Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Very Interesting

From the San Fran Chronicle: In 1968, U.S. Army Sgt. John Hartley Robertson fell into the jungle, his helicopter shot down over Laos in a top-secret mission during the Vietnam War. If Hollywood had its way with the script, the Green Beret would have been welcomed home a hero after a daring rescue. In reality, history presumed him slain, relegating his name to war memorials and funeral pamphlets.
A new film by Emmy-winning documentarian Michael Jorgensen tells the story of this Alabama-born soldier lost at war. “Unclaimed” purports to have found Robertson in a remote jungle, his frame bent with age, his memory of his wife and children’s names erased by the trauma of war. He no longer speaks English.
The documentary follows Vietnam veteran Tom Faunce, who, while on a humanitarian trip to Southeast Asia in 2008, heard tales of an army brother forgotten by his own government and left to start a new life in Vietnam. At first, the filmmaker set out to debunk these claims and expose the man as a poser. But the evidence seemed to suggest otherwise....
Through a translator, the 76-year-old man tells his account: How the North Vietnamese captured him after his helicopter crash, how they trapped him in a bamboo cage and tortured him for years. Eventually, his captors released him, physically and mentally broken. A widowed woman found him lost in the jungle, nursed him back to health and eventually married him. Taking on his wife’s late husband’s identifying information, he registered as a French-Vietnamese citizen named Dan Tan Ngoc.  http://blog.sfgate.com/hottopics/2013/04/30/vietnam-veteran-presumed-dead-reportedly-found-in-remote-jungle-44-years-later/
It will be interesting to see if Sgt. Hartley will want to come back to the United States.

No comments:

Post a Comment