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.
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