American Prisoner Of War (POW) Found In Vietnam Jungle After 45 Years, Here’s What Happened
During the Vietnam War in the late 1960s and early 1970s, thousands of soldiers fought for the United States during an era when the nation was divided about the country's involvement in the conflict. Many of these soldiers became prisoners of war (POWs) and sadly, many were never heard from again.
One of those soldiers was Master Sgt. John Hartley Robertson. He was presumed dead after being captured in 1975 but miraculously found to be alive in 2008! But the happy homecoming wasn't what it seemed.
In 2008, A Missionary Heard Of A Strange Rumor
In spring 2008, a Christian missionary named Tom Faunce (who was a Vietnam veteran) went to Cambodia to help locals dig wells. He had survived two tours of duty, but not everyone he served with during his stint in the military was as lucky as he was. Faunce was greatly affected by the war and turned his energies towards religion and helping others around the world.
During a break from the well project, Faunce heard a rumor that an American Vietnam veteran had survived a helicopter crash in 1968 and will still alive. The man was reportedly living in Laos.
A Marriage And A Name Change
Faunce found out that the American was a highly decorated Green Beret named John Hartley Robertson. Robertson was injured after his helicopter crashed and was sent to a North Vietnamese Army prison. While captive, Robertson married a nurse who cared for him.
Once Robertson escaped from his prison, he stole the nurse's dead husband's ID and escaped to South Vietnam. Robertson changed his name to Dang Tan Ngoc. The story sounded quite unbelievable, yet Faunce gave it the benefit of the doubt. Soldiers subjected to stressful situations can behave in unusual ways and make decisions that perhaps they wouldn't in regular circumstances.
"He's Not American, He's Vietnamese"
Faunce needed to meet Robertson in person in order to verify his story, so he decided to visit his home. The man he met was very thin, about six feet tall, and sported thinning gray hair. Robertson welcomed Faunce into his home and invited him into the living room. Robertson knew why Faunce came to see him.
While he was pleasant, his wife was not happy. She was shocked by the visitor and yelled angrily in Vietnamese: "He's not American. He's Vietnamese!" Robertson took his wife aside, and when they came back she told Faunce why she was so afraid.
Secret Work With The CIA
The wife revealed that she was worried that her family would pay the consequences if people discovered she had smuggled Robertson out of prison so many years earlier. Over the next several hours, Robertson opened up to Faunce and talked about his time in the military. After graduating from high school in Alabama, Robertson joined the Green Berets.
He trained as a paratrooper, and in the mid-1960s he was recruited by the CIA in a top secret position and helped bomb North Vietnam. Robertson and others worked with the agency in Laos and Cambodia, executing sensitive search-and-destroy reconnaissance missions.
Unlucky Mission
While Robertson was good at his job, he was unable to escape enemy fire while flying in a helicopter over the South Asian jungle in 1968. The helicopter was struck, and as it began to spiral towards the ground, most of the soldiers were ejected. Robertson, however, got stuck inside. This probably saved his life.
He survived the crash, but he was not in good shape. His bruised and injured body was transported to a Vietcong hospital. That is where he met his future wife. Then Robertson began the next chapter of life as a Vietnamese farmer in rural Laos.
Missing & Presumed Dead
Those who were unlucky enough to be captured were often starved, tortured, and sometimes killed by the Vietcong. When the war ended in 1975, many of the POWs were released. Still, others remained missing and were presumed dead, including Special Forces Green Beret Master Sgt. John Hartley Robertson.
Robertson claimed that after his escape, he did his best to survive in the jungle until eventually it just became a new way of life.
Robertson's Foggy Memory
Jorgensen wrote, directed and produced the 2013 Canadian documentary Unclaimed about the former Special Forces Green Beret. Faunce was the one who convinced the filmmaker to make the documentary and to help Robertson reunite with his family. In the film, Robertson discussed being shot down over Laos during a classified mission.
He explained that he lived in a bamboo cage in the Vietnamese jungle and claimed he was tortured for more than a year before he was sent to the hospital. The strange thing was that Robertson spoke only Vietnamese and didn't remember his children's names or his own birthday.
Digging Into Robertson's Disappearance
Jorgensen made sure he researched everything he could about John Hartley Robertson prior to making the film. He told IndieWire.com in 2014: "I did a lot of research about this mission and the MACV-SOG Organization that the Pentagon put together in January of '64.
Then I tried to find everything I could about this missing man, and what was known about him. That was really a black hole. He disappeared; there are no files about this guy at all. There are a couple of statements by people who were in the air or on the ground when his helicopter went down, pretty minimal."
Returning Home
During their visit, Robertson asked Faunce if he knew what happened to his family back home. Faunce was unable to answer his questions. He wanted to help Robertson and asked him to go to the United States embassy and get fingerprinted to confirm his identity.
Once Robertson proved who he was, he would be able to reconnect with his loved ones. Things didn't get rolling until 2012 when a filmmaker, Emmy Award-winning director Michael Jorgensen, sent someone to Vietnam to bring Robertson to Canada to reunite with his sister, who was eager to see her long-lost brother after almost 45 years.
Family Reunion
In order to reunite with her brother, Robertson's sister, Jean, her husband, and her daughter Gail flew from their home in Tuscaloosa to Canada to see him. The last time Gail saw her uncle was during her 10th birthday party. Robertson was reunited with his family on Dec. 17, 2012. He had such trouble with English that he needed a translator to help communicate with his family.
