<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body dir="auto"><div><span></span></div><div><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><div><span></span></div><div><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><div>Courtesy of <i>Stars and Stripes</i> at:</div><div><br></div><div><a href="http://www.stripes.com/news/veterans/us-veteran-finds-lost-love-in-vietnam-and-she-has-a-surprise-for-him-1.388855">http://www.stripes.com/news/veterans/us-veteran-finds-lost-love-in-vietnam-and-she-has-a-surprise-for-him-1.388855</a></div><div><br></div><div>--------------------------------</div><div><h1 style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-weight: 400; font-size: 28px; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px 0px 7px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.2; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;">US veteran finds lost love in Vietnam — and she has a surprise for him</h1><p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px 0px 11px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Alone in a hotel room in a small Vietnamese town, Jim Reischl waited restlessly. Recounting the story later, the Vietnam veteran said he had traveled 8,500 miles, with an arthritic knee, for this long-sought reunion.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px 0px 11px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">"I am getting a bit excited," he said. "Geez, I haven't seen her in 45 years!"</span></p><p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px 0px 11px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Then came a knock on the door.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px 0px 11px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">On the other side stood the woman he'd left behind when he shipped out of Saigon in July 1970. The young bar hostess who'd told him she was pregnant. He hadn't believed her, but he'd also never stopped thinking about her. Now she was about to walk back into his life.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px 0px 11px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Reischl, 68, came to Vietnam as a 21-year-old Air Force sergeant and was stationed at Tan Son Nhut Air Base outside Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px 0px 11px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">After his year-long tour, he went back to Minnesota, became a government cartographer, married twice, had a son and suffered Agent Orange-related health problems. But he never forgot his "first lady."</span></p><p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px 0px 11px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Around 2005, after his second marriage ended, Reischl set out to search for the woman he remembered only as "Linh Hoa" — not her actual name.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px 0px 11px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">He began by scouring the Internet, eventually contacting Father Founded, a group that helps link soldiers and their Amerasian children through DNA testing and other means.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px 0px 11px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">An estimated 100,000 children were born to U.S. servicemen and Vietnamese women during the Vietnam War, most of whom eventually immigrated to the United States. Many were adopted by American families.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px 0px 11px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Since 2012, with the help of Father Founded volunteers, Reischl has traveled to Vietnam five times, speaking to journalists and placing ads in local newspapers.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px 0px 11px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">The most recent read: "I am in search of you. It has been many years. I am not looking for a relationship. I want you to know that. I just would like to talk with the wonderful lady I knew in 1969 and 1970."</span></p><p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px 0px 11px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Last spring, in a trip chronicled by The Washington Post as part of a project about Amerasian children left in Vietnam, Reischl went back to visit the $5-a-month apartment where the couple had spent lazy days making love, watching a black-and-white TV and listening to Beatles and Blind Faith records. He still remembers the day she told him she was pregnant.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px 0px 11px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">"She wanted me to stay with her and live in Vietnam. At the time I said, 'I'm not going to live here, stay here.' It was totally foreign to me," Reischl said. "I was young and stupid, I guess."</span></p><p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px 0px 11px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Reischl showed neighbors a photo of the young woman he had snapped from a taxi the last day he saw her. She was standing on the balcony watching him ride away. Nobody remembered her, but Reischl said he vowed, "I will never officially stop looking."</span></p><p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px 0px 11px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">In September, a 64-year-old woman sitting by her bedridden husband in the village of My Luong in Vietnam's Mekong Delta picked up her iPad and clicked on a news site. She idly opened a locally written article about kids abandoned during the war. Scrolling down, she was shocked to see a photo of her younger self, in the arms of a khaki-clad soldier — Reischl.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px 0px 11px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">"The moment I saw it, I knew," the woman, Nguyen Thi Hanh, recalled. "Suddenly the memories of the first love reemerged."</span></p><div class="ndn_embed ndn_embedding ndn_embedContainer ndn-widget-embed-2 ndn_embedded" id="ndn-video-inside-story" data-config-distributor-id="92012" style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; margin: auto; padding: 0px; position: relative; z-index: 1;"></div><p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px 0px 11px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Also flooding back were thoughts of their daughter. For there had been a child after all.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px 0px 11px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">After Reischl shipped out, a devastated Hanh left Saigon to take refuge in the countryside. On Dec. 18, 1970, she gave to birth to a baby girl with large eyes and pale skin whom she called Nguyen Thanh Nguyen Thuy. Her given name meant "First Tear," Hanh said, "because I was alone and didn't have any family with me at the time."</span></p><p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px 0px 11px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Hanh, then just 19, let a friend take the child to an orphanage, thinking she would still be able to visit her. But the friend disappeared, and when Hanh went to the orphanage, the nuns told her they had no record of her case.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px 0px 11px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Hanh joined the South Vietnamese Army and, after the fall of Saigon in April 1975, spent two years in a Communist reeducation camp. There, she met her husband, now 74 and incapacitated from a stroke. The couple has two grown children.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px 0px 11px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Over the years, she said, she never stopped looking for her child — and never forgave Reischl for deserting her.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px 0px 11px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">"I was still angry with him," she said.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px 0px 11px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">After she saw the news article, Hanh emailed the reporter, who helped her link up with Reischl back in St. Cloud, Minn. Texting, phone calls and Skype chats followed. Their improbable reunion happened this past weekend in Hanh's home town.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px 0px 11px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">"Nice to meet you . . . again," Reischl said when he opened the door and saw the petite Hanh, her hair still parted on the same side as he remembered it. He held out his arms. Hanh burst into tears.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px 0px 11px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">She became emotional again when the two sat down for an interview. The white-haired Air Force veteran put his arm on her chair as if to comfort her — close, but not too close.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px 0px 11px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">The two are now determined to find the child they lost. Reischl brought a DNA kit so they could submit a sample from Hanh to a database for Amerasians seeking relatives on a family heritage website. Without this effort, they say, their reunion will not be complete.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px 0px 11px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">"It's a lie to say I'm completely calm and carefree about this event," Hanh said later. "I have mixed feelings about it. I'm quite happy with my current life otherwise. My only unfulfilled dream is to be able to find my first daughter."</span></p><p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px 0px 11px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">--------------------</span></p><p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px 0px 11px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Jim Reischl and Nguyen Thi Hanh, who dated during the Vietnam War while Reischl was stationed in Saigon, meet again after 45 years in Hanh's hometown in Vietnam's Mekong Delta region.</span></p><p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px 0px 11px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><a href="http://www.tomandrodna.com/Photos/Stars_and_Stripes/SS_011516.jpg">http://www.TomandRodna.com/Photos/Stars_and_Stripes/SS_011516.jpg</a></span></p></div><div>--------------------------------<br><br><div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Seeya 'round town, Moscow, because . . .</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">"Moscow Cares"</span></div><div><a href="http://www.moscowcares.com/" style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><font color="#000000">http://www.MoscowCares.com</font></a></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"> </span></div><div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Tom Hansen</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Moscow, Idaho</span></div></div><div> </div></div></div></div></div></body></html>