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US Vietnam vets return in search of abandoned kin

"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.

"But I won't get emotionally involved yet. There have been so many ups and downs. One woman tricked me and her own daughter into believing we were related. I need to see the tests," he says.

His caution is understandable. After a spate of claims by fake Amerasians, the US consulate has tightened its visa application policy for people claiming US parentage.

Even Hien's son turned out not to have been Bill's child, according to two recent DNA tests.

"More and more American men and Amerasian children are trying to find each other," said Phan, a Vietnamese man who works as a liaison between the two groups.

"But it's very difficult. In most cases the mothers remember nothing. Many were cleaners in US bases or prostitutes, who were not well educated and had several boyfriends at the same time. After the communists took control in 1975, many mothers were afraid of being associated with the enemy so they burned all evidence of their old lovers," he says.

That has not stopped some veterans from launching what appear to be hopeless searches. Last month Rafael Pagan, a former army quartermaster, returned to Long Binh army base to look for a girlfriend he had last seen in 1969.

"I loved her and she was pregnant when I left so I still feel responsible to help my child," said the 60-year-old, who now works as a store clerk in a New York hospital.

"The problem is I don't remember her name," he says.

Despite the lack of information, several Amerasians have replied to an ad he put in the newspaper with his picture and details. Two have sent off DNA samples, each of which will cost several hundred dollars to be processed.

Pagan says he is not daunted by the cost or the long odds.

"I went to Saigon in the hope that I'll see some results. Whatever it takes, I will do it," he said.

Vietnam's most famous Amerasian is Phuong Thao, a pop singer who was conceived the night before her father was posted back to the US in 1967.

"Mum never talked about my father. I never asked. She thought it was impossible to find him. She just wanted to forget," Thao says.

"But I thought about him. At school, I was taught that Americans killed many Vietnamese. So I wondered whether my daddy was a good guy or a bad guy," he says.

When she was 28 years old she got the chance to ask the question in person after an American writer helped her to track down her father, James Yoder, who had been unaware of her existence.

"The first time I met him, I cried like a baby," Thao says. "I looked exactly like him."
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