civilian named Manning)
who explained that an error had been made in 1973. Newly recovered remains
returned by the Vietnamese to U.S. control had been positively identified as
those of Frank Parrish. At the same time, the remains of Parrish's partner, SFC
Earl R. Biggs, had been recovered and identified. The family was shown new
forensic data, including dental records. This time, Johnnie Parrish felt assured
that the identification had been accurately made. The officials explained that a
meeting would be held in Washington the following Tuesday, following the holiday
weekend, to record the family's acceptance of the new remains identification and
to establish a timetable for exchanging the remains. Johnnie Parrish requested
that he be kept fully informed, and was assured that he would be.
On Saturday, December 30, John Parrish drove from his home in Joshua, Texas to
the Rose Hill Cemetery in Cleburn to visit his brother's grave. He photographed
the grave.
On New Year's Day, 1990, John Parrish again drove from his home to Rose Hill
Cemetery for a funeral ceremony for an old friend. After the ceremony, Parrish
decided to again visit the gravesite of his younger brother. What he found there
shocked and angered him. His brother's grave had been opened and the remains
removed. He had not been informed.
Parrish immediately drove to the Crusier-Pearson-Mayfield Funeral Home and was
told that the grave had been opened because they had needed to prepare the
gravesite for his brother's body, which would be buried at 1:00 the following
day. Parrish was once again shocked and angered that he had not been told.
January 2, 1990, on the day of the supposed meeting to determine a timetable for
exchange of remains, Frank Parrish was buried in his home state of Texas. On
January 3, 1990, the U.S. announced that remains returned by the Vietnamese
during 1989 had been positively identified as being those of SFC Earl R. Biggs.
No public mention was made of the newly-identified remains of Frank Parrish.
Further investigation revealed that neither the U.S. Government nor the funeral
home had obtained proper exhumation and transportation permits to remove and
transport the remains from Frank Parrish's grave. Over a holiday weekend, the
government had secretly and illegally removed the body, and had not notified the
family as promised. Had John Parrish not investigated, Frank Parrish might have
been buried without his family present. Critics began using terms like
"grave-robbing" in relation to the Parrish case.
In the Parrish case, the 1973 identification was hastily and incorrectly made.
Other similar cases support criticism that the U.S. Government is making
positive identifications, sometimes upon the flimsiest of evidence, in order to
more quickly resolve the issue of the more than 2300 Americans missing in
Southeast Asia. In this case, the family was further grieved by the inept
conduct of the government in notifying them of the exchange and burial schedule.
Of the greatest concern, however, is the fact that, for 17 years, the U.S.
Government had considered Frank Parrish "accounted for." Therefore, even if a
first-hand live sighting report had been received that Parrish was alive, it
would have been discredited on the basis that he was dead. The government had
"concrete proof."
Tragically, reports of Americans still held in captivity continue to flow into
the U.S. intelligence community. Many officials who have seen these largely
classified reports are convinced that hundreds of Americans are still alive in
Southeast Asia, still prisoners of a war that most Americans would like to put
behind them.
Many fear the books are being closed on Americans who are alive. If so, what
would they think of us for allowing it to happen? How many would serve the next
time their country called them if they knew they could be abandoned?
-------------------------------------------
U.S. Government Caught Robbing Grave of Vietnam Veteran to Hide Its
Mistake in Identification of Remains
For U.S. Veteran News and Report, March 1990
By Paul Warren
Johnnie Parrish always wondered whether that was really his brother, Army
Master Sgt. Frank C. Parrish, buried in Rose Hill Cemetery in Cleburne,
Texas.
When the Army returned Sgt. Parrish's remains for burial in May, 1973,
more than five years after he was reported captured in a Viet Cong
ambush and summarily executed, Johnnie Parrish thought the forensic
evidence a bit flimsy.
The forensic "experts" had based their identification of Sgt. Parrish
on three pieces of evidence: (1) the remains had been found near where
Sgt. Parrish and his Vietnamese strike force had been ambushed; (2)
photographs of Sgt. Parrish supposedly corresponded with X-rays of the
skull, even though the skull had neither jawbone nor teeth; and medical
equipment like that which Sgt. Parrish carried was found near the
ambush site. "But my mother and dad and everybody else accepted,"
Johnnie Parrish told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Eventually, Johnnie
Parrish also accepted it, however reluctantly. "The thing that hurt me
is that in 1973, the Pentagon said to me, `You can accept or reject
it, but this is final. This is concrete proof,' and I didn't like the
attitude," Johnnie Parrish said.
Then, in early January this year, Johnnie Parrish drove from his home
in Joshua, Texas, to the Rose Hill Cemetery to attend a funeral
ceremony for an old friend. After the ceremony, Parrish decided to
visit the grave of his younger brother. What Johnnie Parrish discovered
at his brother's gravesite shocked and angered him. His brother's grave
had been opened and the remains removed.
Johnnie Parrish had accidentally stumbled onto a government-endorsed
grave robbery. The U.S. government was trying to hide a mistake it made
17 years earlier when it incorrectly identified the remains of Sgt.
