February 25, 2021 • 20 mins
In a very modern fashion, Brent Evanoff discovers a secret he’d been unaware of for over 25 years. Through that process, he manages to help another veteran reconnect with something they lost as well.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From the small towns to the big cities, we bring
you the stories at that matter. This is this is
This is the Our American Stories podcast. This is Lee Habi,
(00:27):
the host of the Our American Stories podcast. On today's episode,
we bring you the story of the connection shared by
two veterans separated by nearly a half century. We love
producing these stories and bringing them to you from our team.
They work hard, day in and day out to bring
you stories from the people that you don't often get
(00:49):
to hear from, but that you should. And if you'd
like to support us in all that we do here,
visit our American Stories dot com, click on the donate
button and become a part of all all that's going
on here. The American people are the star of this show.
America itself is the star of our American Stories, and
we appreciate both one time gifts and monthly donations to
(01:13):
keep our positive stories about a good and great country going.
It's for you and through you that we tell these
stories because it's you, the American people again, who are
the star of this show. And now Robbie brings us
Brent Evanoff, who discovered a secret you'd been unaware of
(01:34):
for over twenty five years. I was born in Counts Plus,
Iowa and raised good Midwestern values. I come from a
history of family serving in the military all the way
(01:56):
back to World War One. Both grandparents fought in World
War Two, father Vietnam era, countless aunts and uncles that
had served over the years. That influenced me quite a bit,
and I decided to join the military. Graduated high school early,
just didn't really quite know what I wanted to do
in this world other than serve the military and go
(02:17):
on to do good things. December nineteen eighty nine and
listened as a Calvalry Scout, and I went through Calvary
Scout Training Fort Night's, Kentucky and found myself signed to
the third Armor Calvalry Regiment in Fort Bliss, Texas, May
of nineteen ninety and being a new private, you know,
(02:39):
everything's still new to me. I'm training. In August of
nineteen ninety, we were out on a two week field
training exercise when I recutivated Kuwait. To all intents and purposes,
Kuwait has ceased to exist as an independent sovereign nation. Afternoon,
every one, well at this hour, I rock remains in
a firm control all of the tiny oil rich country
(03:02):
of Kuwaiti. We had a warning order to prepare to
deploy to the Middle East. Didn't really understand the consequences
that we rolled back on posts and there's trains everywhere.
We're loading tanks and Bradley's on trains to go to Beaumont, Texas.
We're loading live ammunition into these armored vehicles to go
to Beaumont, Texas. And we had about ten days to
(03:26):
you know, kind of finish shots and some we did
some training. Being a eighteen year old kid about to
turn nineteen, the last three days we kind of had
our own personal time, and to be quite honest, I
only remember about a third of that time, you know,
being young kids off to war. You know, we trained
(03:47):
hard and we kind of party pretty hard. Well, you know,
I go over there overseas and get on with my life,
get out, go to college at the University of Iowa,
and I graduated. I was a Omaha fireman for a
little while, and then I proceeded to get interested in
(04:10):
anathesia and left and became certified as a certified registered
nurse and esthotist and found myself getting married to a
woman and we had three beautiful children. And you know,
my son is interested in going in the military, graduating
high school much like I did. And great kid on
head on his shoulders. But I understand where he's coming from.
(04:30):
You know, you don't know what you want to do,
and so he was going to enlist in the military.
And you know, I'm in my ana sesia practice and
I'm thinking, you know, I'm in my mid forties and
comfortable in my lifestyle, and you know, I think I'm
got the world by the tail. And I find myself
(04:52):
in a case, in a sesia case. And my sister
texted me about noon, said hey, can you talk And
I text her back, I'm in a case, guy, call
you later. She said, we'll call me when you get home.
And I get home that day. It was in February
of two thousand and eighteen, and I clicked back in
the recliner, remember it vividly, and the ceiling fan was
(05:14):
on low, and she said, Brenn, are you sitting down?
And she's twelve months younger at me. And I know
people out there with siblings, they know when they're messing
with you, or when something all of a sudden, it's
very serious. And I said, yeah, I'm sitting down, Sis,
what's going on? She bluntly told me that I have
a twenty six year old son I don't know about.
(05:34):
And I vividly remember looking at the ceiling fan. I
watched the blade go around three times, and I kind
of said, Sis, I'm going to need a little more information. Well.
