"I remember the last night I was with you. I put my hand on your stomach and felt our son kicking and moving. I did not write you as I should have done. I was young and immature in 1968 and I am sorry I was not there to take care of you both."
Nguyen Thi Hien, a middle-aged woman who lives in one of Ho Chi Minh City's poorest neighborhoods, had been waiting more than 30 years for the letter that contained these words.
The last time she saw or heard from the writer, he was a handsome young GI and she was a beautiful but heavily pregnant bar girl who went by the name of Linda.
In the US and Europe it was the summer of love, but in Vietnam this was the year of the Tet offensive and some of the fiercest fighting of one of the 20th century's messiest wars.
Hien's 19-year-old boyfriend, Bill, had just finished a tour of duty in Binh Duong province and was on his way back home to the US.
He planned to go to college and make a new start.
Seven days after Bill left, she gave birth to a son and had to find another man who would put his name on the birth certificate.
It was an all too common story. During the 10-year war US troops are estimated to have conceived and abandoned -- albeit sometimes unknowingly -- an estimated 50,000 babies. Although half have subsequently emigrated to the US, these so-called Amerasians have become a symbol of Washington's failure to live up to its commitment to South Vietnam.
This was particularly true on April 30, 1975, when the last few US troops evacuated Saigon, since renamed Ho Chi Minh City, leaving behind desperate crowds of South Vietnamese who feared retribution from the victorious troops of the communist North.
To hide their affiliations to the US, southern soldiers stripped off their uniforms and many mothers abandoned their Amerasian children. Many were forced to live on the street, one reason why they became known locally as "children of dust."
But 30 years on, their plight -- often neglected, ill-educated and vulnerable to drug abuse -- is increasingly pricking the conscience of US war veterans, who are returning in growing numbers to search for and support the girlfriends and children they left behind.
Now around retirement age, many former GIs and marines have the affluence, leisure and inclination to revisit the past. Their task has been made easier by the recent improvement in relations between Washington and Hanoi, the Internet and DNA paternity tests. Hien's letter from Bill is one of the positive results.
At the center of the campaign is the Amerasian Child Find Network, a web-based organization that claims to have reunited 300 US fathers and their Amerasian children since it was established in November 2001.
It was set up by Clint Haines, a veteran and former private investigator, who found his girlfriend after a 10-year search and is now looking for his child. He says he was forced to leave them in 1971 by the military, which made it impossible for non-commissioned soldiers to take back wives.
He was reunited with his girlfriend after paying almost US$1,000 for newspaper ads and a TV commercial in the Quang Nan area where they had last met. In the next few days, he expects to get the results of DNA tests which will tell him whether he has also located his son, who was given to an orphanage.
"I hope it's him. He's so destitute, I want to help him," says Haines, 53, who has a family in the US.
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