(car beeping) - Truthfully, I hated all things Vietnam.

So are you interviewing us?

- Yes.

I hope you will understand me.

- I knew that here were a lot of people who'd been killed but those people had killed my father.

I couldn't even imagine setting foot in that country.

I could not fathom wanting to go.

Where's your picture?

- I haven't had pictures.

It's a long time emcees.

- I don't know if it was I started to soften or mellow or age but there came a time when I realized that my father's bombs had killed people and probably many, many, many people and that there was maybe even a daughter maybe like me on there other side who had lost her dad and was feeling this kind of pain and anger too.

(speaking in foreign language) - [Margot] You're speaking Vietnamese to me, aren't you?

- [Female] Yes.

Can you fix a little bit of your hair, like the front?

- When you're in this search about who's your dad, what you're really asking is who am I?

- We didn't talk a lot about Vietnam growing up.

- I think like most of the kids when I was younger growing up through school, I had probably a lot of negative things about the thought about Vietnam.

- It was kind of like it was just a part of history, it was something that happened.

- I'd been on this mission since being a little kid to figure out what Vietnam was.

I read every book, I read every map, I looked at every documentary that I could watch.

- I never really wanted to learn about Vietnam but as I've gotten older, I feel really drawn to it.

- I had never honestly thought there's kids over there too that lost their dad.

- I'm going to Vietnam because that was the last place my dad was and I want to be closer to him.

- I got to stand on that ground.

That's as close as I'm gonna get to my father when he was alive.

- They'll be six of us going, four daughters and two sons, from all over the country, all different kinds of backgrounds but all curious about meeting who is this person on the other side.

(dramatic music) - Hello Miss Patty Loew And Miss Margot Carlson Delogne.

We are really lucky to have you here today with us in the studio and so welcome to our talk show today.

- Thank you so much for having us.

- Thank you.

- You are with groups of friends.

So what do you think about that?

- I'm with five other sisters and brothers, as I call them now.

We all lost our fathers in Vietnam and we've all come here for really two reasons.

One is to visit the places where our fathers died but the second is to meet sons and daughters on the other side.

So we wanted to meet Vietnamese children whose fathers died fighting our fathers.

We feel that that is an important step in our understanding of this war and what happened to our families and in healing from the war.

So that's why we're here.

- I heard some stories about the son and daughters in America, some of them, they feel a little bit anxious when they heard about Vietnam and they feel a little bit anxious also when they think about going to Vietnam.

- Some of us also coming here were nervous because we were gonna meet a son and daughter on the other side and we had no idea what to expect.

Will they be mad at us?

Will they see us as the invader's children?

We were concerned about this.

- [Male] Each of you have at least one other side.

- Okay, and will we all be at the same table or should we sit at the same table?

- What do you think, mixed, or opposite, what is it?

You think we mix together?

- Yeah.

- It better?

- It's better to mix.

And so maybe they have brought pictures with them, hopefully, they bring pictures with them.

(wistful music) (speaking in foreign language) - It's very exciting but I will tell you that all six of us were a little bit nervous coming here to meet you.

Our questions were would our coming together open old wounds on either side?

Would we be angry or sad all over again if we met and perhaps you might have had these concerns too but yet here we are, here we are today, and your presence, I would like to say, demonstrates a lot of courage and compassion.

It is a testament, I think, to our best selves and I think it is also a way for us to honor our fathers who I think would be very proud of our gathering today.

So we all grew up with just one side of this story and there are always two sides to every story and so we stand, literally, I stand with my fellow brothers and sisters to hear the other side.

May we open our ears and our hearts and come to a greater place of understanding and healing.

So thank you very much, thank you (applause) - That moment is never gonna happen again.

That's the first time that sons and daughters from each side have met each other.

We don't know what to say, they don't know what to say and we don't know how that's gonna turn out.

- He was lost on April 28th, 1968.

He's still missing in action.

(speaking in foreign language) - The son that I was sitting next to was a war orphan.

For the first time, my heart just ached for him.

You know our hearts ache for our dads.

Until this trip, I hadn't really thought about the Vietnamese children were missing their dads.

We had the translators but we could understand each other through, how the words were being spoken, whether someone was getting teared up, whether they were smiling.

- I was four weeks old.

- Their faces just light up when we start looking at pictures and they started getting on their cell phones and showing us pictures of their kids and their husbands and we connected.

Language didn't even matter.

- I'm writing down notes as everybody's going through their age and when they were born and like, oh, that's close to my birthday, oh, my daughter's that age, my son's that age.

There's pain but there's no bitterness.

