A family’s journey finally ends thanks to new DNA technology

The bones were broken and weathered, their edges softened by three decades of tropical rain: four pieces, the largest about 3 inches, tip to tip.

They were mixed in the silty loam of a Vietnamese hillside with the wreckage of a Navy jet. Most of the debris had been dragged off by scavengers, but what remained included pieces of belt, parachute and boot sole. The pilot had not ejected.

A team sifting through the crash site found shards stamped with serial numbers that corresponded not just to an A-4 Skyhawk, an attack jet flown by the hundreds in Southeast Asia, but to a specific plane known to have crashed with a specific man aboard.

So in 1994, the Defense Department told the pilot's widow and children that after 29 years, his Skyhawk was no longer missing, and his fate was all but certain.

The Pentagon stopped short of saying it had found the man himself. The artifacts were circumstantial; it would take stronger evidence to strike the former Norfolk and Virginia Beach resident from the roster of the lost.

It came down to the bones, which were so small and worn that experts couldn't be sure they were even human. They sat boxed on a laboratory shelf. Years passed.

That Cmdr. Peter Mongilardi Jr. will be buried Wednesday at Arlington National Cemetery is testament to a science beyond reach just two years ago: coaxing old bones to yield nuclear DNA - the chain of amino acids unique to each of us, that resides in our every cell, that makes us who we are.

Nuclear DNA has been used for years to determine paternity, prosecute rapists and free the wrongly convicted, but not to identify remains of any real vintage. Just a single copy is contained in a cell's fragile nucleus, and it degrades quickly.

Last summer, however, scientists at the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory in Rockville, Md., perfected a technique for extracting minute amounts of broken genetic material from the collapsed nuclei of aged cells and for copying it into a sample big enough to test. Mongilardi's was one of the first two cases they cracked using the new procedure.

His funeral will be a tribute to perseverance as well, for Mongilardi's loss came early in America's Vietnam experience - on June 25, 1965, as the North Vietnamese were ringing their cities with missile batteries that would claim scores of U.S. planes later in the war.

A week shy of 40, the commander was among the senior-most aviators in country that Friday afternoon: He'd flown war planes since just after World War II, led an A-4 squadron aboard the carrier Coral Sea, and had recently taken command of the ship's entire air wing.

He was in one of three Skyhawks on an armed reconnaissance mission near Thanh Hoa, a port city on the Gulf of Tonkin, when he spotted a small bridge and rolled out of formation to take it out. His wingman saw him disappear behind a veil of heavy rain, at the same moment, the sky erupted in the blossoming smoke of anti-aircraft fire.

Mongilardi's memorial service at Fort Myer's Old Post Chapel, a few steps outside Arlington's gates, will testify to patience and resiliency, too. His family's snapshots recount the days since he vanished: black-and-whites of his daughter and son as teens. Color portraits of his children grown and married. Grandchildren. His wife, Patricia Perrine, during the 23 years before she remarried.

She was just out of high school and living in Norfolk's Broad Creek Village when they met at a party. The young ensign made a good first impression - he was lean, sharp-eyed and funny, a well-read math whiz with an engineering degree from Cornell. He stood a hair over 6 feet tall and drove a Cadillac convertible.

"He was in a beautiful cashmere sweater - I can see it still - gray slacks and loafers," Pat recalled. "I had never seen anyone so darling, or so Italian."

Half Italian, actually - Mongilardi's mother was French, which would prove significant decades later.

They married in New Jersey after a year's courtship, she in a tailored navy suit that matched his dress blues, then took up the nomadic life of a young Navy couple, Quonset Point, R.I.; Kingsville, Texas, where Mongilardi shipped out for Korea and daughter Julie was born in 1952; Jacksonville, Fla.; Carmel, Calif., where son Raoul came along in 1957.

Mongilardi got a Norfolk billet at what was then called the Armed Forces Staff College, and they built a house in Virginia Beach's Thalia area. Two years later, after he completed a stint at sea, they moved on to Patuxent River, Md., where Pete tested jets.

One day, he ran into trouble more than five miles up and had to eject over the Chesapeake Bay. An Eastern Shore farmer fished him out of the drink; Mongilardi came to with the man's dog licking his face. He flew in an air show later the same week.

"My husband was going to stay in until his flying days were over and then he was going to get out," Pat said. "The thought of a desk job just drove him crazy."

In Lemoore, Calif., Mongilardi made C.O. of an attack squadron, and in late 1964 shipped out on the Coral Sea. Pat and the children found the base there "absolutely the worst place to be, a depressing environment," and for good reason: Husbands and fathers were working halfway around the world, in a place most Americans couldn't find on a map, and a growing number of them weren't coming home.

"When we would see a moving van pull up at a house," Mongilardi's daughter, now Julie Sims, said, "we knew somebody's dad had died."

When a chaplain brought word of Pete's disappearance, a grieving Pat moved the family back to Virginia Beach, bought a small house in Bay Colony and suffered through nightmares "that he crashed and got out and was injured, and that they took him.

