SEARCH AND SAVE -- The miracles that came from a massacre. The true story of Baby Kathleen, a seriously-wounded Vietnamese infant saved by American military personnel unafraid to break the rules of engagement; thirty-five years later, the grown-up Kathleen saves her saviors from their invisible war wounds.

SYNOPSIS:

Out of the massacre came a miracle.

MAY, 1969, VIETNAM: U.S. Army Rangers move through a jungle. The smell and the vultures in the air tell them something horrible awaits them in the village ahead. They discover everyone is two days dead. But where is that muffled cry coming from? A Ranger gently rolls a woman’s corpse and discovers she has a wounded baby wrapped in her arms. The infant is alive, but barely so.

From that point on, every rule in the Army’s book is broken to save the child. The rangers never should have called in a Medevac helicopter. The pilot never should have performed a “dustoff” rescue. The head triage nurse at Third Army Field Hospital in Saigon should never have accepted the Huey’s tiny cargo. The doctors and nurses were forbidden from operating on civilians – but they did. Nevertheless, the rules of humanity trumped the rules of engagement.

The closest priest is summoned, and the baby is baptized with tap water and given the name Kathleen, from one of head nurse Capt. Donna Rowe’s favorite songs, “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen.” Emergency surgery is successful; Kathleen is saved. A room in the hospital is converted into a nursery. An orange crate becomes a crib, and diapers are fashioned from washcloths and sanitary napkins. When they have breaks from treated combat casualties, the nurses and corpsmen scrounge for baby formula.

The priest blackmails the nuns running a local orphanage into accepting Kathleen. He tells her story at a Sunday Mass, and a Naval officer steps forward to adopt her – but he must make an all-out assault on the Vietnamese bureaucracy to do so, taking his case all the way to President Diem.

THIRTY-FIVE YEARS LATER: Everyone goes home, but the War goes with them. Nurse Donna becomes a successful realtor, but she feels her pride in her wartime service has been robbed by anti-war protesters who called American servicemen “baby-killers”. Corpsman Richard Hock tries to live a normal family life, but PTSD spoils it all; he has seen too much to ever be at peace. Kathleen grows up, but never learns who she really is, or to whom she owes her life.

After her adoptive parents divorce, Kathleen is adrift. She has a good husband and two beautiful daughters, but to fill the hollow space inside her, she needs to search for the medical family she never met, the ones who gave her a chance at life.

It takes a series of small miracles, but Kathleen finally tracks down Donna, Richard, and some of the others who ignored regulations to save her. For the baby with the hole in her chest, the hole in her heart is healed. For Donna, Kathleen is living proof that there was high honor in her wartime service. For Richard, Kathleen allows him to relive the one pure moment of good in his time in Vietnam. They had saved Baby Kathleen, and she came back to save them.