Father And Son Coaxed From Jungle 40 Years After Vietnam War
Four decades ago, Ho Van Thanh fled the fighting in his native Vietnam, disappearing into the jungle with his infant son, Ho Van Lang. This week, father and son emerged for the first time – an enfeebled Thanh carried in a stretcher and Lang wearing only a loin cloth made of tree bark.
According to the Vietnamese newspaper Dan Tri, Ho Van Thanh, now 82, was last seen in 1973, running into the jungle after his wife and two other children were killed by a bomb or landmine near his home.
When Thanh and Lang, 42, were finally coaxed out of the jungle in Vietnam's central Quang Ngai province on Thursday, they had been living 20 feet up in a tree house, stocked with arrows and other makeshift hunting implements.
The Telegraph quotes a local Vietnamese newspaper as saying the elder Ho had fallen out of the habit of speech and that his son only knows a few words of the local dialect of the Cor ethnic minority. They used a homemade axe to chop down trees and survived partly on corn they cultivated as well as fruits and cassava roots from the jungle:
"But there were poignant mementos of their previous life.
The father kept his soldier's trousers neatly folded in a corner [of the tree house]. Beside them was the little red coat his son was thought to have been wearing when they fled."