Returning dog tags – A decades-long journey
It’s been nearly 50 years.
U.S. Air Force veteran Mary Webb, while deployed to Vietnam for a year in the early1970s, was shopping with a friend in Saigon when her bag full of personal possessions, including her dog tags, was stolen by two men on a motorcycle – ripped from her shoulder while she was walking down the street.
Webb, 73, figured she’d never see the dog tags again; she almost forgot they were even taken in the theft. That was until recently when she received a message from a stranger living in the Bay Area who said he was in possession of dog tags with her name on it. A friend of hers thought it was a scam initially, but as soon as she saw the email she had an overwhelming feeling that the sender was real.
“I just find this whole situation so exciting,” Webb said. “After so long, I think my dog tag has had a more interesting journey than I have.”
The journey
On Aug. 2, Webb received an email from Elliot Wilen, who lives in Berkeley. In 1999, Wilen visited Vietnam with a college
friend. While there, he met some of his friend’s relatives, including a woman who would end up being Wilen’s future wife, Bach Tuyet Nguyen, and her father,
Duc Nguyen, who served in the South Vietnamese Navy.
During a trip back to Vietnam years later, Wilen’s father-inlaw put out some dog tags that had been collected during the Vietnam war. In that region, people collected dog tags to use as part of a Vietnamese practice known as “cao gio,” which is a folk remedy for fevers and general aches and pains where a metal object such as a coin or spoon … or a dog tag … is scraped across the skin.
Dog tags include identifying information and are issued to all soldiers. If a soldier dies in combat, the dog tag is used to help identify them quickly.
After showing off his collection of dog tags, Wilen’s father-inlaw gave him one. Wilen would return home and store the gifted dog tag before forgetting it existed, until his father-in-law passed away a few weeks ago.
While looking through some old possessions, Wilen and his wife found the dog tag and noticed there was an American name on it – Webb’s name. He did some internet searching and ended up locating Webb before making contact.
“At first, it was just a matter of curiosity, and then once I was able to find a definite match and a real person, I thought it would be important for that person and nice for them to get this back, something they had lost so long ago,” Wilen said.
Twenty years ago, when he was initially given the dog tag, it was much more difficult to search for people on the internet. Wilen recently utilized a website to locate Webb through the Tan Son Nhut Association, which is a forum where military personnel who served in the Vietnam War can exchange memories of their time in the service. Webb has only been a member on the site for a few years, so she feels lucky Wilen was even able to find her after so long.
“I’m truly amazed at how kind people are that he thought of the Tan Son Nhut Association to get an email address,” she said.
Webb, who was part of a small population of women who served in Vietnam, was issued a replacement after initially having her tag stolen in Saigon in 1971. Once she receives the lost set of tags in the mail, she plans to keep it in a safe place with other family heirlooms.
“I plan to put it with my dad’s dog tags in my little box of treasurers that I’ve been collecting since I was young,” Webb said.
“At some point, maybe my family will be interested in keeping the little box.”
Now that she has made a new acquaintance, Webb hopes to welcome Wilen to the area in the future to visit the Museum of the Forgotten Warriors, where she has served on the board as treasurer for 12 years.
“You think when you walk away from Vietnam that it’s just another end to another service station, but you never think that something is going to come back to you after all these years,” Webb said. “It’s absolutely amazing.”