To those who loved him, Robertson seemed like a completely different person. In fact, prior to seeing his family, there was some skepticism that he was the person he claimed to be. Then the fingerprint results came back.
Fingerprint Results
Shockingly, the fingerprints didn't match. It was speculated that he had gotten his name wrong and wasn't really John Hartley Robertson. Maybe he was a different long-lost soldier? There was very little evidence to support either claim, so it was assumed he was the real Robertson. Faunce and Jorgensen decided to test his credibility by reconnecting the man from Vietnam with one of his old Green Beret buddies, Ed Mahoney.
Mahoney was eager to meet up with Robertson after he learned that he was still alive and survived the helicopter crash in 1968. But if he seemed different to his family would he seem different to a fellow soldier?
DNA Test
Jorgensen filmed their meeting at a restaurant in Dong Nai. When they met, the pair exchanged an awkward hug. Their conversation was then translated in English and Vietnamese so they could understand one another. Mahoney, who served with Robertson and knew him well, believed unequivocally that it was John Hartley Robertson.
However, the fingerprint information and Robertson's strange family reunion spurred the family in Canada to truly find out if the man from Vietnam was actually who he said he was. In order to find out the truth, they decided to get a DNA test.
The Hard Truth
Before the film premiered, Jorgensen told the media that Robertson's American wife and two children had initially agreed to do a DNA test but later decided not to. While it seems a little bizarre that they didn't want to know the truth, the filmmaker explained, "Somebody suggested to me maybe that's (because) the daughters don't want to know if it's him."
"It's kind of like, that was an ugly war. It was a long time ago. We just want it to go away... I don't know. What would compel you not to want to know if this person is your biological father?"
Not Robertson
When the documentary was released, many people, including the family, had convinced themselves that the man from Vietnam was, in fact, Robertson. They held off on a DNA test because they wanted to believe their beloved father/brother/uncle was alive. But science does not lie, and when the DNA tests came back they proved that the man was not who he claimed to be.
Before the results were made public, Robertson's niece, Gail Metcalf, daughter of Robertson’s sole surviving sister, Jean Robertson-Holley, said of the situation, "The bottom line is even if the DNA test came back negative, he’s still proven to be an American. My mother will never believe he is not her brother."
Seeking The Truth
An Alabama-based forensics laboratory used a sample from Robertson’s nephew with a blood stain collected from the man from Vietnam to test the DNA. Robertson's other niece, Cyndi Hanna, revealed on her GoFundMe website that helped raise money for the test: “We have received the results of the [nuclear] DNA test, and sadly there was NOT a match. This is very disappointing.”
Gail Metcalf added, "As my mother has said, we only want to do right by my Uncle John, and if that means exploring the possibility that the U.S. government has made a mistake or that the man claiming to be my uncle is actually another lost American and doesn’t know who he is, we intend to seek the truth on our own terms.”
Government Interference
The U.S. government wasn't very helpful to Jorgensen in finding the truth about Robertson. He told IndieWire.com: "The contact that I worked with in the government was very deceitful. I think they were trying to steer us clear of even doing this story. As we were just about to finish the film, even before Tom’s team had found John’s sister – because they had a really hard time trying to find his relatives – the government had told us that they had gotten blood samples from a brother and sister and that they were doing DNA tests.
That was totally untrue, his brother was dead at the time and his sister has never been contacted by the government."
One Big Scheme
Just one day after Jorgensen's film premiered, The Independent reported that the man who claimed to be Robertson was, in reality Dang Tan Ngoc, "a 76-year-old Vietnamese citizen of French origin who has a history of pretending to be US army veterans".
The Independent had discovered a memo from a 2009 report from the Defense Prison of War/Missing Personnel Office about Ngoc, who as early as 1982 Ngoc claimed to be Robertson. The Independent reported Ngoc had been impersonating Robertson for years with "some Vietnam War veterans saying he could have possibly conned veteran groups out of thousands of pounds over the last 30 years."
A Tooth Reveals More Clues
While filming Unclaimed, the man who claimed to be Robertson removed one of his teeth and gave it to Faunce and the filmmakers. This helped determine the man's genetic makeup. Lesley Chesson, a senior scientist at Salt Lake City’s IsoForensics Inc., analyzed the tooth and said it was "very likely" that the person who possessed it had grown up in the United States.
Tooth enamel includes chemicals that can reveal many things, such as the climate and geology of a region where a person grew up. So while the man may not have been Robertson, it appeared he was probably American.
Still Questions
However, it's not 100 percent certain that Ngoc is American after testing just one of his teeth. A Stars and Stripes article pointed out that the isotope results from the tooth also match other parts of the world in addition to the United States. If two teeth were tested it would be a better indication that a person grew up in a particular geographic area.
By just testing one tooth, you can't eliminate the possibility that the individual moved around when he was a child. That one tooth could happen to match a place in the United States, but what about the other teeth?
Corrupt MIA Agencies
It's unclear who Ngoc actually is, but it appears that the U.S. government is trying to overhaul its MIA agencies to help families learn more about their loved ones. Jorgensen told IndieWire.com, "I think it’s always the fallback position of the government, to deny and to try to let it go away rather than to face the issues.
But as you can see at the end of the film, shortly after the film screened at the Hot Docs Festival in Toronto, the government launched a very large investigation into their own MIA agencies calling them 'dysfunctional, inept, and potentially fraudulent', and that‘s in regard to more than 83,000 cases since WWII. That’s shocking."
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