Parrish. They were trying to hide it from the Parrish family and hide
it from the public. Without the proper permits, without telling anyone
in the family, the government had come in and robbed Sgt. Parrish's
grave and sent the remains to Hawaii. "Man, I am as mad as a wet toad,"
Johnnie Parrish said after viewing the desecrated grave, chastizing
employees at the Crusier-Pearson-Mayfield Funeral Home in Cleburne,
which handled Sgt. Parrish's burial and the exhumation of the remains.
Johnnie Parrish had been warned by the funeral home in December, 1989,
that the government may have made a mistake in identifying his
brother's remains. Parrish requested that he be kept informed of the
progress of the case and was promised by funeral home employees and an
unidentified government official that he would be. But the next thing
Johnnie Parrish heard about his brother's case was when he looked into
the empty grave.
The government began furiously backpedaling on the Parrish case when a
Pentagon informant leaked information to the U.S. Veteran News and
Report about the mixup of remains and subsequent attempts to cover up
the mistake through grave robbery. According to information obtained by
U.S. Veteran News and Report, the U.S. government obtained neither the
permit required for exhumation of the remains originally believed to be
those of Sgt. Parrish nor the permit necessary for transportation of
the remains. "The Army is under the impression that all necessary state
requirements would be met by the funeral home," said Major Lois Faires,
a spokeswoman for the Pentagon. Officials at the
Crusier-Pearson-Mayfield Funeral Home refused to comment on the case.
But Johnson County Clerk Robby Goodnight confirmed that neither the
exhumation permit nor the transportation permit had been obtained.
Faires said the mixup in remains was unusual. "This is extremely rare
that something of this nature occurred," she said. Faires told the Fort
Worth Star-Telegram that she knew of only one other case in which the
wrong remains had been sent for burial.
But Ted Sampley, chairman of Homecoming II, said he knows of at least
10 cases in which it has been proven that the wrong remains were sent
for burial. "And we don't know how many they have managed to hide,"
said Sampley.
Perhaps the most infamous case of an incorrect burial involves Marine
Sgt. Ronald Ridgeway, one of nine Marines the government thought it had
buried in a mass grave in St. Louis in 1968.
Ridgeway was a member of Company B, 1st Battalion, 26th Marines,
stationed at Khe Sanh on Feb. 25, 1968, when his unit was ambushed by
North Vietnamese regulars while on patrol just outside the base.
Although the ambush site was within view of the base, Ridgeway's unit
was pinned down by heavy fire and attempts to reinforce it were driven
back by the NVA. When the Marine units finally were able to break
contact and return to base, they had to leave their dead behind. It was
several days before the Marines could attempt to recover their dead
because of heavy enemy activity.
When they were finally able to get into the area, the Marines found
that repeated harassment and interdiction fires had badly scrambled the
remains of their fellow Marines. They recovered what they thought were
the remains of nine dead Marines, none of whom could be individually
identified.
Among them, according to the government forensic experts, was Ridgeway.
Those sets of remains were combined with the remains of nine Navy men
who had died in a separate incident and were interred in a mass grave
in St. Louis. But, on Jan. 28, 1973, nearly five years after he
supposedly was buried, Ridgeway was repatriated from a North Vietnamese
prisoner of war camp.
Ridgeway had come back from the dead, much to the chagrin of the U.S.
government. Although the relatives of seven of those Marines believed
buried in St. Louis found little hope in Ridgeway's return, the wife of
one of them, Ruth Brellenthin, thought it entirely possible that her
husband, Lance Corporal Michael Brellenthin, might have escaped with
Ridgeway.
For five years the government refused to give Mrs. Brellenthin
information about Ridgeway's whereabouts so she could question him
about the incident. When she finally found him on her own, it was 1978,
10 years after the ambush. Ridgeway told her he had not seen Michael
Brellenthin during or after the ambush. But an intelligence report
obtained by Mrs. Brellenthin indicated that in late February, 1968,
approximately 20-30 U.S. POWs were sighted near Khe Sanh.
According to the report: "Source observed several of the PWs wearing
`strange caps.' He described this cap as olive drab in color and made
of cloth. Caps described resemble the USMC fatigue cap." Yet, the U.S.
government continued to state unequivocally that LCpl. Michael
Brellenthin had been killed in action because Ruth Brellenthin could
not prove otherwise.
Although the government lacked evidence that Michael Brellenthin was
dead, its assumption that he was dead outweighed Mrs. Brellenthin's
assumption that he might be alive. "The attitude of the government on
these cases," said Sampley, "is that if you can't prove that the
remains are not of a particular individual, then they must belong to
the individual the government says they belong to."
Even if individuals are able to prove that remains can not be
positively identified as belonging to a specific person, the government
will not accept that as proof. The only opinion it values in forensic
cases is its own.
The case of Air Force Lt. Col. Thomas Hart is a specific example of
this. Hart's AC-130 aircraft was shot down in Laos in 1972 with 16 crew
members aboard. In 1985, the government told his wife, Anne Hart, that
it had found her husband's remains during a crash site excavation in
which she had participated.
