Bio: Hansen, Gerald – Lt. - Finds Baby in Vietnam (1974)

Transcriber: Stan

Surnames: Hansen, Erickson, Davis

----Source: Tribune/Phonograph (Abbotsford, Clark Co., Wis.) 11 Jul 1974

On September 5, 1972, 1st Lt. Gerald Hansen arrived home from Vietnam cradling a baby wrapped in a blanket. His wife, Mrs. Gerald (Judy) Hansen, met him and their new daughter, Amy Laraine, at the Seattle-Tacoma Airport.

1st Lt. Gerald Hansen is the son of Mr. and Mrs. Peter Hansen, former Curtiss residents, and the nephew of Mrs. Cornell Erickson, Curtiss.

Lt. Hansen, a medical advisor to the Cambodian Army at a Training camp in Don Bathin, and another officer, found the baby girl, along with two others, in a roadside ditch in Vietnam in June o 1972. Then Amy Laraine was about three weeks old. Babies were frequently left in the ditches because if the nearby orphanage because they were motherless, girls (of little economic value to their parents) or fathered by foreign soldiers, and therefore considered social outcasts.

Lt. Hansen kept a check on the trio, nicknamed “Winken, Blinken, and Nod,” Blinken eventually stealing his heart, which was filled with a combination of love and pity. He wrote his wife and asked if she minded him bringing a daughter home if he found one. They had discussed the adoption of a daughter before he was sent overseas, eager for their adopted son, Erick, to have a sister and having lost two infants born to them. Mrs. Hansen worte back, “Go ahead, her name will be Amy Laraine.”

Efforts of the U.S. Immigration Service, Red Cross and the American Embassy in Saigon enabled the Hansens to complete adoption procedures before the first lieutenant returned home. The couple is now considering adopting two more Asian children.

The story with a happy ending for a tiny baby left in a ditch bundled in a blacket, indicating she was sick, and when found running a 103 temperature, weighing about seven pounds, covered with a flaring rash, was printed on Mother’s Day in the News Tribune, Tacoma, Washington, and was written by Judy David, Sound Life Writer.