They're exactly like us and what happened to them in the war was exact thing happened to us, they lost their father, that was the end result.

They feel the same way we do.

Whatever I thought is wrong.

That moment it puts it bigger than any one of us and that's kind of empowering.

Living your life where you're searching after one name on the wall, my dad's name, it's important to me, but you become singularly focused on that, looking for answers that you may never get, truths that you may never know, and to be in this situation and first of all, now it's six of us, that's a bigger mission and then all of a sudden, now there's 10 more people on the other side and then you really start thinking in a much, much bigger scale and I think that opens you up a lot more.

- Yes, I'm nervous about it.

Before last year, I wouldn't have known where to go and I still don't know that this is, I don't know if where we're going is where his crash site is but they did an excavation last year on a site that could possibly be my dad's.

I've always had a picture in my head of what the site would look like.

It's a five year old, six year old, seven year old picture from when I was that age and it's always stayed the same.

It looks like a jungle.

I was always told he went down in a jungle and that they had so much difficulty finding the site because the jungle would just close up around the crash site.

I just pictured a thick jungle, tropical jungle, that's what's in my head.

I'm sure it'll be completely different.

The thing I'm most scared about is that if when I'm there, if I don't feel anything.

- [Pilot] Preparation for landing.

- The reason why we did coordinates, my original reason, was how am I gonna trust an eight digit code on a website or the government that doesn't correspond to anything and say that's the coordinate and then give that to somebody and somebody's gonna take us there and how do I know they're right?

I didn't know that that was gonna become critical until the very first site visit.

(speaking in foreign language) - So that's where they're saying the site they're looking at.

(speaking in foreign language) - They're looking this area.

- But that's not this site.

That might be a site but that's not the site we're looking for.

That spot, that's where we want to go.

(speaking in foreign language) - Can you make bigger?

(speaking in foreign language) (kids laughing) - Let's just get on the road.

Let's just go and start driving somewhere.

We're gonna run out of light and if they can get through, they can get through.

If they can't, we'll just... - [Ron] Yeah just now we got to figure out how many bikes.

- [Margot] Can he leave right now?

- [Margot] Yeah, right now.

- [Margot] And how much does he want?

- [Female] 400,000.

- [Margot] Okay, let's go.

- [Ron] Let me just look.

- I had a poem that I wanted to read that I had found.

I'm gonna try to get through it, see if I can.

"I was only five years old when mom told me you had died.

"I didn't fully know what that meant.

"I felt numb but still I cried.

"I didn't know how big a hole your passing would leave.

"I didn't understand how much loneliness "I was about to receive.

"As the years have gone by, "I've forgotten a few things, "like the sound of your voice "and how your laughter used to ring.

"I've spent more of my life without you than with you, "I'm sad to say, "but I want you to know I still love you "and I think about you every day."

(speaking in foreign language) - [Translator] My father's name's (speaking in foreign language).

One month old, one month old.

(speaking in foreign language) - [Male] He's handsome.

- My mom was 17 when she had me.

She was just about to turn 18.

My dad enlisted at 17 years old and he was killed two weeks after he turned 19.

So now in my older life with two kids, I'm looking back and now it kind of has a lot more impact.

I never tried to figure out the politics of it until much later in life and then I learned much later in life trying to figure out the politics, I'm just better off thinking about how it was when I was six or seven years old where it didn't matter because it doesn't.

Everybody who fought on both sides didn't have a choice.

Not having a father, it was hard.

I'd be playing soccer and I'd have these games and I'd have a great game and I would just always think well maybe they got it wrong, maybe dad's gonna show up 'cause that'd be really cool.

And so then I built him up as this great dad.

I had this image of him that he would come and he would take care of me and he'd see me in my game taking shots on goal.

That sat with me for years.

This is as close as I'm every gonna get to where he was.

(crying) Dad, it took a while but I made it back.

This place that you were killed has treated me so nice since I've been here.

(crying) That's for you, dad, and I'm older than 21 so this is for me.

(soul music) ♪ Pull the string and I'll wink at you, I'm your puppet ♪ I'll do funny things if you want me to, I'm your puppet ♪ I'm yours to have and to hold ♪ Darling, you've got full control, of your puppet ♪ Just pull them little strings ♪ And I'll sing you a song ♪ I'm your puppet ♪ Make me do right or make me do wrong ♪ I'm your puppet ♪ Treat me good and I'll do anything ♪ I'm just a puppet and you hold my string ♪ I'm your puppet ♪ Your walking, talking, living, loving puppet ♪ I'm hanging on a string ♪ I'll do anything - Oh God, that's awesome.

I love that.