"I prayed that didn't happen," she said. "I finally talked to a friend of Pete's. He said, 'Pat, I'm going to be perfectly honest with you. Do not entertain any thought at all that Pete is coming home because we know for a fact that he went in.'

"His friends would stop by, and they all agreed about it: 'Don't think that he's coming back. Get on with your life.' They were very up front."

The war ended. The children grew into adulthood. In 1992, the United States began sending teams of soldiers and scientists back into Vietnam to account for the 2,583 men who had not returned from the fighting.

The following April, one such team studied photographs in Hanoi's Central Armed Forces Museum, much of which is devoted to what the Vietnamese call "the American War." Among them were seven pictures depicting the wreckage of an A-4 shot down near Thanh Hoa.

Six months later, in October 1993, investigators spoke to witnesses who'd seen the A-4 smack into a field of sugar cane and explode. The locals took them to the site, where the investigators found that time and weather had all but erased the jet's impact crater. They found nothing but scraps of cloth, metal and rubber.

"There's a particular smell to a flight suit, and that smell came to me so powerfully," she recalled. "I had the feeling he was at the foot of my bed. I didn't see anything, but I felt that presence.

In March 1994, an American and Vietnamese recovery mission descended on the field, stripped away the sugar cane, and for 12 days excavated the crash site with picks and shovels, sifting the dug-up dirt through quarter-inch screens. It left with bits of airplane and pieces of "life support," the equipment a pilot wears in flight - lap belt, torso harness, parachute, life preserver, inflatable G-suit - and two

The artifacts made their way to the U.S. Army's Central Identification Laboratory in Honolulu, then and now the largest forensic lab in the world, staffed by Army regulars and civilian anthropologists who venture to the planet's remotest corners in a quest for the missing. Its scientists are rightly famed for closing decades-old cases with scant remains.

Numbers from the aircraft parts told a compelling story, however: The wreckage was that of an A-4C, the same model Mongilardi flew. His was the only plane of that series to go down near Thanh Hoa. And the Life Sciences Equipment Laboratory at Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio reported that the crash was "non survivable."

It was enough to prompt the government to notify Mongilardi's family that his probable crash site had been found.

"That helped us a lot," Sims said. "We finally knew that his plane had gone in and exploded on impact, and that he hadn't ejected."

For that, the lab and the pilot's family had to wait for a technology that didn't yet exist.

At the heart of that technology was deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, a molecule that resembles a corkscrewed ladder and that serves as the genetic blueprint of every living thing. Human cells contain two kinds of DNA. The more familiar, nuclear, is housed in a cell's command center and is composed of material from both parents.

Identical twins aside, a person's nuclear DNA is one of a kind, and thus an unparalleled tool in establishing identity. Its fragility has made it all but useless, however, in identifying remains from the Vietnam War. In cases of such vintage, scientists instead have tapped another type of DNA, found in a cell's mitochondria, the power plants that covert simple sugars into energy.

Mitochondria are thick-walled and tough. They're also plentiful - each cell hosts a crowd of them, and is thus packed with multiple copies of mitochondrial DNA. This material - in shorthand, "mtDNA " - has proved startlingly hardy: In 1997, scientists announced they had extracted a sample from a bone estimated to be more than 40,000 years old, and with it proved that modern humans had not descended from Neanderthals.

Researchers also used mtDNA to identify a cache of Russian bones as those of the country's last royal family, executed by Bolsheviks in 1918, and to remove U.S. Air Force Lt. Michael Blassie, lost over South Vietnam in 1970, from Arlington's Tomb of the Unknowns.

There's just one catch: mtDNA is not one of a kind. It is inherited solely from one's mother and passes from generation to generation unchanged; a person's mtDNA is a carbon copy of Mom's, and her mother's, and her mother's mother's.

This can prove an advantage in some experiments, such as tracing humans back to a single "mitochondrial Eve," the foremother of all humans, who lived in sub-Saharan Africa more than 140,000 years ago. American scientists pulled off that nifty piece of work in 1987.

In placing names on the graves of American servicemen, however, it's a limitation. Seemingly unrelated people who share a female forebear, perhaps centuries in the past, can have matching mtDNA. In at least one Vietnam-era case, two occupants of the same crashed aircraft have been found to match.

Its maternal source presents a further complication: Mongilardi's closest biological relatives - his children - carried only Pat's mtDNA. Finding his mitochondrial match would mean exploring his mother's bloodline for living aunts, uncles and cousins.

In January 2000, scientists at the Hawaii lab removed a sample about the weight of a nickel from the remains recovered at Thanh Hoa and shipped it to Rockville's Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory, among the most technically advanced such facilities on the planet.

Its staff had no trouble extracting an mtDNA sequence from the sample, but as Defense officials soon learned, Mongilardi was an only child, and his mother died when he was a toddler. She was French. Her family history was a blank.

"They employed a gene alogist to do the work," said James J. Canik, the DNA lab's deputy director, "and that person just struck out."

