Rescue Registry : Group Seeks to Reunite American Fathers With Vietnamese Children

SAN JOSE —  Barry Huntoon, a former Army medic in Vietnam, picked up a copy of Life magazine in the summer of 1985 because of an article on “Amerasian” children--the offspring of U.S. soldiers and Vietnamese women.

Inside he found a photograph of the daughter he had never met, who he thought had died years earlier.

“There was a picture of a little girl selling peanuts on a beach in Vietnam,” said Huntoon, 35, a carpenter in the San Jose suburb of Saratoga. “Just from looking at her, I knew she was my daughter. Then I looked at the name and location (of the girl) and saw I was correct.”

Girl Was ‘Overjoyed’

Starting with only that photo, Huntoon used contacts in a Vietnamese refugee camp in the Philippines to locate the 14-year-old last year. Her mother had died when she was an infant and she had lived the life of an orphan, “practically a beggar,” Huntoon said. He wrote to her and received several letters and a photograph in return.

“She was overjoyed that someone would care enough to look for her and want her,” Huntoon said. With his wife of three years, Huntoon has readied a room in his home for the girl, and is impatiently awaiting the Vietnamese government’s permission for her to emigrate. “I automatically thought, ‘I have a home where she belongs,’ ” Huntoon said. “We have a lot of time to make up, a lot of love she’s been missing.”

That magazine photograph triggered more than Huntoon’s far-flung search. In November, 1986, inspired partly by their efforts in assisting Huntoon, two San Jose veterans formed the Amerasian Registry--a new nonprofit organization aimed at reuniting American fathers and their half-Vietnamese children.

“Veterans are getting better in terms of their emotional healing and are taking stock and responsibility for what happened when they were in the service,” said Jim Barker, a counselor in a local veterans program and a founder of the registry. “We feel we are an important part of that national healing process.”

The Amerasian Registry, the first organization in the country to focus exclusively on reuniting these children and their fathers, is an unusual joint effort between veterans and local Vietnamese immigrants. The group hopes eventually to develop a computerized data base with names and addresses of Amerasians in the United States and fathers seeking children, Barker said. There also are plans to provide advice and support to fathers trying to find children still in Vietnam.

But for now, with no paid staff or budget, efforts have focused on a few cases such as Barry Huntoon’s, and on just keeping in touch with the several dozen other fathers and children who have contacted them. The process is slow, often painful and frustrating--there has been only one full reunion arranged by the organization--but Barker and registry co-founder Bruce Burns persist.

Veterans seeking Vietnamese offspring remain a very small group. Estimates of the total number of Amerasian children born during the Vietnam War range from 8,000 to 18,000--but only 75 veterans have contacted the registry for help in finding a long-lost son or daughter, Barker said. In the last year about 40 veterans looking for their children have contacted the Pearl S. Buck Foundation, a Pennsylvania relief organization devoted to helping Amerasian children, according to Buck Foundation officials. The State Department has a list of 82 Amerasian children still in Vietnam whose fathers have petitioned for their emigration.

Most of these are men who had long-term relationships with a Vietnamese woman. Some lived with their Vietnamese partners for a year or more.

“Of the men who came forward, there is not one case where the woman was a prostitute or bar girl,” said Burns, an attorney. “They were nurses, or they worked in the PX. The men even to this day have very strong emotional feelings about these women.”

Caught Up in War

Some of the men lost touch with their lovers and children when the war engulfed the Southeast Asian nation. Others cited failed plans to bring women and children to the United States.

Paul Thompson, 43, a Redlands engineer, lost track of his infant son in 1970 when his Vietnamese concubine fled the house they shared, afraid he would take the baby to America against her will. Thompson contacted Burns after reading a newspaper article about the registry’s work.

“If my son wanted to come over here, I would do everything I could to bring him over,” Thompson said. “If not, I’d try to do what I could to make things better for him there.”

Phillip Mild, 42, a Dodge City, Kan., department store manager, lost touch with his Vietnamese lover and child when their village was overrun by Viet Cong a month after he left the country in 1967. Now married, Mild and his wife have contacted the State Department and immigration authorities trying to locate them, but to no avail.

“I kept trying to keep in touch with them, but it was like running into a blank wall,” Mild said. “But there’s a person over there that I’m responsible for. That’s what keeps me going.”

So far, the registry has been able to provide Mild and Thompson with little more than moral support and encouragement. Quests such as theirs have been complicated by a longstanding American ambivalence toward “half-breed” Asian children and by the absence of diplomatic relations between the United States and Vietnam, Burns said.

When the French left Vietnam in 1954, they arranged for the mass emigration and resettlement of 25,000 French-Vietnamese children. By contrast, when the United States pulled out in 1975, it was up to individual Americans to legitimize and obtain visas for their Vietnamese children.

