AnirudhaRun Soldier Run
The helicopter crashed and unlike his team, he couldn’t eject himself out. He was captured and was taken to the Vietcong hospital and it as there he met the nurse who later helped him with his escape plan. She gave him her late husband’s ID proof and from where they started a new life. In Laos, he was no soldier but a simple farmer. But what happened to his family back in the US?
Making The Return
Robertson always thought about his family who was living hundreds of miles away from him. He even asked Faunce if has any knowledge about that. Sadly, there was no answer to that particular question. But after hearing one part of the story he told Robertson to contact the US embassy and tell them his story. They could actually help him in reuniting him with his family. This brave soldier has already suffered a lot and it was time put this struggle to end. But even the embassy couldn’t help him and it was in the year 2012 he got the chance to come out in front of the world as John Hartley Robertson and not Dang Tan Ngoc. Emmy Award-winning director Michael Jorgensen heard about the story and helped Roberston in coming to his loving country. He wanted to reunite Roberston with his sister who hasn’t seen him for 45 years. His sister thought he was dead…
The Documentary
All thanks to Jorgensen, Robertson returned back to his country and the director made a documentary on his life, titled Unclaimed. It was actually Faunce’s idea who told him the story and asked him to make a movie on it. In the documentary, Robertson told everything that happened to him in the last 45 years. He told that he was kept in a bamboo cage and before he escaped he was tortured for a year. Surprisingly, Robertson told everything in Vietnamese and did not remember his birth date, or his children’s name. But there was more to the story that he never told anybody until people saw the documentary.
The Backstory Of Robertson
Filmmaker Michael Jorgensen was a brilliant director and before filming the movie he made sure to gather all the required information about John Hartley Robertson. “I did a lot of research about this mission and the MACV-SOG Organization that the Pentagon put together in January of ’64. Then I tried to find everything I could about this missing man, and what was known about him. That was really a black hole. He disappeared; there are no files about this guy at all. There are a couple of statements by people who were in the air or on the ground when his helicopter went down, pretty minimal,” Jorgenson told in the interview by the IndieWire.com.
The Strange Reunion
The reunion didn’t happen as smoothly as one might think. Jean, his sister, and her husband were informed about Robertson and they were flown to Canada where Roberston was. The big event of reunion happened on the 17th of December, 2012. The family couldn’t recognize him as he seemed like a very different person. He didn’t speak English and was provided with a translator. And the family thought is he even real or someone trying to be Robertson. But then the skepticism grew stronger when fingerprint results came in.
The Fingerprint Controversy
Things weren’t looking great for Robertson and turned into a nightmare when the fingerprints results came. The fingerprints didn’t match and they started thinking that Faunce has made a mistake and this man is not Robertson but some guy who was also lost during the war. But before confirming anything they tried one more thing which was reuniting him with one of his team members, Ed Mahoney, both of them served the army together and there was no way he couldn’t recognize his brother in arms.