A snapshot shows Nguyen Tan Hoa, 55, as a young man in the late 1970s. The photograph behind that one shows him and another young boy standing beside a U.S. serviceman during the Vietnam War. Hoa was 10 when U.S. Marines with a Combined Action Platoon moved into his village during the conflict. For the next three years, Hoa spent most of his time with the Marines and still refers to himself proudly as one of them. "Whatever they got, I got," he says. "We shared everything." After Saigon fell to North Vietnamese forces in 1975, he was devastated. "I really felt like I was the last G.I. in Vietnam," he says. Aug. 10, 2012.