Man Seeks to Return Dog Tags From Vietnam

May 28, 2004 -- Touring the Ho Chi Minh trail six years ago, 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. Sometime he would stumble upon dog tags from U.S. soldiers, which he would collect and store in an ammo bag under his bed.

"He had 105 of them, and he just harbored them away, thinking perhaps that they were worth something," Santayana recalled. "Well, that day they were worth 100 bucks."

Unsure if they were real, Santayana called the Pentagon after returning to home to New York. Defense officials requested the information from the identification tags, which Santayana quickly sent. "The Pentagon analyzed them within two hours and they indicated that all of them were totally legitimate," he said. "Out of the 106 dog tags, 105 of the [soldiers] did actually return back from Vietnam alive."

A Man on a Mission

Santayana says the Pentagon seemed most interested in the dog tag of Harry Beckwith Jr., a soldier killed in action when his helicopter was shot down. Defense officials requested Beckwith's dog tag to return to his family. Santayana was happy to do so, but he wanted to be part of the process.

"The reason why I bought them in the first place was out of sense of obligation," he said. Too young to have served in Vietnam, Santayana says he "felt some sort of quiet obligation to involve myself but there was never really the opportunity." This was an opportunity.

"I said, 'I'm happy to give it to you but I would love for you to involve me in giving it back to the family,' " Santayana said. "And they declined and so I respectfully declined with them, also."

Soon Santayana located Beckwiths's mother in Missouri. He traveled to her and returned the tag. "She was thrilled" to receive the dog tag, he said, "because it actually gave her an element of closure."

Since then, Santayana has returned 13 other tags to their rightful owners. But in 2003 he hit a wall. The information on the dog tags is limited, and he was not able to locate any more of the original owners.