The backstory was my mom was our housekeeping at another
hospital and retired two years earlier. She got into genealogy
and swabbed her buckle membrane and sent it in and
(05:58):
she gets like an email back saying, hey, you two
need to really talk. And my mom didn't know what
to do, so she contacted my sister, and my sister
kind of was emailing this guy. And it turns out
this guy was in the United States Navy's station in Italy,
and he said, you know, I you know, my birth
certificate says father unknown. You know, if he doesn't, this
person doesn't want to be a part of my life.
(06:19):
I understand that if they could tell me a little
bit about my maybe my genetic history, if I need
to be concerned about anything, I'd appreciate it. And I'm
just floored. You know, here I have the world by
the tail and and and then something like this happens
to you unexpectedly. I you know, you're only on this earth,
you know, a snap of a finger, fraction of a
(06:41):
second of time. Why would you not want to get
to know someone like that? And so I said, yes, Chris,
I would love to, you know, get a hold of him.
And my sister sent me a picture of him. You know,
we look alike. His mother was down at Fort Bliss,
Tex at the same time period I was, and you know,
I just harkened back to that time where being a
(07:03):
you know, raise your hand if you've never done anything irresponsible.
I remember vividly video conferencing with the skype and up
pops this, uh, this handsome young stud in the United
States Navy serving overseas, and we kind of just you know,
(07:25):
said a low and you know, got to know each
other a little bit, and uh it was really a
wonderful experience. And you know, as I you know, a
month later, I kind of talked to my family and
you know, told them the story and how good head
on his shoulders, um, you know, and we just kind
(07:48):
of fomented this relationship of you know, getting to know
each other, you know, and this, This kid has an
amazing ability to you know, um, I felt guilty, you know,
because I missed being a father to him during impressionable years.
And I felt guilty a lot of time. And he
(08:09):
kept interrupting, he saying, Hey, let's not look in the
back the rear view mirror. Let's let's look down the
road and just enjoy what we have. And you know,
a lot of times it brings me to tears, to
be quite honest, that this young man could be so strong,
and it's really humbled me in a lot of ways.
So fast forward. My son's in the United States Army,
(08:33):
and again I called my son that I've always known,
my old young son, and Tyler my new old son.
You know, he's in the navy overseas in Italy. My son,
my son, Nicholas, my old young son is in the
army in Korea. And I've got two high school girls.
And you know, when I got out of the army,
(08:55):
I spent four months backpacking through part of North Africa
and Europe and quite an adventure. And come to find out,
my new old son has traveled extensively through Europe and
has a military history entrance interests much like I do,
and my son Nicholas, my old young son. I thought, wow,
(09:16):
you know what an amazing experience. My two sons had
not met. That summer, I flew Tyler from Italy to
meet his sisters for the first time. Unfortunately, my son
was already in the army in Korea at that time.
So I thought, how can we all just kind of
take this blessing and tied all in together? And I
(09:39):
came up with a solution to I'd never traveled to
Far East Asia, so I put this out there and
it kind of came together. In May and June, we
spent thirty days backpacking through South Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, and
Cambodia to be able to see my sons meet for
(09:59):
the firs time and just kind of can try to
connect ourselves as a family as best we can underneath
the circumstances. And boy was it humbling and an amazing experience.
So we're traveling getting to know each other. Um, Tyler,
my new old son, does not have sisters, so m
(10:21):
watching them interact and new big brother kind of as
we're spending thirty taste together literally staying in hostiles and
kind of roughnes it you know, that's kind of what
what the venture we were looking for, um teasing as
new sisters and likewise as sisters teasing their new older
brother back and brothers and brothers kind of interacting, um,
(10:44):
you know, as a as a father it um it really,
you know kind of. I was very very happy. And
if you like what you hear, if you love the show, please,
by all means subscribe and share. We're trying to bring
(11:04):
people together in this country. There are so many things
that tear us apart, but if we can agree on
just one thing, this is a good and beautiful country.
