Vietnam Legacy: Finding G.I. Fathers, and Children Left BehindPosted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Family/Parenting, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2013-09-16 20:57Z by Steven |
Vietnam Legacy: Finding G.I. Fathers, and Children Left Behind
The New York Times
2013-09-16
James Dao, Military and Veterans Affairs Reporter
SALTILLO, Miss. — Soon after he departed Vietnam in 1970, Specialist James Copeland received a letter from his Vietnamese girlfriend. She was pregnant, she wrote, and he was the father.
He re-enlisted, hoping to be sent back. But the Army was drawing down and kept him stateside. By the time Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese in 1975, he had lost touch with the woman. He got a job at a plastics factory in northern Mississippi and raised a family. But a hard question lingered: did she really have his child?
“A lot of things we did in Vietnam I could put out of my mind,” said Mr. Copeland, 67. “But I couldn’t put that out.”
In 2011, Mr. Copeland decided to find the answer, acknowledging what many other veterans have denied, kept secret or tried to forget: that they left children behind in Vietnam…
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