Many years ago while visiting my family in the beautiful Mekong Delta of South Vietnam, I met Mrs Nguyen,who was visiting some members of her family also in the south. Mrs Nguyen gave birth to a baby girl during the war, who had been fathered by an American GI. However, the search (this time, as is most typical), was not for the father of her child, but for her daughter.

The baby girl had been airlifted to America during the infamous operation "baby lift, as Mrs Nguyen thought this was the best chance to insure her daughter's survival as an Amerasian. Operation Baby Lift was a humanitarian project to get the Amer-Asian children out. This was the children of the American men. If they stayed around in Vietnam, they would be murdered by the Viet Cong. Still to this day, Amer-Asian children are treated as outcasts in Vietnam, and many lead difficult and isolated lives from traditional Vietnamese community.

They were in different orphanages in South Vietnam, run by Catholic South Vietnamese nurses. Usually the mothers put them there, or left them at the front door. She knew her daughter had been adopted by an American family but as the birth was in Viet Nam, the usual path I would normally walk down to seek " amended ID" information was not applicable here.

I gathered up what information I could surrounding her birth in Vietnam and returned to America to begin work on this and other cases which had subsequently developed. During the intervening months, I had made many contacts to various agencies which all proved fruitless. I decided to post this information on as many boards as I think would be useful for this case.

Before I had left Viet Nam, Mrs Nguyen had given me a photograph of her and her daughter which she has pinned to her daughter's clothing before leaving her at the orphanage.This photograph proved later to be the key. Her daughter had kept this photograph all these years, and, knowing she had been adopted began her search on her mother through friends she had in Viet Nam, as well in America.

One day, she noticed the post I had made on some message boards, and instantly of course recognized the photograph of her and her mother. I had left a contact email address as welll as tel# along in my post, and one day I received a phone call from a very tearful but very happy young woman.