Not a perfect country, but a good and beautiful one. Again,
If you love what you're listening to, if you love this,
if you love this podcast, subscribe and more importantly share
(11:24):
with friends and neighbors. We decided that we wanted to
see Vietnam, and in order to see really Vietnam, they
don't have a reliable public transportation system, so you have
to ride motorcycles. And through a lot of research, I
found a guide out of Denang and we spent five
(11:46):
days touring on motorcycles, my daughter riding behind me, and
my other daughter riding behind the guide, and my two
sons riding their own motorcycles, and we drove along the
hot Chiman Trail out of Denang, headed south to the
Ashaw Valley, and we got to permit from the communist
government to climb Hamburger Hill and road to Caison. And
(12:10):
everywhere we're going, we're stopping in little villages and meeting
these people and and still seeing a lot of remnants
from the war in a lot of ways. Um. And
we find ourselves at Cason and well, we're looking around
at some of the bunkers that that a collapsed, and
we're there and a village, local villager came up to
me and he had some trinkets and he wanted to
(12:32):
sell them. And I looked at him and the first
thing I saw was a US military dog tech and
then I saw North Vietnamese rushed North Vietnamese Army medal,
and so a few other trinkets and so forth, and
I knew I wanted them, so I paid. I think
I paid like seven dollars. And you know, we went
on with our trip connected as a as a as
(12:53):
a as a family and had an amazing experience. You know,
my son that I've never known comes into my life
and we kind of come full circle with the family
that he's never known and my family with a Sunday
never knew. Well, we get back from our trip to
Omaha and I go back to work and I start researching,
(13:17):
you know, my time off this name on this tag, Well,
this name kind of had a unique first name smelling.
So I the first thing it is, I use Internet
search to find see if he maybe one of the
sixty eight thousand that were killed in the Vietnam War,
and his name wasn't on there, which kind of gave
me hope that maybe I can might be able to
(13:37):
reconnect this piece of property to a US military serviceman.
My preliminary Internet search has won't come up with anything.
My wife got interested and she kind of helped me
look around. And because of the gentleman's unique first spelling
of his first name, we come across an old obituary
(13:58):
from Minnesota of a gentleman that perhaps was this guy's father.
In the print that said survived by this gentleman and
his wife. And my wife took the first name of
his wife and the last name and looked on social
media and found a Carol Hammond, and we got a
(14:24):
phone number and I called and it was a voice machine,
and I said, you know, hello sir. You know, my
name's Brent Devana from Omaha, just returned from Vietnam. And
if I came back with a piece of property that
you may have left over there, if you're you know,
the mister that happened to lost his property over there,
(14:44):
you would you please call me. And so a week
went by, and it was a weekend and I'm doing
stuff around the house and I get a phone call
from this gentleman and he says, yes, you know, this
is me Um. I did serve. I served actually two
tours in Vietnam. You know, how can I help you?
And I proceeded to tell them that, you know, it
(15:05):
was traveling over there and purchased this dog tag. And
he the first thing he asked me, he goes, what
numbers are on there? And I proceeded to tell them
and goes, oh, that was from my second deployment. Well,
he proceeded to tell me his story and he grew
up in northern Minnesota and got a little bit of
(15:26):
trouble three months before the graduation from high school. And
back then, you either went to jail or you went
in the military, and he chose the military and found
himself in one hundred and seventy third Airborne in Vietnam
nineteen sixty seven, nineteen sixty eight. He told me that,
you know that he was wounded with a roadside momb
(15:49):
that was command detonated and you know, he h if
it wasn't for him wearing the radio that day, that
he probably would have lost his life as a large
piece of shrapnel had torn into the radio and he
was wounded in the leg and and and got knocked
out actually, and came conscious and recovered from that and
(16:12):
went on to serve in Berlin, Germany during the sixties
and the Cold War, decided that he wanted to go
back to Vietnam. So he found himself in one hundred
and first Airborne in nineteen sixty nine, nineteen seventy in
m Vietnam. And he said that time was, you know,
a lot different than this first tour. They were doing
(16:34):
missions of uh. You know that they didn't necessarily always
wore their rank or their insignia or patches. And he
was in the Battle of tam Key and there's platoon
of thirty five found themselves surrounded in a gun battle
for at least a day. I thought it, maybe he
said too. And and when the battle was over, he
(16:56):
out of the thirty five, he was one of seven survivors,
and in fact, of those seven, two were not wounded,
and he was one of them. And proceeded to tell
me that he'd decided that, you know, back home in
Northwoods in Minnesota was a place that he'd like to go,
and found himself there and he actually runs a retreat
for a local veterans group up there, and hopefully one
(17:19):
day I can meet him. Well, we had a wonderful
phone call. I hung up and I told him that
I'm going to be mailing his piece of property to him.
