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Saturday, April 29, 2000
Luu Le Quyen never reached America. The C-5A transport that lumbered off a runway outside Saigon 25 years ago groaned out a few miles and crumbled into the Vietnamese countryside, killing her and 143 other orphans of war and the volunteers who tried to spirit them to new families in a peaceful world.
Bruce Williams got the phone call at 3 a.m. on a Sunday morning. For months, his wife and 5-year-old son in Johnstown, Cambria County, had planned for a new daughter's arrival. Her name was Luu Le Quyen: born 1974, died 1975.
"Even though we never met her, it was enormously sad. It was a deal that made you cry," Williams said. "You just go on, I guess."
Williams and his wife went on. To this day, they are not comfortable talking about it and who can blame them. They were quiet people doing a quietly decent thing and were left with shrapnel in the heart.
The letter arrived last year, postmarked Saratoga Springs, N.Y. It was one of a flurry written to families named Williams and it came from David Shakow, who began by apologizing if he was stepping on old wounds. Shakow explained he'd spent the intervening quarter of the century trying to figure out something he'd noticed on the birth certificate of his adopted son, Jeffery, who had miraculously survived the crash of a C5-A transport laden with Vietnamese orphans in the final days of the war.
Luu Le Quyen had a twin.
Jeffery Shakow, born Luu Khiet Minh, left Vietnam 25 years ago today, on the last flight out before Saigon fell.
Shaken, his eyebrows singed from the crash that almost killed him, he had no documents, save the Vietnamese birth certificate the Sisters of the Sacred Heart provided.
Until the child reached America, Shakow wasn't sure Jeffery had survived the crash. He got various accounts. One day the child was dead. The next, alive. Then Shakow had the birth certificate translated and discovered there was a twin.
"I needed to know," he said. "My own son had disappeared for a time. If there was that slim possibility she was alive . . ."
He wrote to all the agencies. Nothing.
Nancy Shakow told her husband not to give up. There had to be an answer.
"There's no records. There's no records," he would tell her. "This was wartime. People weren't writing things down."
Years later, in Bangkok, a woman named Rosemary Taylor, who works with orphaned children in Southeast Asia, was punching old records from a Vietnamese orphanage into her computer when she noticed two children, each with the family name Luu. Then she noticed the same birth date. Then she remembered David Shakow's questions from years before. Then she posted a letter to Saratoga Springs.
Shakow got someone from an agency to tell him the other Luu went to a family named Williams in Pennsylvania. He started writing.
When Williams and Shakow finally connected, there wasn't much either man could tell the other.
"I didn't have any records or anything," Williams said. "It was like this mysterious ending."
This year, Shakow and his son Jeffery, now 26, went to Vietnam and visited the crash site.
Jeffery, who avoids interviews, looked over the land he left at 13 months. Whatever feelings might be there he is holding close.
"I traveled with him for two weeks," Shakow said. "I'd get a word here, a word there. He didn't want to tell me."
Sometimes, when all the questions are answered, all you're left with is the same old mystery.