PORTLAND, OREGON
November 26, 2000

Woman's Odyssey In Search Of Father Changes Lives

By Margie Boule
Oregonian Staff Writer

For a woman who started out with little curiosity, Stephanie Hanson has done an amazing amount of detective work in the past five years. Along the way she’s uncovered answers that stunned her; some of those answers have provided comfort to people who lived with their own painful questions for 30 years.

This is much more than a story about adoption. It’s a story of war, of memory, of honor. It’s the story of a young man who died 31 years ago in Vietnam, not knowing that his girlfriend back home in Oregon was seven months pregnant.

Stephanie was born in April 1969 at Portland Adventist Medial Center. Her mother, unmarried and grief-stricken over her sweetheart’s death, gave up her baby for adoption.

Stephanie was adopted by the Hanson family. “I always knew I was adopted and I never cared,” she says today. She gave little thought to her birth parents, except once when she was in college in Washington, D.C. “My boyfriend took me to the Vietnam wall, just as a tourist. I started walking down the path and about three-quarters of the way down I heard a voice inside me say ‘Your dad is on that wall.’… I let it drop. I’m not that type of person. I’m very logical and reasonable. I didn’t understand where the feeling came from.”

Stephanie graduated and returned to Portland, still uninterested in her birth parents. But in 1995 she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. “They said they had to have my medical history, because they treat hereditary M.S. very differently.” Stephanie resisted. In the end, her adoptive father insisted she go with him to an adoptees-rights meeting. They shared their search with a group leader, not expecting answers.

The next day the woman called Stephanie at the high-tech firm where she works and passed along the name and local address of Stephanie’s birth mother. “I wasn’t ready to do this,” says Stephanie. “But in the end I didn’t have a choice.”

Stephanie’s aunt contacted the woman, who agreed to a meeting. Stephanie and her birth mother were uncomfortable at first, but finally the ice was broken. They forged a relationship that continues today. Stephanie learned her birth father’s name was Gary Norman Young and that he had died in Vietnam. “She gave me the newspaper clipping about my dad’s death. And I look exactly like him. He had my smile. I’d always hated my crooked smile, but that moment changed my feelings.”

Stephanie’s mother had never told Gary’s family about the pregnancy and hadn’t kept in touch. The only other souvenir she had was the program from Gary’s funeral. “It said he was buried at the Finley-Sunset Hill Memorial Park. I’d gone by there a million times and never knew.” Stephanie visited Gary’s grave “…and suddenly I needed to know what had happened to my dad.”

The clipping said Gary was a Navy corpsman – a medic – attached to a unit of Marines in Vietnam, and he’d died in a helicopter crash. Stephanie went to the Internet and found a Vietnam helicopter pilots’ association. The Webmaster put up a Web site for her that included her address.

On Feb. 6, 1996, the day before the anniversary of her dad’s 1969 death, she got a package in the mail. Someone in Washington, D.C., had seen the Web site, gone to military archives in the capital and copied the casualty report on Gary’s death. On the papers was the name of Gary Young’s stepfather, whom Stephanie knew had raised Gary. The man still lived in Portland. Stephanie called him.

The man was kind, but skeptical. But later that evening Gary’s brother Steve called. “He’d seen my birth mom at Gary’s funeral and she was obviously pregnant. The weird thing is, he and his wife had just started to search for me.

“Steve was absolutely thrilled. When he first saw me he looked like he’d seen a ghost.” When Gary’s stepfather met Stephanie he turned to Steve and said, “Well, we don’t need a blood test.” The resemblance could not be denied.

They gave Stephanie a box of Gary’s possessions, including his letters home and his dog tags. Stephanie wears the tags every day. From the letters she learned what unit Gary had been with in Vietnam. “His last letter said ‘I’m going to start flying (medical evacuation) soon.’ It was written just before he died.”

Stephanie went back to the Web and found a group called Pop A Smoke, a Marine helicopter association. Within days she found the man who had replaced Gary in Vietnam, who put her in touch with two men who had known Gary. “He had only been with the unit for six days, so the fact these guys remembered him was amazing.”

Another man pinpointed the date of the crash. But no one had information about why the chopper had gone down. So Stephanie wrote all 3,000 men listed on the Pop A Smoke web site. “And I got responses every day. I’ve had over 1,000 so far. Ninety-eight percent didn’t know about my dad. But they told the most amazing stories.” Then one day in September 1998 Stephanie’s phone rang. It was the man who had recovered Gary’s body after the crash.

“He said it was in the middle of a battle. The crash was in a rice paddy near an old French graveyard, so they were hiding behind tombstones to try to get out to the chopper. The most important thing he told me was that they looked peaceful. They did not suffer. They had died on impact.”

The man told Stephanie that Gary had been attached to Marine unit HMM-364, the “Purple Foxes,” and that he had died on his first day, his first flight. He gave Stephanie the map coordinates of the crash. “He had it all. It was amazing.”

Soon after, Stephanie got an email from a man who’d been in a trailing chopper, who’d seen the crash. He told Stephanie that Gary’s helicopter had been shot at, and had lost both boosters. It had dropped like a rock. “He said it was a chilling experience that seemed to last forever. They tried to go in several times to help but they were getting fired on.”

Then she heard from the man who’d been Gary’s boss, the chief corpsman. “He’d known Gary very well. He’d driven him there that day, to the chopper…For the last 28 years…he had gone to the Vietnam wall every year and said hi to him.”

Stephanie tracked down relatives of the other men who had died in the crash, and shared what she’d learned. Elderly parents, siblings and spouses wept to learn details of the deaths, long withheld by the military. One relative sent Stephanie a letter from another eye-witness. It held a huge surprise.

“It referred to a survivor.” No one ever had mentioned a survivor. Stephanie again sent out blanket email inquiries. Sure enough, someone sent a name and an old address. The survivor did not want any contact, she was told.

Stephanie wrote the man and heard nothing for a month. And then he called, saying he remembered nothing and wanted to be left alone. Stephanie was gracious and grateful for the call. But the man’s war buddies wanted to reach him. She wrote him again. This time he replied with an invitation to meet.

They got together in early 1999. “He said, ‘I can’t tell you how much my life has changed from your first letter. I realized I needed to deal with all this.’ ” The man described the crash and his feelings. “He was the last person who saw my dad alive,” says Stephanie. “That was a great piece of healing for me.”

Since then Stephanie has been helped by more veterans. She was sent photos of her dad in Vietnam. A group of active and former Marines visited the crash site, planted the Marine flag, and sent Stephanie photos and a vial of dirt from the site. She was invited to a Marine reunion in August in San Diego, was made an official Purple Fox in her father’s stead, and gave a speech thanking the men for their assistance.

And not long ago, she got a large package in the mail. Inside were Gary’s medals and a letter from Sen. Max Cleland, D-GA., who’d learned the medals never had been issued to Gary’s family.

These days, Stephanie spends a lot of time helping veterans connect with one another. “I’ve become something of a conduit,” she says. “My Uncle Steve says ‘You’re Gary’s legacy and this is your destiny.’ I fully believe it. I want to help these guys. There are so many men out there still hurting, and something needs to be done. I’m not going away. Gary wanted to help the Marines in Vietnam so much. I know he’d be very happy that I’m helping his Marines.