NHA TRANG, Vietnam – Ty Cope, born Thang Nguyen, stood Thursday in an un-air-conditioned hotel lobby in this picturesque but sweltering coastal city. He leaned into his cellphone.

"I am inquiring to find out," the Baptist pastor from College Station said, "if you are my father."

Confusion ensued, and Cope handed the phone to Thomas Ho of Mesquite, a fellow Vietnamese-American who still speaks Vietnamese.

Thirty-five years ago, Ho and Cope left South Vietnam with the entire Cam Ranh City Christian Orphanage, a war-forced evacuation that would bring them all, improbably, to Buckner Children's Home in Dallas.

Last week, Ho and Cope each made their first trip back to Vietnam as part of a reunion of the Cam Ranh/Buckner orphans. Now, suddenly, they were in an identity drama, trying to determine whether a Vietnamese man who had been in touch via the Internet really might be Cope's dad.

Ho talked to the man in Vietnamese for a moment, then pulled away to translate.

"He said, 'I'm very happy. My son! My son!' "

Ho added that the man had agreed to come see Cope the next day.

"Oh, my goodness," Cope said.

Life can take momentous turns, and no one knows that better than the Cam Ranh/Buckner orphans, who were together again last week in their homeland.

There were 69 originally, and two dozen came to the reunion, nearly all traveling thousands of miles from Dallas or elsewhere in the United States.

They're middle-aged now, and middle-class. Most have college degrees, and their professions include architect, banker, computer programmer, nurse, teacher and social worker.

They represent a spectrum of assimilation. Many of the younger children were adopted out of Buckner and soon lost their language. The older kids would stick it out, attending Skyline High and speaking Vietnamese among themselves.

But they all retained – and still do – a deep bond.

"We went through so much together," said LoiBeth King, a missionary in East Asia who turned 10 during the evacuation.

They've been having reunions every five years in Dallas, but at the last one, they committed to going back to Vietnam. They raised money, created a website, established an archive of photographs from the Cam Ranh and Buckner days, and ordered reunion T-shirts and ball caps with the slogan "Get Love, Share Love."

After all the planning, the reunion got under way Wednesday, with a big contingent boarding a bus in Ho Chi Minh City (still popularly known as Saigon) heading north toward Nha Trang and Cam Ranh.

Thirty-five years ago, they were orphans on the run, headed the other way.

The Cam Ranh City Christian Orphanage was started by Patrick Beckham, an Air Force surgeon from Texas who was stationed at the U.S. military base at Cam Ranh Bay. Beckham, part of last week's reunion, had seen in Korea the damage war did to families and children.

The base's Protestant Men of the Chapel took up the cause, providing materials and volunteer labor for construction. And the Rev. Jim Gayle, a Baptist missionary in Cam Ranh and a former Buckner orphan, found a director.

That was Ha Nguyen, son of a pastor and himself a public-school principal. Nguyen agreed to take on the orphanage as a second job.

By 1969, children had begun to arrive. Most weren't, in the strictest sense, orphans. They had a surviving parent, usually a mother, who because of poverty or war dislocation thought she couldn't care for them and saw the orphanage as offering a better future.

But if you're in an orphanage, you're an orphan, and that's still the term of choice for those who lived in the jumble of buildings among green hills near Cam Ranh Bay.

They recall the orphanage as a place of discipline, with chores, study halls and devotionals. But there was also soccer, and ice cream and hot dogs brought by U.S. soldiers, and other creature comforts.

"I slept on my first mattress there," Kimmie Nguyen of Grand Prairie said.

By 1972, the United States was pulling out of Vietnam. With the base's closing, the orphanage lost its flow of donated supplies and had to rely more on its garden and livestock. More serious trouble came in spring 1975, when the South Vietnamese military began to collapse under pressure from the communist troops of the north.

When Da Nang fell, refugees streamed past the orphanage. Ha Nguyen, operating from Saigon, looked for a way to take the orphans south.

But on April 2, 1975, his sister Xuan Nguyen, the day-to-day manager of the orphanage, decided evacuation couldn't wait.

She loaded the orphans, the staff and their kids on three buses. Each orphan carried a sack with a ball of rice, a change of clothes and a nametag.

One bus made it to Saigon, but two got caught in a firefight by soldiers. A roadblock diverted them toward the coastal town of Phan Thiet.

There, after spending the night at a church, they rented a boat that carried them in a storm to the port of Vung Tau. Ha Nguyen sent a bus that brought the stragglers to Saigon, and they stayed a week at a Baptist center.

