News-Info-Alerts

Re: MIA's Fractured Family Reunites

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Date: July 14, 2002

"Good morning, sisters-in-law, torn by war no more

By Tom Bailey Jr.
baileytom@gomemphis.com

The Vietnam War made sisters-in-law of Linda Moreau and Hong Thi Chau 30 years ago.

But it took 25 years for them to find each other, two needles in a global haystack. Moreau lives in Oregon, Chau in Memphis.

Moreau's brother, Mickey Allen Wilson, was 24 when the Army helicopter he piloted was shot down near Quang Tri on Jan. 8, 1973. He and five others on the aircraft were missing in action for six years before being declared dead by the U.S. government.

A few days before his death, Wilson sent a letter home to his family in California.

"Mary and I will be home soon," it said. "I'm planning on taking her to Disneyland. She is going to be a few days behind me so I'll have to wait at Grandma's house for her. . . . Mary said 'thanks for the Xmas card.' ''

"Mary" was Hong Thi Chau. American soldiers routinely gave Anglican names to the Vietnamese women they met. "There were a lot of 'Kims,' 'Marys,' 'Sandys' and 'Lees,' "recalled Chau, 49, a war refugee who resettled in Memphis in 1991 and lives in the Berclair area.

Chau and Wilson met at a base club near Chu Lai. She tended bar and served tables. "He wrote and told us they got married Dec. 7, 1972" at a Danang hotel, said Moreau, of Medford, Ore.

But with Wilson's death and the chaotic aftermath of the war's end and Communist takeover, Chau and her American in-laws never connected until Moreau started making trips to Vietnam in the mid-1990s. "I worried and wondered about his wife for 24 years," Moreau said.

On her first trip in 1996, Moreau didn't know "Mary's" real name and had no success. By 1997, Moreau had found her sister-in-law's real name in her brother's military file. She returned to Vietnam with the right name and a photo of Chau, which her brother had mailed home to the United States. She got a television station in Danang to broadcast the photo with her plea for help in finding her sister-in-law. The plan worked. "One of her brothers called my hotel. It was translated to me that my sister-in-law lives in Memphis, Tennessee," Moreau said.

Chau recalls the late-night phone call she received from the same brother: "He said, 'American girl, name Linda, put picture of you on (Danang) TV. I see you.' "

"I said, 'Linda! Oh, yeah! That sister of my husband!' "

Moreau returned home and called her sister-in-law. "And I cried and I cried. It was her. She knew about my brother. She knew where my grandmother lived. She knew my name, and she told me her and my brother had a son."

Until a year ago, Chau lived in the Madison Heights neighborhood, where Associated Catholic Charities has housed many refugees with its resettlement program.

She first worked making hamburgers and other sandwiches for Serv-O-Matic and for the past few years has manned a parking garage booth at Methodist Healthcare-University Hospital. Her son - named Son - has a similar job at a parking lot across from the Criminal Justice Center on Poplar. Both are here on green cards.

Moreau, 52, owns a women's gym in Medford with her sister. This trip to Memphis is one of a half dozen visits she's made since discovering the whereabouts of her sister-in-law. And she has worked just as hard advocating for Chau and Son, now 30, as she did finding them.

She provided the Department of Veterans Affairs enough circumstantial evidence of Chau and Wilson's marriage that the government started sending monthly dependent benefit checks of about $1,000 to Chau 18 months ago.

The money enabled Chau to buy a small brick home in Berclair. Her son and his young family bought a home about the same time nearby.

Now, Moreau is trying to get the Army to recognize Chau as her brother's widow so Chau can get a military ID and health benefits and shop at the PX in Millington.

Her brother was missing in action for about six years until he and others were declared dead. So Chau also should receive, retroactively, the pay that other spouses of MIAs got during those six years, Moreau said.

Moreau hasn't made any progress. The Army tells her it needs a copy of a marriage license, but there is none. An Army spokesman said the court of last appeal for such conflicts is the Army Review Boards Agency. But Moreau said she had been unaware of the agency and had not submitted an appeal.

Still, Chau is grateful for the help from her American sister-in-law. "I feel happy that she help me."

Tom Bailey Jr.: 529-2388
  Copyright 2002 - The Commercial Appeal is an E.W. Scripps Company newspaper"