HO CHI MINH CITY, vietnam — Vo Huu Nhan was in his vegetable boat in the floating markets of the Mekong Delta when his phone rang. The caller from the United States had stunning news — a DNA database had linked him with a Vietnam vet thought to be his father.
Nhan, 46, had known his father was an American soldier named Bob, but little else.
“I was crying,” Nhan recalled. “I had lost my father for 40 years, and now I finally had gotten together with him.”
But the journey toward their reconciliation has not been easy. News of the DNA match set in motion a chain of events involving two families 8,700 miles apart that is still unfolding and has been complicated by the illness of the veteran, Robert Thedford Jr., a retired deputy sheriff in Texas.
When the last American military personnel fled Saigon on April 29 and 30, 1975, they left behind a country scarred by war, a people uncertain about their future and thousands of their own children.
These children — some half-black, some half-white — came from liaisons with bar girls, “hooch” maids, laundry workers and the laborers who filled sandbags to protect American bases.
They are approaching middle age with stories as complicated as the two countries that gave them life. Growing up with the face of the enemy, they were spat on, ridiculed, beaten. They were abandoned, given away to relatives or sold as cheap labor.
The families that kept them often had to hide them or shear off their telltale blond or curly locks. Some were sent to re-education or work camps, or ended up homeless on the streets. They were called “bui doi,” which means “the dust of life.”
Forty years later, hundreds remain in Vietnam, too poor or without proof to qualify for the program created by the Amerasian Homecoming Act of 1987 that resettles the children of American soldiers in the United States.
Now, an Amerasian group has launched a last-chance effort to reunite fathers and children with a new DNA database on a family heritage website. Those left behind have scant information about their GI dads. DNA matches are their only hope.
In the fall, Bob Thedford’s wife, Louise, a genealogy buff, logged on her account with Family Tree DNA and saw a surprising result. It was a new match for her husband, a father-son link. The son was Nhan.
Louise had long suspected that her husband might have had a child from his days as a military police officer in Vietnam. She had found a picture of a Vietnamese woman tucked inside his wallet shortly after they wed.
The news was more of a shock to their daughter, Amanda Hazel, 35, a paralegal from Fort Worth.
“To be honest, the first thing I thought was, ‘Are you sure this isn’t a scam?’ ” Hazel recalled.
Pictures of Nhan arrived a short time later. He was the image of his late grandfather, Robert Thedford Sr., a Navy veteran who had fought in World War II. “You look so much like your grandfather PawPaw Bob,” Bob told his son.
Thedford, a strapping Tarrant County deputy sheriff known as “Red” for his auburn hair, had met Nhan’s mother while he was at Qui Nhon Air Base. His memories of her are hazy, and his family said he rarely spoke of the war.
Tentative contacts followed, although Nhan speaks no English and does not have a computer. E-mails were exchanged through intermediaries, packages followed. Nhan sent sandals he had made and conical paddy hats; the Thedfords sent Nhan a $50 bill and Texas Rangers gear.
“Is there anything you need?” Robert Thedford kept asking.
Then there was the emotional first Skype call, when both men cried seeing each other for the first time.
“He looked like me,” Nhan said. “I felt like I connected with him right away.”
Last August, Thedford, 67, who had previously been treated for skin cancer, fell ill again. The cancer had spread, and he had a series of operations, the most recent April 3. As the Texas family rallied to care for him, Vietnam receded.
Recently, Nhan Skyped with Hazel from a dusty computer in the back of a friend’s sewing supply shop in Ho Chi Minh City. She spoke from her living room, her dogs running about. Nhan asked how his father was doing.
“He’s doing good. He can sit up in a chair now. They’re working with him,” Hazel said. “I feel bad not connecting sooner, but Mom and Dad think about you and talk about you all the time.”
Thedford had showed pictures of Nhan to the nurses in the hospital and said, “This is my son in Vietnam.”
This article has been edited to correct the year when the last American military personnel fled Saigon on April 29 and 30. That year was 1975, not 1965.
