Steve Yoshiaki Flaherty (1947-1969)
In March of 1969, in the steaming, battle-scarred jungle of the A Shau Valley in central Vietnam, a young Japanese-American paratrooper from Columbia, a star athlete at Dentsville High School, penned four letters to friends and relatives.
Sgt. Steve Flaherty, who had been adopted by a Columbia couple and brought to the United States from an orphanage in Japan when he was 10, was killed, likely by a mortar shell, shortly after he wrote them.
The letters were taken from the young paratrooper's body by a North Vietnamese soldier. More than four decades later, in 2012, they were delivered to the family after they had been presented to then-U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. They were the first artifacts from the bloody and controversial war to be exchanged between the two nations.
(omitted)
Flaherty was born on Jan. 11, 1947, to an unknown American soldier and a Japanese mother during the U.S. occupation of the devastated island nation after World War II.
His mother, Tsugie Ushiroda, who is referred to in a Japanese documentary as a dancer, tried to raise him alone but wasn't able to support him. When the boy, then named Yoshiaki Ushiroda, was four years old, Tsugie gave him up to the Elizabeth Saunders Home, an orphanage in Osaka for unwanted mixed-race children, often products of rape or prostitution, who were generally held in contempt by the Japanese population.
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Rescued, he gave his all in Vietnam