Mrs. Hart was immediately skeptical, especially when the government
said it had identified 13 of the 16 crewmen. Mrs. Hart decided to have
her own analysis done on the seven tiny fragments of bone, which could
be held in one hand, the government said constituted the remains of her
husband.
Dr. Michael Charney of Colorado State University, who has nearly 50
years of experience in anthropology, analyzed the bone fragments. "It
is impossible," Charney wrote in his report, "to determine whether
these fragments are from LTC Hart or any other individual, whether they
are from one individual or several, or whether they are even from any
of the crew members of the aircraft in question."
Mrs. Hart refused to accept the remains and sued the government,
challenging its identification procedures. Mrs. Hart's challenge
produced additional criticism of the Army's Central Identification
Laboratory (CIL) in Hawaii and the the techniques it uses in
identifying remains.
Some scientists, including Charney, charged that CIL deliberately
misinterpreted evidence in order to identify remains. They said that
the Army consistently drew unwarranted conclusions about height,
weight, sex and age from tiny bone fragments. "These are conclusions
just totally beyond the means of normal identification, our normal
limits and even our abnormal limits," said Dr. William Maples, curator
of physical anthropology at Florida State Museum.
Among the egregious errors cited by Charney was a piece of a pelvic
bone that the laboratory mistakenly said was part of a skull bone and
was used to identify Chief Master Sgt. James Ray Fuller, who was on the
same AC-130 aircraft as Hart. Procedures at CIL were revamped shortly
after that, but there continues to be concern about the accuracy of its
work.
There are recurring charges that the U.S. government, in an effort
hastily account for as many missing men as possible, is stretching the
bounds of credibility when it comes to identifying remains.
One such case involves Sgt. Richard Fitts. Fitts was a passenger on a
Vietnamese Air Force CH-34 helicopter near Tchepone, Laos, on Nov. 30,
1968.
The crew of the helicopter was Vietnamese. The American passengers were
part of a team assigned to Command and Control North, MACV-SOG, U.S.
Army Special Forces. The mission was classified then and remains
classified.
Other Americans aboard the aircraft included Sgt. Arthur E. Bader, Cpl.
Gary R. LaBohn, SSgt. Klaus D. Scholz, Major Samuel K. Toomey, Cpl.
Michael H. Mein and 1st Lt. Raymond C. Stacks.
The helicopter was hit by 37mm anti-aircraft fire and crashed in flames
near a stream in heavy jungle. No ground search was initiated because
it was in a denied area. No survivors were seen.
In March, 1988, the crash site was excavated by a joint Lao/U.S.
technical team and human remains consisting of 17 teeth and 145 bone
fragments, none measuring over two inches, were recovered.
On Jan. 3, 1990, the U.S. government announced that the remains of
Fitts had been identified and returned to his parents. That
identification was determined by the government's conclusion that two
of the 17 teeth belonged to Fitts. They were buried in a separate
casket in Boston, Mass.
The remaining 15 teeth and 145 bone fragments were said to be
unidentifiable. But on Feb. 8, 1990, the Pentagon announced the
remaining Americans had been identified and would be buried, along with
the Vietnamese crew, in a mass grave in Arlington, Va.
Fitts' name was included on that tombstone along with the other
Americans because the Pentagon believed some of the bone fragments
belonged to Fitts. "What it amounts to is a mass burial, sort of like
what Stalin did," said Sampley. "If you can't prove it's a particular
individual, just say the remains are unidentified. Don't just stick a
name on it."
But that's exactly what the government did in the case of Master Sgt.
Frank Parrish in 1973. According to Faires, it was decided that the
remains belonged to Parrish because they were of a Caucasian of about
the same age and medical equipment was found nearby. "There was nothing
forensically (proving) it wasn't Parrish," said Faires.
Parrish had been accompanied on the fatal patrol by another Special
Forces team member, Sgt. 1st Class Earl R. Biggs. The Pentagon says his
remains were returned earlier. But the family of Sgt. Biggs must now be
wondering, just as Johnnie Parrish wondered 17 years ago about his
brother Frank, whether it was actually Sgt. Biggs it buried.
As for the remains that were interred in Sgt. Parrish's grave, what
little is known about them, according to government documents, is that
they belonged to an individual who was held prisoner for several years
before being executed.
Was that Biggs? Was it Parrish? Or, was it one of the more than 2,000
men still unaccounted for in Southeast Asia?
The government says it doesn't know and has sent the remains back to
Hawaii for further identification. Who knows what unsuspecting family
they will be sent to next for burial?
Sgt. Frank Parrish was buried for the second time in Rose Hill Cemetery
in January, 1990 in a simple ceremony. There was no honor guard this
time to salute him, no grieving widow to accept the flag that covered
the coffin.
The Army says Sgt. Parrish's widow, who has since remarried, refuses to
comment on the mixup, but that is an excuse the government conveniently
hides behind when it is trying to avoid publicity about an embarrassing
incident.
The families of Biggs and Parrish bore their grief 17 years ago when
they were told their men had died. Now, that grief has been compounded
by inexcusable Army inefficiency.
The families will forever be burdened with the question of whether or
not the remains they buried actually were those of their loved ones.
Paul Warren is a veteran journalist who has covered the POW/MIA issue
extensively.
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