The Air Force medevac plane taxied in. I felt a surge of apprehension. The plane stopped, and the ground crew wheeled over the stairway for disembarking. When the door opened, a very small girl appeared, excitedly waving. When I looked more carefully, I realized that she had no nose.

It was 1968. I had come to meet a group of five war-injured South Vietnamese children in need of medical care unavailable in their own country. The Committee of Responsibility, a voluntary organization with which I was involved, was bringing large numbers of these children to the United States with the permission and cooperation of both our government and South Vietnam’s.

Three boys between the ages of nine and twelve were coming to my community, a suburb of New York City; they would go directly to Nyack Hospital by ambulance. After seeing the children off, I drove home with two other committee members, talking anxiously about the three young boys entrusted to our care—Yen Van Doan, Le Sam, and Nguyen Lau. We all had a new sense of the magnitude of the job each of us had undertaken: providing a home and emotional support for one child during his recuperation. Ultimately, the children would return to their families in Vietnam.

My husband, Alvin, and I were active in the anti-war movement, but our wish to serve as a foster family was driven by more than that. With three healthy children of our own and a nice house in the suburbs, we knew we were enormously lucky. And that luck brought with it a responsibility for people not so fortunate. Yen Van Doan was one of them.

Al and I and our three sons—Shmuel, ten, Jonathan, eight, and Jared, five —started by visiting Yen during the weeks he was in the hospital, where he was receiving skin grafts for a leg wound suffered in a rocket attack on his village.

After he was released from the hospital, Yen came to live with us. He was very small for his age—12—but he was courageous, bright, and funny. As his wound healed, he walked first with crutches, then with a brace and orthopedic shoes.

Yen’s English quickly improved. Our own children and those in the neighborhood accepted him as a neat, if somewhat exotic, new kid, who was always ready to play ball or tramp in the woods behind our house.

There were problems—some of them medical, some emotional, some cultural. After all, Yen was an adolescent who had been suddenly transported to a country and way of life he knew nothing about. In Vietnam Yen’s parents were farmers, and he tended buffalo. Too poor to have attended school, he was illiterate in his own language. In our home he soon developed the ability to use the color TV, selecting his favorite programs. He learned a new language. He discovered underwear. He pronounced the Chinese meals we had in a local restaurant the “best American food.”

Yen