And I said, I've bought it from a villager and Casson,
and he goes, wow, you know, I never stepped one
foot on Caison. I operated about fifty miles south of there. Actually,
(17:39):
the only thing I can come up with is, you know,
trading over time, villagers and so forth. And and he
doesn't remember one incident where he specifically lost his dog tag,
but I mailed it to him, and you know, I
get an email about a week later from his wife
and it's you know, his wife says it really my
(18:03):
effort to track him down and return a piece of
property from his past really men a lot to him.
And you know, and my story just kind of comes
to a conclusion that two circles have been closed. A
son I never met before reunited with his father and
(18:23):
family that he's ever known, and that through our travels
together as a family, forming a new relationship, that we're
able to kind of bring full circle of veterans past
to him by reuniting him with something as simple as
a dog tag, which any member who's been in the
military knows how much that is a part of their
(18:46):
life at the time. So you know that those two
experiences combined really humbles me as a as a father,
as a you know, human being and American that you know,
just when you think that you think you have life
figured out, you know, the older I get, the more
(19:07):
I frombly believe life is truly stranger than fiction. Indeed,
and that's what we learned here every day telling stories,
especially our listeners telling stories. Great job as always by
Robbie on the production and his special thanks to Brett
evanof his story My Goodness, his family story and then
(19:27):
another family story that he stumbles upon while having an adventure.
And by the way, if you do take your family overseas,
go to these places like Vietnam, go to Haiti, go
to Africa, go to places that well, you can learn
a lot more about your own country and others by
visiting these places. And what a thing to do for
a guy. Most people would have taken that dog tag
(19:49):
and stuck at someplace, but he decided to track it
down and track the person down who would belonged to.
And I only know that my grandparents would have loved
who have had a dog tag or letters or anything
from the sun that died in World War two and
all we got was a flag. So for anybody who
served and lost somebody or even not lost somebody, the
(20:11):
importance of this paraphernalia, well it's not small. Thanks again
for listening. I'm Li Habib and this is the Our
American Stories podcast
From the small towns to the big cities, we bring
you the stories at that matter. This is this is
This is the Our American Stories podcast. This is Lee Habi,
(00:27):
the host of the Our American Stories podcast. On today's episode,
we bring you the story of the connection shared by
two veterans separated by nearly a half century. We love
producing these stories and bringing them to you from our team.
They work hard, day in and day out to bring
you stories from the people that you don't often get
(00:49):
to hear from, but that you should. And if you'd
like to support us in all that we do here,
visit our American Stories dot com, click on the donate
button and become a part of all all that's going
on here. The American people are the star of this show.
America itself is the star of our American Stories, and
we appreciate both one time gifts and monthly donations to
(01:13):
keep our positive stories about a good and great country going.
It's for you and through you that we tell these
stories because it's you, the American people again, who are
the star of this show. And now Robbie brings us
Brent Evanoff, who discovered a secret you'd been unaware of
(01:34):
for over twenty five years. I was born in Counts Plus,
Iowa and raised good Midwestern values. I come from a
history of family serving in the military all the way
(01:56):
back to World War One. Both grandparents fought in World
War Two, father Vietnam era, countless aunts and uncles that
had served over the years. That influenced me quite a bit,
and I decided to join the military. Graduated high school early,
just didn't really quite know what I wanted to do
in this world other than serve the military and go
(02:17):
on to do good things. December nineteen eighty nine and
listened as a Calvalry Scout, and I went through Calvary
Scout Training Fort Night's, Kentucky and found myself signed to
the third Armor Calvalry Regiment in Fort Bliss, Texas, May
of nineteen ninety and being a new private, you know,
(02:39):
everything's still new to me. I'm training. In August of
nineteen ninety, we were out on a two week field
training exercise when I recutivated Kuwait. To all intents and purposes,
Kuwait has ceased to exist as an independent sovereign nation. Afternoon,
every one, well at this hour, I rock remains in
a firm control all of the tiny oil rich country
(03:02):
of Kuwaiti. We had a warning order to prepare to
deploy to the Middle East. Didn't really understand the consequences
that we rolled back on posts and there's trains everywhere.
