The O positive dog tags

Valley Morning Star:

Joe Beltran's dog tags told you everything you needed to know about the man in 1971.

A motor pool worker, his tags said he was from McAllen. He was Catholic. And his blood type was O-positive.

But, he says, one piece of information stamped into those metal tags was wrong.

Thirty-eight years later, the disabled oilfield worker knows that he bears the primary responsibility for his life and his actions. But he thinks that life would be different if he'd known then that his blood type was actually type A-positive - and he is trying to figure out if he can hold the Army responsible for the mistake.

"All these years, I've gone through three marriages and three kids, and none of them were O-positive," Beltran said last week. "I thought none of (my wives) were faithful."

He might still be married to his second wife, he said, had she not explained blood typing and heredity to him.

A nurse in Alice, she couldn't help pointing out to her husband that their 3-year-old son, J.M., could not be theirs. Children with type A blood have at least one parent with A proteins in their blood.

"That got me mad, so we split," he said. "She said, ‘I've never been with no one,' but..."

His third, a tumultuous marriage to a Mission woman, ended shortly after the birth of his third son, who also had type A blood, he said.

"I just had my doubts ... I always had doubts," he said sadly.

...

It is strange that he never bothered to get a blood test over all these years. If he had been hospitalized they would have checked it before any operation. Because O positive is a universal donor the military would put that on the dog tags of troops that they did not have conclusive test results on. They in fact did the same thing to me. I carried O positive dog tags the whole time I was in Vietnam, but when I was wounded the test they ran before I was operated on showed I was B positive. I don't recall what my children's blood type is, but it has never been an issue with me.

It is curious to me that his second wife did not demand he get a new blood test. She was a nurse and knew the score and knew she had not been unfaithful.