soldiers, which he would collect and store in an ammo bag under his bed. Sometime he would stumble upon dog tags from U.S. SANTAYANA COLLECTION - Touring the Ho Chi Minh trail in 1998, Wall Street trader Manny Santayana stumbled onto a Vietnamese man who made a living out of extracting bombs from the ground, grinding up the metal and selling it for profit. Aaron, a resident of the UK, reached out and sent some of the dog tags to Patriot Connections Dog Tag Project to help return them. Returns are underway. Thien’s family, as a token of appreciation, gave Bougourd some dog tags they had found at Ben Hoa Air Base. In 1994 he escaped Vietnam on foot through Cambodia and on to Thailand, which is where Aaron Bougourd met him. It was after this that he was sent to a communist reeducation camp, where he was tortured and forced to denounce his anti-communist beliefs. Major Ly Kim Thien was commissioned as an officer of the Republic of Vietnam Air Force in 1964 and served in several capacities throughout Vietnam up until the fall of Saigon in 1975. Thien, a South Vietnamese officer living as a refugee. Bougourd had been volunteering for the Father Ray Foundation Orphanage in Thialand when he met Major Thien, and helped him find his lost family in Vietnam.

With much effort and research, we have located many, completed returns and have more returns underway throughout the United States.īOUGOURD COLLECTION - This collection of dog tags began their journey home after British Army/Navy veteran, Aaron Bougourd, received them from the family of Major Thien in 2006. In 2010, he gave the rest to us to try and locate and return the rest of them. Over the years several people/organizations worked with Jim Six on returning some of the dog tags. He brought back 450 of them and gave them to Jim Six. Gloucester County Time Reporter Jim Six asked the then Deptford Police Chief Ray Milligan to purchase as many as he could and bring them home, as Milligan traveled back and forth to Vietnam for Operation Smile. SOUTH JERSEY COLLECTION – This collection of dog tags (450) journey home began in 1993 from DaNang and China Beach area in Vietnam where they were being sold in shops.

Dog tags military information