We're loading tanks and Bradley's on trains to go to Beaumont, Texas.
We're loading live ammunition into these armored vehicles to go
to Beaumont, Texas. And we had about ten days to
(03:26):
you know, kind of finish shots and some we did
some training. Being a eighteen year old kid about to
turn nineteen, the last three days we kind of had
our own personal time, and to be quite honest, I
only remember about a third of that time, you know,
being young kids off to war. You know, we trained
(03:47):
hard and we kind of party pretty hard. Well, you know,
I go over there overseas and get on with my life,
get out, go to college at the University of Iowa,
and I graduated. I was a Omaha fireman for a
little while, and then I proceeded to get interested in
(04:10):
anathesia and left and became certified as a certified registered
nurse and esthotist and found myself getting married to a
woman and we had three beautiful children. And you know,
my son is interested in going in the military, graduating
high school much like I did. And great kid on
head on his shoulders. But I understand where he's coming from.
(04:30):
You know, you don't know what you want to do,
and so he was going to enlist in the military.
And you know, I'm in my ana sesia practice and
I'm thinking, you know, I'm in my mid forties and
comfortable in my lifestyle, and you know, I think I'm
got the world by the tail. And I find myself
(04:52):
in a case, in a sesia case. And my sister
texted me about noon, said hey, can you talk And
I text her back, I'm in a case, guy, call
you later. She said, we'll call me when you get home.
And I get home that day. It was in February
of two thousand and eighteen, and I clicked back in
the recliner, remember it vividly, and the ceiling fan was
(05:14):
on low, and she said, Brenn, are you sitting down?
And she's twelve months younger at me. And I know
people out there with siblings, they know when they're messing
with you, or when something all of a sudden, it's
very serious. And I said, yeah, I'm sitting down, Sis,
what's going on? She bluntly told me that I have
a twenty six year old son I don't know about.
(05:34):
And I vividly remember looking at the ceiling fan. I
watched the blade go around three times, and I kind
of said, Sis, I'm going to need a little more information. Well.
The backstory was my mom was our housekeeping at another
hospital and retired two years earlier. She got into genealogy
and swabbed her buckle membrane and sent it in and
(05:58):
she gets like an email back saying, hey, you two
need to really talk. And my mom didn't know what
to do, so she contacted my sister, and my sister
kind of was emailing this guy. And it turns out
this guy was in the United States Navy's station in Italy,
and he said, you know, I you know, my birth
certificate says father unknown. You know, if he doesn't, this
person doesn't want to be a part of my life.
(06:19):
I understand that if they could tell me a little
bit about my maybe my genetic history, if I need
to be concerned about anything, I'd appreciate it. And I'm
just floored. You know, here I have the world by
the tail and and and then something like this happens
to you unexpectedly. I you know, you're only on this earth,
you know, a snap of a finger, fraction of a
(06:41):
second of time. Why would you not want to get
to know someone like that? And so I said, yes, Chris,
I would love to, you know, get a hold of him.
And my sister sent me a picture of him. You know,
we look alike. His mother was down at Fort Bliss,
Tex at the same time period I was, and you know,
I just harkened back to that time where being a
(07:03):
you know, raise your hand if you've never done anything irresponsible.
I remember vividly video conferencing with the skype and up
pops this, uh, this handsome young stud in the United
States Navy serving overseas, and we kind of just you know,
(07:25):
said a low and you know, got to know each
other a little bit, and uh it was really a
wonderful experience. And you know, as I you know, a
month later, I kind of talked to my family and
you know, told them the story and how good head
on his shoulders, um, you know, and we just kind
(07:48):
of fomented this relationship of you know, getting to know
each other, you know, and this, This kid has an
amazing ability to you know, um, I felt guilty, you know,
because I missed being a father to him during impressionable years.
And I felt guilty a lot of time. And he
(08:09):
kept interrupting, he saying, Hey, let's not look in the
back the rear view mirror. Let's let's look down the
road and just enjoy what we have. And you know,
a lot of times it brings me to tears, to
be quite honest, that this young man could be so strong,
and it's really humbled me in a lot of ways.
So fast forward. My son's in the United States Army,
(08:33):
and again I called my son that I've always known,
my old young son, and Tyler my new old son.