(speaking in foreign language) - [Ron] Wherever he says.

Anywhere on that.

(speaking in foreign language) - [Translator] So now we go to this right?

- [Ron] Anywhere on that.

(speaking in foreign language) - [Ron] To the river, you can do that?

- [Translator] Yeah.

- [Ron] Okay.

- [Translator] Yeah.

- This is my daughter.

This is my granddaughter.

She's nine and she's six.

And then, this is my wife, this is my son, he's 31.

Hits you like a ton of bricks.

I kept telling myself I wouldn't be emotional but I knew I would be.

I'm here to honor a man that I never knew but I think about him every day of my life and I will 'til the day I die.

One of the things I regret the most is the years he missed with grandpa and grandma.

I need to be a better grandson, try to visit them more often.

I just want my dad to know they love him and miss him dearly.

This was my dad's 1968 Camaro.

He loved this car.

I don't know if my mother liked it so much 'cause it had a stick shift.

(sad music) (speaking in foreign language) (sad music) - I went to Vietnam to answer unanswered questions and to feel close to my dad again.

As much as I love my dad and will always respect and honor everything that he did to serve his country, on a personal note, my dad was an alcoholic and when he drank, he was not very nice.

He had a couple times in his life where he'd stopped drinking six, seven months or whatever, and then he would go back to it.

I don't know if my life would've been as it is right now being raised in the home of an alcoholic.

I have the memories that my brother and sisters and my mom have shared with me.

I don't have any of the bad memories that they do.

As I was standing there looking out over Danang, there was a part of me that kind of felt like I was cheating.

I grew up with an uncertainty of how my dad actually died there.

When his commanding officer and the chaplain came to my mom's house, they had actually alluded to there being a chance, though they weren't sure, that my dad may have taken his own life.

I didn't feel like sharing that with everybody because I thought that maybe I would be looked upon as not really being as worthy of the title of gold star child because the war didn't take him away from me, that there's a chance that he took himself away from me.

I just remember thinking had things gotten so bad, had he been back to drinking and just couldn't fight his own demons anymore, the alcohol wasn't enough and because of the horrors that he saw there every day, and I'm not sure if he was aware but my mom was planning on leaving my dad and filing for divorce had he made it back from Vietnam.

Looking out over that hill, I just wondered if maybe that he kind of did himself and maybe us a favor.

A part of me had to wonder that maybe I ended up being better off which was very hard to say.

After years of looking, I finally had a gentleman comment on a post of mine on the Vietnam page on Facebook and said that he knew my dad.

Not only did he know my dad but he actually served with him and my dad was his chief so my dad was his boss.

We've been able to touch base and talk.

He was able to answer the questions, exactly what happened that day, I asked him point blank did he take his own life and he flat out said no.

My dad was on a MEDCAP patrol.

They went out to local villages to try and see if there was any medical needs.

Something went wrong in the village, that part is still uncertain, nobody really knows, four people ended up being injured on that trip.

My dad ended up being the only one that died from his injuries, he was shot in the head.

Had I known this, I probably would've even tried to find out more from the locals about the MEDCAP patrols.

I would've felt even more of a camaraderie and felt even closer to them.

Even though it was myself, I felt like an outsider with this knowledge that maybe my dad did do this.

It was always kind of like my dirty little secret.

My burden would've been a little lighter going over had I known that.

(speaking in foreign language) (laughing) - My grandmother had said that while he was over there, they sent him to school to learn several Vietnamese languages and dialects.

He hopped over to translate and the helicopter was shot down.

My mom, she was like, "Whatever you need, we'll do."

And I said to her, "I need you to pull this chest "of dad's stuff out of this cedar chest "that hasn't been opened in 45 years."

I took this out and I played on it.

I don't play harmonica.

But I thought it was pretty cool, my dad played.

- [Margot] Did he really?

- Yeah, yeah, he was really musical.

He was in the band.

I've done a lot of praying.

A lot of prayers for my church and my spiritual family.

My mom and I have talked more about it and what it was like.

I've learned more about what he was like growing up.

I want to be baptized in the river.

There's something very complete about that and very spiritual, very healing.

(upbeat music) ♪ I'll remember you ♪ Long after this endless summer has gone ♪ I'll be lonely, oh so lonely ♪ Living only to remember you ♪ I'll remember you ♪ Your voice is soft as the warm summer breeze - Today, seeing the water and seeing everything I feel like that hole is really closed up and it just feels really good, freeing.

