Fixing Bonds Broken By War

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washingtonpost.com

Fixing Bonds Broken by War

By Ellen Nakashima

BANGKOK -- For as long as she can remember, Jang

Rattanapim has carried a snapshot of her father.

Whenever she felt low, she said, she took the

yellowed photo of the handsome young American gunship

pilot out of her wallet.

"I would talk to my dad's photo when I felt I

needed somebody," said the tall young woman with sharp

Anglo features and a creamy Thai complexion. Long

ago, her mother, who is Thai, told her that her

father had been killed during the Vietnam War. In

truth, he left Thailand two days before she was born.

That was 32 years ago.

Last spring Jang met her father, Bryce Menninga,

for the first time. They were reunited by a former

U.S. military intelligence officer named Gene Ponce

who has made it his mission to bring together U.S.

veterans and the children they fathered during the

Vietnam War.

"It's a miracle," said Jang, who towers over her

friends at 5 feet 7 inches. "It's the best thing

that's ever happened in my life."

Thousands of babies were born to Thai women and

U.S. servicemen stationed in Thailand, and many were

left behind, Ponce said.

"The fathers are getting old," he said. "In their

consciences, they know that they left a child that

they may never know. For some, it's been on their

minds for quite a while. Now they just want to close

a chapter in their lives."

Ponce's mission began with his own story. When he

was a 23-year-old airman stationed at Korat air

base in northeast Thailand 32 years ago, he fathered a

daughter by a Thai woman.

Although he was not ready for marriage, there was

no way, he said, that he was going to leave his

daughter behind. After negotiating with his girlfriend

and her parents, he brought his daughter, Vassana,

to the United States. The child lived with Ponce's

parents until he married several years later. Ponce

and his wife raised Vassana and two children of

their own. Today he is retired, remarried and living

in Bangkok with a Thai wife, Supawan Ponce, who is

his interpreter and partner in sleuthing.

His idea to reunite fathers and their children

took shape in December 2000, when he moved to

Thailand and began thinking about the children he saw in

the orphanages he visited as a young man.

"I always wondered about these children over

these 30-plus years," he said. "I thought: Whatever

happened to them? Where are they now? Is there

anything that I can do to help now?"

He started building a database of veterans and

civilians who served in Thailand. It now has about

100,000 names. He also has 10 Web sites devoted to

pilots, soldiers and sailors who were assigned to

Thailand during the war.

A reunion here in October 2002 for Thai and U.S.

military and civilian personnel who had served in

Thailand unexpectedly advanced his project. He was

standing in the lobby when a woman approached and

said she had heard he had a veterans' database. She

asked if he would be able to locate a friend in the

United States. Ponce found the friend's name in his

database, contacted him on her behalf and soon had

his first success. Delighted, the woman spread the

word.

Among the people she told was Tuenjai Rattanapim,

who was a bartender at the officers' club at Ubon

air base in northeast Thailand during the war. Last

January, she contacted Ponce, telling him she had a

daughter who had never seen her father, a former

pilot. She wanted to know what had happened to him.

She had his name, the approximate dates of service

and one yellowed photograph.

Ponce agreed to help. His database yielded no

hits, so he searched Internet phone directories. Ponce

found just one Bryce Menninga, in Texas. On his

first try, he reached Menninga's wife. When Ponce

called back a few days later, Menninga was "very

silent," Ponce said.

In "shock" was how Menninga described his

reaction in an e-mail reply to questions.

"In the next few minutes I experienced panic --

how do I tell my family? suspicion -- does somebody

want a lot of money? and thankfulness -- she found

me, and I may really get to meet her."

He asked for a little time to tell his wife,

Kathy, and two daughters, Crystal and Brandy, who did

not know about Jang. But he wanted to see his Thai

daughter.

A few days later in Bangkok, the Ponces, Tuenjai

and Jang gathered at a McDonald's. "Jang, your

father's still alive," Tuenjai said. "Gene has found

your father."

"But you told me he's dead," Jang said.

"I lied to you," she said.

"I was shocked," Jang recalled later. "Is this

really happening?"

She relayed her mother's explanation for

withholding the truth: "She told me, 'I did it because your

father had already left and I didn't know if we

would ever find each other again, and I didn't want

you to be unhappy about that. And so I told you that

he died in a plane crash.' "

Jang has memorized the date April 24, the time --

11:55 p.m. -- and the flight, Northwest 001, that

brought her father to her. She recalled their

meeting, their first embrace, at the airport. He was

tall, 6 feet 4 inches, hair graying now, still

handsome. She thought he looked like her.

"He was trembling and he held me very tight," she

said. "He said he was so sorry. Both of us cried."

"I was messy, smelly, dirty and extremely

fatigued," Menninga recalled. "I picked Jang out of the

crowd immediately, mostly by her height. . . . We

hugged each other for a long time, shedding a few

tears in the process. . . . It was an unbelievable

experience. The more I got to know her, the more I was

impressed with her."

"I thought about Jang many times," he wrote in

his e-mail. "I felt quite guilty about not being

there or doing more for her and also very sad about

missing her growing up. . . . Being young and foolish

(and in a stupid war), it never occurred to me to

report her birth to U.S. authorities." Now, he

wrote, Jang is finding it difficult to obtain a visa to

visit him in the States.

Ponce, who also has located a son for a father in

Texas, is working on 46 other cases. Ten are

requests from fathers, 16 from sons and daughters, 20

from mothers of Amerasian children. The requests come

from the United States, from Thailand and from

Europe. He has a Web site, amer-thai2001.tripod.

com/gspresearch/.

If he locates a father who does not want to be

reunited with a child, he said, he tells the son or

daughter that he just could not find the father. "I

know it's not correct," he said, "but after finding

a father, you know you just can't tell the child,

'He said no.' I don't think anybody could do that."

Menninga, now a 58-year-old commercial airline

pilot, is thrilled that Ponce found him. "It filled a

void I expected to take to my grave," he said.

"There have to be dozens, if not hundreds of dads who

would like to be reunited. The children deserve to

know something more than just, 'He was an American.'

"

Jang agreed. "I think it's unfair for a child to

be born without knowing who the father was," she

said in an interview at a hotel in Bangkok.

Menninga gave Jang a white album that his wife

had helped put together with photos of his family, of

Menninga as a baby, as a college basketball player

and a pilot in the cockpit of his AC-130, the plane

he flew over the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos.

His daughter, Crystal, wrote a letter, saying she

was excited about meeting Jang one day.

In her album, Jang has placed a copy of a letter

she sent to her father and his family.

"Never before did I learn how much it means to

hug and to call someone a dad," she wrote. "It still

seems unreal and unbelievable that I have a dad and

he is still alive! But I have! The last piece of

puzzle in my life has been put together finally."