PORTLAND, OREGON
June 1, 1999

Vietnam Dead Remembered

Survivors gather at a memorial to honor their loved ones who didn't return

By Foster Church
Oregonian Staff Writer

On a day when the past is remembered, the scorching memory of Vietnam remains, sharp and poignant. Even for the young, it persists.

On Memorial Day at Portland's Vietnam Veterans Living Memorial, onlookers thronged the grassy bowl as names of Oregonians who died in the Vietnam War were read.

Some came to remember parents or family members, others to reflect on a war they did not personally experience but that has burned through a generation to their own lives.

Monday at the memorial, Stephanie Hanson, 30, of Portland sank down before the polished black slab of granite on which the name of her father, Gary N. Young, is chiseled.

It was Hanson's first visit to the memorial, a focal point for a search that has come to fill her life. The search is as much for her father as for herself.

Stephanie Hanson never knew her father. Gary Young, a Navy medic, died 2 ½ months before she was born.

She was put up for adoption at birth. It was only in 1996 that Hanson began a search for her birth parents. She found her birth mother that year and learned that her father died in a helicopter crash in Vietnam.

She began an Internet search on Veterans Day of 1996 to find more, not only about her father but about the circumstances of his death. She learned that the crash occurred as the copter descended to pick up the victim of a land mine explosion. She even met a survivor of the crash.

With the full support of her adoptive parents, she joined an organization of children whose parents had been killed in the war. She wears her father's metal identification tag around her neck. She has written the Army, asking to be given his service medals.

"It's amazing what a huge part of people's lives the war was," she said. "Some are still haunted by their stories."

Often the search for the past in Vietnam is a search to heal a wound.....