Forrest’s Story

Our mission in August1969 was to lay down recon fire 100 meters outside a Vietnamese village to drive out the inhabitants and then disperse CS, powdered tear gas. CS would make this enemy outpost uninhabitable for at least a year. 9 of my buddies and I walked toward the village in a straight line, 4 on my left and 5 on my right, some 15 meters apart. Without realizing we stepped over 3 well concealed Viet Cong bunkers in a dry rice patty. We stopped at the 100 meter mark to begin laying down fire. As I knelt steadying the M16 with my right elbow on my right thigh, I suddenly noticed 30 caliber and AK47 machine gun rounds kicking up the dark earth around me. Grabbing my radio to call in a gun ship I found myself knocked to the ground staring into the humid blue sky. Quickly inventorying my body I counted one right boot, but no left. The popping sounds to the right drew my immediate attention to 3 North Vietnamese Army Regulars (NVA) executing my wounded comrades. The M16 I carried landed beyond my grasp when I was hit…I could not move to retrieve the weapon because my missing left ankle lodged securely beneath my head. The return fire to my left came from our wounded platoon lieutenant crawling toward me. When the LT was hit, I used his weapon to defend myself until help arrived. I only survived.
After the war, I married my beautiful wife Pamela. It soon became evident that getting pregnant wasn’t going to be easy for us. We were both disappointed, but Pamela was especially distressed by it. She longed to be a mother with every fiber of her being. We visited the doctor without result. I suppose we could have taken heroic steps with a fertilization clinic, but Pam developed a vision for adopting a little girl from China. We started developing the dossier required for a China adoption. It turned out to be a complex and daunting task. So we began a passionate life of prayer for our adopted child.
I remember the day we presented our dossier to the adoption agency. We were very excited. Two weeks later, we got a call. Our contact explained that China had changed some rules and wouldn’t allow adoptions to parents who were more than 30 years older than the adoptive child. That new rule disqualified us both. That essentially killed our prospects in China. We were floored, not to mention distraught. Our contact told us we had other options and not to lose hope. We had been entirely focused on China and hadn’t considered anything else. The good news was that the dossier we’d constructed for China was more than adequate for other countries with a few small changes. We considered adopting from Russia, Thailand, India, Columbia, Eastern Europe, and Vietnam.
I had been a combat soldier in Vietnam during 1968 and 1969. I was wounded at the end of my tour and had spent several years in a hospital and in a wheel chair. In spite of extensive veteran counseling and an understanding of the importance of forgiveness, I could not imagine adopting a child from Vietnam. I realized, to my surprise, that I still had some unresolved issues. I tried not to let Pamela know, but she could tell I was having trouble with the idea.
We drove home from the agency and I escaped into a book I was reading at the time. It was a novel by Randy Alcorn called Deadline. I opened it up and almost immediately read, “When you go to war with a people, you dehumanize them to do what you do in war. If you ever expect to reconcile with that people, you have to consciously promote them back to humanity.” I was stunned. It was like God was speaking directly to me through that passage. I shared what I’d read with Pamela. I asked her to give me a few days to work through my feelings. She was gracious to me. I prayed diligently, but also searched hard for a way out. I wrestled with the idea of going to Vietnam. I struggled over working with the Communists. I tried to imagine being the father of a little Vietnamese child whose grandparents tried to kill me. Once I told Pamela that going to Vietnam would be OK, she was on the phone to the agency before I could turn around. It took about a week for my emotions to catch up with my declarations and what I knew was right. But they did, pretty much.
It didn’t take long for my precarious conviction to be tested. We got a call from the agency a few weeks later. They had wonderful news. We actually had an opportunity to adopt twin boys. It would be a while before I felt right about it, but I knew I would. I just stuffed it and followed Pamela’s lead. She knew my heart and trusted me.
We got a picture of the boys a few days later. They were 10 weeks old and each weighed three pounds. They were clearly malnourished, but they had all their limbs and looked beautiful to Pamela. They looked scary to me. We were told they were in an orphanage in a southern province called Tra Vinh, near the Mekong Delta.
The boys’ names were Dam and Dang. That gave us pause. Perhaps the names Joshua and Benjamin would serve them better as they grew up in the U.S. Joshua was a name we both loved and had talked about for years. We began to pray for the boys and as the weeks and months dragged by, we took them into our hearts and they became our own. They became our sons.
On our 6th wedding anniversary we got a call that Dam, our Joshua, had died. We were profoundly shaken by the news. They assured us that Benjamin was healthy and we should still plan on making the trip to Vietnam. We could hardly wait. We were anxious to hold our son in our arms. Once again prayer became our connection with God.
Our agency liaison, Hung, met us at airport in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) and took us to our hotel. Neither Pamela nor I were prepared for navigating our way in a Third World Country.
On our fourth day, we were scheduled for a very early drive to Tra Vinh. We would meet Benjamin for the first time and participate in the Giving and Receiving Ceremony. Through that, he would legally become our son.