The great majority of Amerasian children remained behind. Their American features brought them scorn from other children and marked them for a marginal existence as street vendors or beggars, according to a 1985 study of Amerasian refugees by the U.S. Catholic Conference.

Not until the early 1980s, when visits to Vietnam by U.S. veterans groups and journalists called attention to the plight of Amerasians there, did the U.S. government begin to recognize them as an American problem.

In 1982, Congress passed a law allowing children fathered by U.S. citizens in Asia to immigrate through the local U.S. embassy--a law that was useless for Vietnamese Amerasians because of the absence of diplomatic relations. Some Amerasians and their families began leaving through the United Nations’ Orderly Departure Program, which was set up in 1979 in response to the “boat people” exodus of the 1970s. In 1984, Secretary of State George P. Shultz announced that Amerasians would be given first priority among the various groups of refugees trying to enter the United States under the program.

Since 1982 the program has brought “at least a couple of thousand” Amerasians out of Vietnam, according to U.N. officials. In early 1986, however, the program broke down in political disagreements between the U.S. and Vietnamese governments.

Outside Help

Rather than waiting for an improvement in U.S.-Vietnamese relations, Burns and Barker have turned to third countries and international voluntary organizations in an effort to reach the children. In Barry Huntoon’s case, they are using a French-Vietnamese film director as a go-between with the Vietnamese government, hoping to get permission for Huntoon to enter the country and bring out his daughter himself.

If locating children still inside Vietnam is difficult, Barker said, trying to locate their fathers in the United States can be equally frustrating.

Along with queries from veterans, the Amerasian Registry has received more than two dozen queries from Amerasian teen-agers in the United States searching for their fathers. Burns himself first became involved in the issue when a social worker introduced him to an Amerasian girl who had recently arrived in San Jose.

“Literally all she knew in English was, ‘I want to find my daddy,’ ” Burns said.

Many of the children know little more than their father’s name and the approximate time he was stationed in Vietnam. The Defense Department’s military locater service requires more detailed information than the children are likely to have, such as the serviceman’s military identification number or Social Security number.

“That’s a lot of information to ask when they (the military) have really accessible records,” Barker said. “We advertise through military magazines and veterans newsletters, but this is a real area of frustration.”

Burns’ encounter with the newly arrived Amerasian girl started him on a two-year search which led, early this year, to the registry’s first and only completed success story.

A Name, a Photo

The girl, Nhung Nguyen, who had come to San Jose with her mother through the Orderly Departure Program, had only her father’s name, a photo and some second-hand memories.

“My mom tell me he was a good guy. A lot of people in the neighborhood like him because he was giving out food,” said Nhung, now 19, in an interview. “She tell me my daddy had black hair, he was tall but not fat. I would walk down the street and see some guy with black hair and think, ‘That could be my daddy.’ ”

Burns obtained more information about Nhung’s father from her mother and other relatives. Eventually he found himself looking for a man named Peter Newcomer, a New Englander who had worked in Vietnam for a non-military agency.

Burns searched telephone books and wrote letters to the State Department and to all the civilian contractors he could find that had done work in Vietnam. He was about to give up when he received a letter from Newcomer, who had learned of his search through the Agency for International Development, his former employer.

Newcomer, 47, a Connecticut carpenter, wrote to Nhung. In February, during Vietnamese New Year, he flew to San Jose for an emotional meeting with his daughter.

“I see my daddy before he see me (at the airport), and I call him and he give me hug,” Nhung said. “I can’t say. I just cry.”

Calls Each Sunday

Newcomer had nothing but praise for Nhung and how well she has adapted to her new country, learning English, working in an electronics plant and studying to be a manicurist. He telephones her each Sunday and plans to fly to San Jose for Nhung’s upcoming wedding.

But Newcomer cautioned that not all reunions will be as easy as his. “I was lucky because she’s a terrific person,” he said. “On my end, I never married, so I didn’t have a wife and kids to explain the whole thing to.”

Even in his case, the situation was complicated by having to re-establish a relationship of some kind with Nhung’s mother. “Nhung and me, we had a relationship that ended when she was 11 months old,” Newcomer said. “Our relationship is simple because it starts from now. Relationships with adults are not that simple.”

Burns and Barker agreed that reunions must be voluntary and carefully planned. Some veterans may still be imagining the infant they left behind, and Amerasian teen-agers have spent years dreaming of a warm, welcoming father.

Working from their homes and offices while holding down other jobs, the Amerasian Registry’s founders have completed only two “matches” so far, those involving Newcomer and Huntoon. But to Barker and Burns, each new query by a veteran is a step forward in a national assumption of responsibility for the children Barker calls “emotional prisoners of war.”

“Critics say our work will only trouble vets,” Barker said. “I honestly hope it does. Then we’ll see something, either gross denial or action. As it is, they’re only cheating themselves out of responsibility.”