♪ Ever after you ♪ I'll remember you ♪ To your arms someday ♪ I'll return to stay ♪ 'Til then ♪ You'll remember too ♪ I'll remember you (speaking in foreign language) (sad music) - I have tried over the years to summon some kind of memory of my dad and it's one of the saddest things I think is that I have no memories whatsoever.

My mom came into our bedroom, my sister and I were in there and she brought a folded flag with her, she had a folded flag on her lap and she basically said, "You're dad's never coming home again."

I always had this hole in me.

I always had this sense of loss.

When they started releasing the POWs and that man came home and there's this beautiful picture of his whole family rushing up to meet him and I remember staring at that for a long time and thinking, what's that like to hug your dad?

I remember feeling this hole and thinking, how am I gonna fill that?

And eventually I found ways and ways that were not so great.

We've all lived with this shadow of Vietnam over our lives and we've all sort of moved through 40, 50 years of not having our dads around and having our families go off in different directions and deal with it in different ways, some good, some really bad.

I really hope for healing 'cause I don't think that you can hate for that long.

When you say right in the tree line, it starts here?

- We're right, yeah.

(crying) - I always looked for you.

I always thought I would run into you.

I'd turn a corner and there you'd be and I'd take you home.

I don't know where you are physically.

Maybe you're here.

Maybe you're nearby.

But I have always felt you with me.

As I stay sober each day, as I confront fears and do things that scare me like being here right now, as I conceived and prepared for this trip, I find you in the best of me.

I came to this area six years ago and I didn't want to be here.

I'm coming here today with a very different view and a very different feeling.

It's more positive and joyful but also so conflicting.

I see the beauty of this place and its people and I've seen the effects of the bombs and I don't understand how someone who was so loving and kind and handsome and great could be at war with this place.

But I have the perspective you never could have, I've seen things you didn't.

I've connected with the people on a totally different level and I'm sorry you could not.

That at the time the era, you could not do that.

But I know that you've been here with me on this trip and that all of our dads have been with us, that you are so proud of what we have done and I am so proud of all of us too.

♪ There was a boy ♪ A very strange, enchanted boy ♪ They say he wandered very far, very far ♪ Over land and sea ♪ A little shy and sad of eye ♪ But very wise was he ♪ And then one day ♪ A magic day he passed my way ♪ And while we spoke of many things ♪ Fools and kings ♪ This he said to me ♪ The greatest thing you'll ever learn ♪ Is just to love and be loved in return (emotional music) - My heart really goes out to Margaret and Margot.

To be in those spots and not know are those the right spots.

They don't have the answer yet.

I hope we can get 'em the answer and when we get the answer, then we'll go back.

- Growing up, we didn't talk about Vietnam, you just didn't.

It wasn't something that you brought up.

So there's people that I've known for many, many years who had no idea that my dad was MIA or had served in Vietnam or any of that.

Going on this trip and peeling the skin off the scab that's been there for so many years, helped me realize that by opening myself up more to people and sharing more of myself, I get so much back, so much back that I couldn't have even imagined.

- You're going there to find out about your father and along this journey, you find out about yourself.

I thought when I came home, I was at peace like I was done.

I don't think I'm near done.

I think I got a lot ahead of me and I don't know what it is.

I think it's outside of my father's name.

- I really feel like I have a purpose, a personal purpose in life, and that's to unite children who are affected by war because know the benefit of doing that.

- I can't imagine being able to heal, to get past that hurt and resentment and bitterness without coming face to face.

It gave me a sense of completion and fullness after 49 years, I'm finally here.

- [Susan] When you sit across from those vets and the sons and daughters, you realize there's not an enemy.

- [Mike] It's humbled me, I can tell you, people from all different parts of the planet and whatever color, crede, race, financial status, we're all the same.

- There is so much war every day, it's just incredible, you turn on the television, you hear about conflicts all over the world.

You know that there are kids that are losing their parents or you hear about somebody dying and that they left behind two children and a wife and two kids and you just think oh God, there's a long road ahead for these people.

- Our friendship at the beginning bloom, bloom.

- I'm coming back and I'm bringing my son with me.

Me and my son.

- You call me.

I will invite you come to my home for drinking.

- I don't think kids who are experiencing loss today will be ready to meet the other side for a while 'cause you have to go through your own process first.

But I know that one day they will wake up and they will say, "There was somebody like me "who lost a dad on the other side "or a mom on the other side.

"I wonder how they're growing up.

"I wonder what they're feeling.

"I wonder what they're thinking.

"I wonder how they explain this."

I hope that that curiosity will bring them to the point that they want to meet that person one day.

(inspirational music) - 65, 66, 67, 68.

This wall finishes at the last year of the war.

(harmonica music)