You know, he's in the navy overseas in Italy. My son,
my son, Nicholas, my old young son is in the
army in Korea. And I've got two high school girls.
And you know, when I got out of the army,
(08:55):
I spent four months backpacking through part of North Africa
and Europe and quite an adventure. And come to find out,
my new old son has traveled extensively through Europe and
has a military history entrance interests much like I do,
and my son Nicholas, my old young son. I thought, wow,
(09:16):
you know what an amazing experience. My two sons had
not met. That summer, I flew Tyler from Italy to
meet his sisters for the first time. Unfortunately, my son
was already in the army in Korea at that time.
So I thought, how can we all just kind of
take this blessing and tied all in together? And I
(09:39):
came up with a solution to I'd never traveled to
Far East Asia, so I put this out there and
it kind of came together. In May and June, we
spent thirty days backpacking through South Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, and
Cambodia to be able to see my sons meet for
(09:59):
the firs time and just kind of can try to
connect ourselves as a family as best we can underneath
the circumstances. And boy was it humbling and an amazing experience.
So we're traveling getting to know each other. Um, Tyler,
my new old son, does not have sisters, so m
(10:21):
watching them interact and new big brother kind of as
we're spending thirty taste together literally staying in hostiles and
kind of roughnes it you know, that's kind of what
what the venture we were looking for, um teasing as
new sisters and likewise as sisters teasing their new older
brother back and brothers and brothers kind of interacting, um,
(10:44):
you know, as a as a father it um it really,
you know kind of. I was very very happy. And
if you like what you hear, if you love the show, please,
by all means subscribe and share. We're trying to bring
(11:04):
people together in this country. There are so many things
that tear us apart, but if we can agree on
just one thing, this is a good and beautiful country.
Not a perfect country, but a good and beautiful one. Again,
If you love what you're listening to, if you love this,
if you love this podcast, subscribe and more importantly share
(11:24):
with friends and neighbors. We decided that we wanted to
see Vietnam, and in order to see really Vietnam, they
don't have a reliable public transportation system, so you have
to ride motorcycles. And through a lot of research, I
found a guide out of Denang and we spent five
(11:46):
days touring on motorcycles, my daughter riding behind me, and
my other daughter riding behind the guide, and my two
sons riding their own motorcycles, and we drove along the
hot Chiman Trail out of Denang, headed south to the
Ashaw Valley, and we got to permit from the communist
government to climb Hamburger Hill and road to Caison. And
(12:10):
everywhere we're going, we're stopping in little villages and meeting
these people and and still seeing a lot of remnants
from the war in a lot of ways. Um. And
we find ourselves at Cason and well, we're looking around
at some of the bunkers that that a collapsed, and
we're there and a village, local villager came up to
me and he had some trinkets and he wanted to
(12:32):
sell them. And I looked at him and the first
thing I saw was a US military dog tech and
then I saw North Vietnamese rushed North Vietnamese Army medal,
and so a few other trinkets and so forth, and
I knew I wanted them, so I paid. I think
I paid like seven dollars. And you know, we went
on with our trip connected as a as a as
(12:53):
a as a family and had an amazing experience. You know,
my son that I've never known comes into my life
and we kind of come full circle with the family
that he's never known and my family with a Sunday
never knew. Well, we get back from our trip to
Omaha and I go back to work and I start researching,
(13:17):
you know, my time off this name on this tag, Well,
this name kind of had a unique first name smelling.
So I the first thing it is, I use Internet
search to find see if he maybe one of the
sixty eight thousand that were killed in the Vietnam War,
and his name wasn't on there, which kind of gave
me hope that maybe I can might be able to
(13:37):
reconnect this piece of property to a US military serviceman.
My preliminary Internet search has won't come up with anything.
My wife got interested and she kind of helped me
look around. And because of the gentleman's unique first spelling
of his first name, we come across an old obituary
(13:58):
from Minnesota of a gentleman that perhaps was this guy's father.
In the print that said survived by this gentleman and
his wife. And my wife took the first name of
his wife and the last name and looked on social
media and found a Carol Hammond, and we got a
(14:24):
phone number and I called and it was a voice machine,
and I said, you know, hello sir. You know, my
name's Brent Devana from Omaha, just returned from Vietnam. And
if I came back with a piece of property that
you may have left over there, if you're you know,
the mister that happened to lost his property over there,
(14:44):
you would you please call me. And so a week
went by, and it was a weekend and I'm doing
stuff around the house and I get a phone call
from this gentleman and he says, yes, you know, this
is me Um. I did serve. I served actually two
tours in Vietnam. You know, how can I help you?
