Editor’s Note The following story was written by Laurie Ezzell Brown of The Canadian Record. The story is being reprinted with permission.
Considering the deep and lasting imprint the Vietnam War has had on this country’s collective psyche, it is difficult to believe that a whole generation of Americans knows little to nothing of that war other than what it is taught—either in school or at the knee of one of the now aging veterans who served in the military during that time.
This story, and a related one which will be published in next week’s Record, offer moving testimony to the war’s lasting impact, and to the very human stories that continue to unfold in its aftermath. This is the story of a child orphaned by the war, the family that found him, and his return to his native country four decades later.
NGUYEN PHI HUNG was eighteen months old when he was first delivered into his mother’s arms in the Denver airport. It was Mother’s Day 1971, and Phi Hung had just traveled a third of the way around the world to find his family.
Phi Hung was one of an estimated 800,000 South Vietnamese children orphaned by the war. Until Pan American Flight 2 whisked him away to America, he had spent most of his young life in an orphanage which—like many others in that war-torn country—was understaffed, underequipped and a breeding ground for deadly disease. So difficult were the conditions and so insurmountable the many obstacles to their care that many of the children who had been left there died.
Phi Hung was different. The Catholic nuns who ran the orphanage nicknamed him “flying hero.” One, Sister Andrea, took a special interest and called him “my Superman,” because, as she later explained, he was a survivor.
“God picked him,” said Carolyn Fletcher, the Gruver woman who, with her husband Richie, stood in the airport that Mother’s Day forty years ago waiting to receive their young son.
Fifteen months earlier, Carolyn had stumbled across the brief human interest story in Guideposts that would change hers and her families lives forever. “The Warm Nest” told of a young Australian schoolteacher, Rosemary Taylor, who went to Vietnam in 1967 as an educational social worker, and whose mission it became to care for war’s youngest victims by finding hundreds of them homes and loving families.
That story planted a seed. “It just sparked something in my soul that would not let go of me,” Carolyn said. “I was fascinated by it...that this woman would leave her home and go over there, make that commitment and sacrifice. It just touched my heart.”
“It was just a real intense time in that country and with the American involvement,” Carolyn said. “This seemed like a way to possibly have something that might come out of that war that would have a positive effect on our lives.”
Carolyn and Richie had been married less than ten years and already had two children of their own. “We really hadn’t planned on extending our family,” she said. “This story just touched us.”
Thus began their quest—a quest that involved dozens of laboriously hand-written letters between the Fletchers and Taylor and others, racing against time and battling snarls of red tape to get as many children as possible safely out of Vietnam before the political situation there deteriorated further.
“If it hadn’t been for the devotion of the workers in orphanages and their desire to get kids out of the country as quickly as they could, it wouldn’t have happened,” Carolyn said.
Phi Hung’s destiny, though, seemed pre-ordained. Asked whether they preferred a boy or girl, the Fletchers answered, “We want the child that needs us.”
The little Superman not only needed a home and parents to love him, but was just ornery enough to survive in the orphanage’s difficult conditions. Most of the children had had very little attention or care in their short lives. Amidst so much illness, disease and neglect, signs of lethargy were a bad omen. When the Fletchers’ appeal for a child arrived, the spirited Phi Hung was chosen.
In the adoption papers, his new parents named him Phillip Timothy Fletcher.
Tim arrived in Denver badly malnourished showing signs of chronic ear infections. Carolyn and Richie took him straight to their pediatrician in Amarillo. “We thought he was deathly ill,” said Carolyn. “He wouldn’t make a peep, wouldn’t even cry.”
But once they arrived in Gruver, where Tim was greeted by his brother and sister, six-year-old Stan and four-year-old Lori, “his personality changed completely,” she remembered. “He was transformed.”
“God picked him,” his mother said, pausing a second before adding, “with Rosemary’s help. She was an angel.”
When Tim decided—sometime around his fortieth birthday—to retrace those ancestral steps and return to Vietnam, he turned, as his parents had before him, to Rosemary Taylor. Unlike his mother, though, who spent agonizing months making daily trips to the post office in anticipation of any new word on the adoption process, Tim and his wife Jennifer turned to Google and Facebook.
There, they were able to locate Taylor and others who had helped in the adoption process, and to connect with other Vietnamese adoptees and their families. The technologically-assisted ability to connect so quickly to his past left little time for second thoughts.
In one of their searches, the Fletchers found a number for Taylor in Bangkok. Now in her 70’s, Taylor still volunteers with Friends for All Children, an organization which assists the orphaned, handicapped and deprived children of Thailand, as well as other refugees.
When Tim called and identified himself, Taylor said, “Hold on just a minute.”
As he held the phone, Tim could hear her moving around in the background. “She got a book out and read off my name, my parents’ name in Gruver...the whole thing,” Tim said. “She had the whole thing right there.”
In doing their research, the Fletchers also found other orphans who had been adopted by families in other countries—including Emanuelle, who was an orphan at the same time and place as Tim, and who now lives in France.
Emanuelle had already returned to Vietnam and found her birth mother. She encouraged them to make the trip and shared some of what she had learned. “Be prepared if you do find your mother,” she told them. “You can’t just say, ‘Here I am. See you later now.”
It is something you cannot walk away from once you’ve found them, she warned.
The Fletchers also talked to Cindy Bowen, whose first husband—MSG Charles Newton—was listed as Missing In Action in April of 1969. Newton was part of a six-member U.S. Army Special Forces team that had been taken into known enemy territory to do reconnaisance. As his team returned from their mission, they came under fire from hostile forces.
Several years after Newton’s disappearance, Bowen had visited South Vietnam. Talking to her helped prepare Tim and Jennifer for their journey. By the time they had acquired passports, talked to others and planned what would be a 16-day trek, the Fletchers were ready.
“We were totally at peace the whole trip,” Tim said.
The Fletchers arrived at the Saigon Airport on July 7. Weary from their 30-hour flight, they were shuttled through customs and immigration. It is there that Tim may have first felt he had finally arrived at his birthplace. “The immigration officer just looked at my passport and stamped it,” said Jennifer. “But when they looked at Tim’s, he stamped it and handed it back to him, saying, ‘Welcome to your home.’”
As plotted out in the days before their July 6 departure from Houston, this was no toe-dipped-in-the-water tour of Vietnam’s glamour spots. Tim and Jennifer wanted to learn about his native country, to immerse themselves in what they knew was a very different culture than their own.
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