The techniques for mtDNA extraction were improving by the month: What had required 5 grams of bone in 2000 soon took just a twenty-fifth that amount. Had researchers tracked down a hairbrush that Mongilardi's mother had used, or even a pair of her eyeglasses, they might have acquired enough hair or skin cells to settle the case.

As it happened, though, advances pioneered at the Rockville lab were not restricted to mtDNA. Some researchers devoted their attention to nuclear DNA, seeking a way to use the tiny amounts of genetic material that might survive in bones 40, 50, even 60 years old.

The problem was daunting. As Canik put it: "If you had a 55-gallon drum filled with water and you dropped a single microliter of DNA into this drum, you know the DNA is in that drum somewhere - but how many times would you have to dip into the drum before you found enough to analyze?"

The lab's scientists eventually adopted a technique used in mtDNA analysis called the polymerase chain reaction, in which tiny strands of DNA are duplicated using a complex recipe of heat and chemical solutions. Contamination is a constant danger, but if it's kept clean as it is copied time and again, a sample can yield enough nuclear DNA to be compared with others.

"We're pushing the technology to levels that most labs can't even dream about," Canik said. "If you'd asked me 20 years ago, or 10 years ago, whether it was possible, I would have told you no."

Un known to his widow and children, Mongilardi's case became a test of the new process last year, along with that of a second man - James "Earthquake McGoon" McGovern, a celebrated CIA pilot shot down while supplying the French at Dien Bien Phu, Vietnam, in 1954.

Pete Mongilardi's nuclear DNA sequence - the coding for his dark hair, his green eyes, the expressive face with which he could make his wife and children laugh, his perfect vision and good teeth, the nerves that enabled him to tail-hook hundreds of times on aircraft carriers - appeared as a chain of blotches on the lab's charts.

In Virginia Beach, packages arrived for Pat and Julia containing cotton swabs they were to scrape against the inside of their mouths for saliva and skin cells, and small plastic bags in which to seal them afterward. Raoul, living in California, got one as well. The lab sequenced the DNA on the swabs.

Comparisons yielded all but irrefutable proof the bones were those of the lost pilot: The lab figured the odds at 9.87 billion to 1.

A second test compared the bones' Y-chromosome DNA, a type of nuclear coding handed down from fathers to sons, with Raoul's. Like mtDNA, it is unique to families, not individuals, but the resulting match led the lab to amend its oddsmaking. The chances that the bones were not Mongilardi's were 1.1 trillion to 1.

The Rockville lab reported its findings to the Central Identification Laboratory on Aug. 3. On Aug. 25, the Hawaii lab's scientific director, Thomas D. Holland, officially identified the remains as those of Peter Mongilardi Jr.

On Wednesday, after a brief church service, a casket containing the four bone fragments, a set of Navy dress blues, and Mongilardi's decorations will be carried to a horse-drawn caisson to the pilot's grave site, where it will be buried at last under a headstone bearing the commander's name.

A flight of F/A-18 Hornets from Oceana Naval Air Station is expected to streak overhead in tribute. A squad of riflemen will fire a salute.

"I've been crying about my dad all these years," Julie Sims said. "That's been such a big part of my identity.

"I'm not happy," she said. "I'm preparing my father's funeral. But this is the end. It's final. And everything has been in limbo our whole lives."

Even as a 41-year puzzle ends at Arlington, seven American teams will be digging for other remains in Vietnam. Five teams will have just returned from a month of searching and digging in Laos. Nine investigators will have just arrived home from Korea.

Over in Washington 's Maryland suburbs, the DNA lab's scientists will be working on some of the 700 to 800 cases they expect to handle this year involving the lost from America's past wars.

“Nuclear DNA has been used for years to determine paternity, prosecute rapists and free the wrongly convicted”*

*Not applicable in North Carolina or if used in connection with lacrosse players.

A small measure of closure.

” Eternal Father, stong to save ... “

For amateur genealogist interested in tracing your family history http://www.familytreedna.com/ is the largest firm out there. Check the upper right to see if there is a project for your surname. I found a missing relative.

4 posted on 04/08/2007 6:31:34 AM PDT by Drango (A liberal's compassion is limited only by the size of someone else's wallet.)

I find it hard to believe that it has been that long now. I remember thinking WW2 was’nt that long ago and that Vietnam was just a few years ago.

5 posted on 04/08/2007 6:51:30 AM PDT by HANG THE EXPENSE (Defeat liberalism, its the right thing to do for America.)

“I find it hard to believe that it has been that long now. I remember thinking WW2 was’nt that long ago and that Vietnam was just a few years ago.”

I was a bit more than a month over ten when this guy was shot down. About 8 years later, I enlisted in the USAF. I stayed in for 24 years, and I’ve been retired for almost ten years. Some ways, it hasn’t been all that long, but in other ways, it’s been forever.

Rest in Peace, Commander. God bless your family, and you.

7 posted on 04/08/2007 9:18:06 AM PDT by Old Student (We have a name for the people who think indiscriminate killing is fine. They're called "The Bad Guys)

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