And I proceeded to tell them that, you know, it
(15:05):
was traveling over there and purchased this dog tag. And
he the first thing he asked me, he goes, what
numbers are on there? And I proceeded to tell them
and goes, oh, that was from my second deployment. Well,
he proceeded to tell me his story and he grew
up in northern Minnesota and got a little bit of
(15:26):
trouble three months before the graduation from high school. And
back then, you either went to jail or you went
in the military, and he chose the military and found
himself in one hundred and seventy third Airborne in Vietnam
nineteen sixty seven, nineteen sixty eight. He told me that,
you know that he was wounded with a roadside momb
(15:49):
that was command detonated and you know, he h if
it wasn't for him wearing the radio that day, that
he probably would have lost his life as a large
piece of shrapnel had torn into the radio and he
was wounded in the leg and and and got knocked
out actually, and came conscious and recovered from that and
(16:12):
went on to serve in Berlin, Germany during the sixties
and the Cold War, decided that he wanted to go
back to Vietnam. So he found himself in one hundred
and first Airborne in nineteen sixty nine, nineteen seventy in
m Vietnam. And he said that time was, you know,
a lot different than this first tour. They were doing
(16:34):
missions of uh. You know that they didn't necessarily always
wore their rank or their insignia or patches. And he
was in the Battle of tam Key and there's platoon
of thirty five found themselves surrounded in a gun battle
for at least a day. I thought it, maybe he
said too. And and when the battle was over, he
(16:56):
out of the thirty five, he was one of seven survivors,
and in fact, of those seven, two were not wounded,
and he was one of them. And proceeded to tell
me that he'd decided that, you know, back home in
Northwoods in Minnesota was a place that he'd like to go,
and found himself there and he actually runs a retreat
for a local veterans group up there, and hopefully one
(17:19):
day I can meet him. Well, we had a wonderful
phone call. I hung up and I told him that
I'm going to be mailing his piece of property to him.
And I said, I've bought it from a villager and Casson,
and he goes, wow, you know, I never stepped one
foot on Caison. I operated about fifty miles south of there. Actually,
(17:39):
the only thing I can come up with is, you know,
trading over time, villagers and so forth. And and he
doesn't remember one incident where he specifically lost his dog tag,
but I mailed it to him, and you know, I
get an email about a week later from his wife
and it's you know, his wife says it really my
(18:03):
effort to track him down and return a piece of
property from his past really men a lot to him.
And you know, and my story just kind of comes
to a conclusion that two circles have been closed. A
son I never met before reunited with his father and
(18:23):
family that he's ever known, and that through our travels
together as a family, forming a new relationship, that we're
able to kind of bring full circle of veterans past
to him by reuniting him with something as simple as
a dog tag, which any member who's been in the
military knows how much that is a part of their
(18:46):
life at the time. So you know that those two
experiences combined really humbles me as a as a father,
as a you know, human being and American that you know,
just when you think that you think you have life
figured out, you know, the older I get, the more
(19:07):
I frombly believe life is truly stranger than fiction. Indeed,
and that's what we learned here every day telling stories,
especially our listeners telling stories. Great job as always by
Robbie on the production and his special thanks to Brett
evanof his story My Goodness, his family story and then
(19:27):
another family story that he stumbles upon while having an adventure.
And by the way, if you do take your family overseas,
go to these places like Vietnam, go to Haiti, go
to Africa, go to places that well, you can learn
a lot more about your own country and others by
visiting these places. And what a thing to do for
a guy. Most people would have taken that dog tag
(19:49):
and stuck at someplace, but he decided to track it
down and track the person down who would belonged to.
And I only know that my grandparents would have loved
who have had a dog tag or letters or anything
from the sun that died in World War two and
all we got was a flag. So for anybody who
served and lost somebody or even not lost somebody, the
(20:11):
importance of this paraphernalia, well it's not small. Thanks again
for listening. I'm Li Habib and this is the Our
American Stories podcast
Host
Lee Habeeb
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