In her travels, she collected 500 dog tags belonging to American soldiers, dead and alive. She brought them home with her and had them authenticated. Now, she devotes her spare time to pairing the lost tags back with their owners or their families, refusing to sell them to museums, collectors or back to the government. Her efforts have attracted national attention, including a recent appearance on NBC's Today.

"The government has paid such little respect to Vietnam veterans," Hansen says. "They want to brush the whole thing aside, but the truth is, we lost. It was a political war." As a firefighter with the city of San Jose, Hansen has worked with many who served in the war. She has also befriended a Vietnamese man whose family escaped from the Communist country in a boat.

Hansen, who had gone backpacking in Europe the year before, scheduled a similar vacation in Vietnam after learning about the country from her friends and coworkers. While visiting the Independence Palace in Ho Chi Minh City, she saw a selection of dog tags. The small metal pieces, which list a soldier's name, Social Security number and religion, were worn and dirty. "They didn't care about them," she says. "Each one was priced between 50 cents and two dollars."

Much of her remaining time in Vietnam was spent locating more dog tags, which had been found by villagers and sold to vendors for a small profit. By the time she came back to the United States, she had more than 500 in her possession. "I carried them in my backpack," she says. "It was scary going through customs, both here and there, because I thought they'd take them from me."

Upon her return, Hansen sent them to the Central Identification Laboratory, Hawaii, which is located at Hickam Air Force Base in Honolulu, and the laboratory authenticated the tags. She then turned to the Department of Defense for assistance in returning the tags to veterans. "Right off the bat, they told me they were all fake," she says. After getting nowhere, Hansen decided to locate the tags' owners on her own. "The government has had over 30 years to do this. I figured that if they haven't done it by now, they never will," she says.

Hansen, who now lives in Santa Cruz, set up a website to facilitate her project, but interest really took off after the publication of an article in Delta Airlines' in-flight magazine, Sky. That article caught the attention of the producers of Today, who featured her on the morning show on Jan. 12. One call she received was from a man in San Francisco, who had 300 dog tags but no time to find their owners. He handed his collection over to Hansen.

Of those 800 dog tags, Hansen has been able to return 168 to their rightful owners and five to the families of soldiers who were killed in action. She has been able to locate some veterans through Internet searches, and her website lists the names on the dog tags remaining in her collection. Visitors have the chance to fill out a form to claim tags for themselves or a loved one. While some veterans have chosen not to reclaim their tags, many are grateful.

"It's been so overwhelming. They just call her and it's like they haven't talked to anyone about the experience before," says Hansen's mother, Marilyn.

Hansen has heard myriad stories of how the tags were lost—wild nights, narrow escapes from land mines and gifts to Vietnamese children who idolized the soldiers. These tales have fleshed out a war that was foreign to Hansen beyond the occasional clip on television.

Hansen's mother knew one person who was killed in the Vietnam War—her brother's best friend—and recalls reading about war casualties in the newspaper when she was a young mother in the late 1960s, but her daughter's learning experience has affected her. "It's so easy to forget when you're not really connected," Marilyn says.

Marilyn still lives in Cupertino, where Hansen attended Faria, Kennedy and Monta Vista schools. "After Stacey appeared on the Today show, my phone didn't stop ringing. Her second-grade teacher still asks about her," she says. "They say I must have instilled good things in her, but we just taught our kids to work hard and care for others."

Four years after her initial trip, Hansen still fields interested calls and emails, which have increased after her recent publicity. But she pledges that the dog tags will only ever go back to the soldiers who had them in the first place. "The tags mean so much to them," she says. "They send me videotapes and everything." She's only met one veteran in person whose tag she returned, but most have expressed thanks for the recognition, no matter the medium.

For more information on Stacey Hansen's project, visit her website at http://www.vietnamdogtags.com.