After a chilling ferry ride across the Mekong Delta, and a little over 8 hours after leaving Saigon, we pulled into Tra Vinh, the capital of Tra Vinh Province. Hung drove out of town and turned onto a narrow path that we expected would lead to the orphanage. We were excited, but after almost an hour on that path our excitement turned to anxiety. The country side had become jungle and our surroundings became more and more familiar to me and my combat experience. It was like a flashback. We finally drove into a small compound of three buildings, one that was about 3,000 square feet, and two smaller structures. We were ushered into the smallest. It was essentially a meeting room with a large table and about 20 chairs surrounded be four thin walls. Hung told us to wait there and he would be, “back in few minutes.”
Forty-five minutes later, we were frantic. Something had to be wrong. I assured Pam that they were not being controlling, disrespectful, or mean spirited. I didn’t tell her I knew it was very difficult for people in Eastern cultures to deliver bad news. Hung finally returned and said there had been some complications. The Director of the orphanage would see us soon. Soon was another 30 minutes. The Director came in and introduced himself through Hung. Hung’s English had been pretty difficult to understand up to that point, but manageable. Now that we needed to really understand what was going on, the language barrier became particularly inconvenient. The bottom line seemed to be that Benjamin was sick and had been taken to the hospital a few days earlier. The Director suggested we go home and try to adopt another baby some day. That was not OK. I turned to Hung and asked him if he knew where the hospital was. To Hung’s credit, he discovered the hospital location from the Director in a rather heated exchange.
As we stepped into the Children’s Ward, Hung spotted someone in a white coat and headed for him. We were stunned by what we saw. The room was probably 20 by 30 feet and crowded wall to wall with baby cribs. There seemed to be 2 or 3 children in every crib. Hung pointed to one about a third of the way into the room. It held a tiny infant and a little 2 year old boy. We moved through a sea of cribs to get to it. Both children were tied down, but the larger boy had gotten a foot loose and was thrashing in agony. His leg was inadvertently landing on the infant and I cringed every time it came down. The infant seemed too sick to complain. Hung motioned to the infant and told us he was Benjamin. My knees went weak. Pam leaned against me and started to sink. It was all I could do to hold her up. Ben was so tiny. He looked so sick. There were open soars all over his little body and he had a plastic oxygen tube taped to his little face. He could not possibly be seven months old. He didn’t look like he weighed more than 5 pounds. As I took a closer look at the larger boy, I realized he must be more like six, maybe seven years old.
Pamela and I stepped out into the hall with Hung only to be jostled and scrutinized by scores and scores of people who were either sick or visiting the sick, and all highly curious about us. Standing in that hall the walls seemed to get closer somehow. I shook myself and knew that we needed more help. So we prayed.
It felt like every circumstance was conspiring to defeat us. I couldn’t even think in all the press of bodies, the noise, and intense scrutiny we were under in that hall outside Benjamin’s ward. There were at least 80 children in that room, some crying and screaming, and some too sick to even moan. There was a single doctor, if indeed that’s what he was, caring for them. It was one of the most heartbreaking experiences I have ever had. I felt completely helpless. So, we prayed again.
Soon the hospital released Ben without complaint and we visited the People’s Committee building in Tra Vinh to finalize Benjamin’s adoption before we could leave for Saigon.
At the People’s Committee Building, there was a bunch of paperwork and the formal Giving Receiving Ceremony. It would take well over an hour.
Finally, the paperwork was ready. About a dozen government workers were invited into the room and I was offered a warm glass of beer. Pamela got a glass of soda. We were expected to take at least a sip. Everyone in the room seemed frozen until we each did just that. They asked us to sit at a table with the Director. Finally, we were done signing and it was the Director’s turn.
The Director was probably 60 years old. He took his time and looked at each of us for a long moment. He then reached into his coat. As he pulled a gold pen from his pocket and unscrewed the cap, he looked at me hard and finally said in English, “You in American War, Yes?” I had never heard the Vietnam War called the American War, but I knew what he meant. I froze. Our eyes locked. I wanted to lie. We both knew then that we had been mortal enemies 30 years earlier. I looked him in the eye and decided to be as straight as possible. I gave him the friendliest, most empathetic smile I could muster and said, “Yes, I was.” He looked back at me with a life time of experience scrolling behind his inscrutable expression. I felt a chill. 30 years earlier I faced a Viet Cong with a white knuckle grip on my rifle, today I stared down an NVA Regular holding only my beautiful Benjamin in gentle embrace. At last, the former enemy gave me a small nod, signed all the documents without another word and left the room.
The Vietnamese people were once my enemy. I had adopted someone who was once my enemy and it was one of the greatest things God had ever allowed me to do. In Benjamin, I had not only reconciled myself to these people, I had made a covenant with him to be his father for as long as we both existed. An adoption is not a contract, conditional on each party keeping its terms. Adoption is instead a sacred covenant and is, by definition, an unconditional commitment. No matter what, Benjamin will always know that I chose to be his father and I will always love him and care for him without condition.
I clearly understood that I was once God’s enemy. At some point in my life, I discovered that Jesus had made a way for me to be reconciled to Him. It occurred to me that reconciliation included His adoption of me into His family. He is my heavenly Father. He will never leave me nor forsake me. That’s a reconciliation and adoption that is an eternal covenant, the most important relationship in the history of man. And, God had allowed me to experience that covenant as an adoptive father, as well as His adopted son. What a gracious Father He is.