With Saigon in chaos, they moved to the extreme southern coastal city of Rach Gia, where Ha Nguyen bought an old fishing boat. For two weeks, the older orphan boys joined local volunteers in helping to repair the termite-ridden hull.

On April 29, the 69 orphans, as well as staff members and their families, took to the South China Sea.

Skippering was Tam Dao, husband of Xuan. He had piloted helicopters for the South Vietnamese air force but didn't know boats.

"I couldn't even swim," he recalled.

The plan was to head for an island, survive by fishing and hope South Vietnamese forces could rally enough to allow for a return to Cam Ranh.

But on April 30, they heard by radio that Saigon had fallen. They decided to head for international waters and try to escape for good.

The boat's engine proved faulty, and the older boys took shifts bailing water. Everyone recalls desperate seasickness and squalor.

About three days in, a Taiwanese freighter drew near. It sailed away but later returned.

"They must have felt guilty," Tam Dao said.

The freighter would tow the orphans' boat most of the way to Singapore.

Once there, Ha Nguyen got a message to local Baptist missionaries. One persuaded West Memorial Baptist Church in Houston to sponsor the group's entry to the United States.

So in early May, they flew to Fort Chaffee, Ark., where the children were immunized. They moved on to a ranch in Houston and visited their sponsoring church there.

Finally, on June 12, they arrived by bus at Buckner Children's Home, which had agreed to take them all in.

The orphanage-to-orphanage odyssey, from the land of water buffalo to the land of longhorns, made the CBS Evening News.

At the reunion, the orphans did not spend a lot of time reminiscing about the old days. But on the bus from Ho Chi Minh City, they stopped by the church in Phan Thiet that sheltered them that first night.

The women of the church whipped up a meal of squid, cabbage soup, pork and eggs. The group ate a big meal and left the church $1,000, a long-planned thank-you gift.

Another stop, on Friday, was at the site of the Cam Ranh Bay Christian Orphanage. None of the buildings remains. A new school occupies much of the land.

Kindergartners and first-graders gave a concert, singing two songs in English under an image of Ho Chi Minh. The orphans applauded, then filed out of the classroom and wandered the grounds, debating what used to be where.

On this hot day, nearly everyone carried a water bottle. Some used empty ones to scoop up dirt as a souvenir.

The week's biggest event was Family Night, when the orphans invited long-lost – and in some cases, never-seen – relatives for a banquet.

Kelli St. Germain sat talking through a translator with the aunt who put her in the orphanage after St. Germain's parents died in a land mine explosion. They tried to figure out how old St. Germain might really be.

Thomas Ho of Mesquite had a dozen relatives at the banquet. Some came from Vietnam's central highlands, taking local buses for a day and a half.

"I'm overwhelmed," he said.

Among them was a cousin who lost a leg to a mine explosion during the war. Ho recalled working with her in the rice paddies as a boy.

In his hotel room earlier, she had shown him the worn end of her prosthetic leg. Ho said he would make sure that before he flew back to the United States, she'd have a new one.

Holme Oltrogee's guest at Family Night was his birth mother, whom he hadn't seen since he left with the orphans.

Oltrogee, of Frisco, had spent much of the week listening to, loving on and crying with the tiny woman. She shared family history and the dire circumstances under which she put him and his brother in the orphanage.

Oltrogee, 42, is hugely grateful for how his life has gone. That includes his adoption by Gene and Alice Oltrogee of North Dallas, education at St. Mark's School of Texas and Davidson College, marriage, a daughter, and an information technology consulting career.

But he had long felt an urge to reconnect with Vietnam and with the woman who brought him into the world as Hung Nguyen.

He got the push he needed from the other orphans.

"This reunion forced me to come back," Oltrogee said. "I needed to come back. I learned more about myself."

At the banquet, the man thought to be the father of Ty Cope showed up.

Cope, 41, had hoped to meet privately, but the encounter occurred in front of everybody. The consensus in the room was that the two looked a lot alike.

"I've still got a lot of questions," said Cope.

On Saturday, he went to the man's house in Nha Trang. Cope brought his family, including John Cope, his beloved father by adoption.

After talking to the man for a couple of hours (he speaks some English, retained from his days as a translator in the South Vietnamese military), Ty Cope lost his doubts. So did the others.

Cope called it a "sweet time," noting that the newly recognized father kept thanking the adoptive father.

The orphan with two dads was just as upbeat about the reunion that became a Vietnamese-American Roots saga.

"It's been beyond anything I could have imagined," he said.