Fort Lee, Virginia - At first, Van Miller thought the whole thing was a scam.

He had received a random letter from Illinois saying that his dog tags had been found. He had lost them in Vietnam more than 30 years ago.

But the Illinois family that found Miller's dog tags and those of 36 other soldiers had started a Web site, which listed Miller's mailing address.

After receiving dozens of calls from people who had seen the site, he decided to give the family a call.

Yesterday at a ceremony at Fort Lee's Littlejohn Auditorium, Miller was reunited with his dog tags - something he said he thought he'd never see again.

Martha Roskam said she had a surprise for Miller. She pulled his tags from around her neck and gave them to Miller, who stared in amazement at the slightly rusted pieces of identification.

"It's kinda hard to speak after something like this," Miller said after receiving his tags. "I never reckoned that I would see something like this again."

Miller was attached to an Army sniper unit in Vietnam from 1969 to 1971 - "two years, four months and six days," he said.

"I really enjoyed my time in Vietnam and I would have gone back if I could, and I lost some real good friends there," said Miller, starting to choke up.

"This is a privilege and I do thank you for giving them back."

The missing tags were found in 2001 when Roskam and her husband Swede were in Ho Chi Minh City - formerly Saigon - on a business trip. Martha Roskam was out shopping when metal from the tags caught her eye.

"When I picked them up, I had a profound sense of sadness," she said.

Not knowing what to do, she went back to her husband, explaining what she had found, and he told her to buy them.

The next day she returned and bought 37 dog tags for $20.

"I was incensed that the tags belonging to American GIs were being sold in a back alley in Saigon," said Swede Roskam, a Korean War veteran. "They didn't belong in a street, and it was our opportunity to return these to the gentlemen."

Since then, the couple, with the help of their son, an Illinois state senator, have returned 19 dog tags to Vietnam veterans or families of those who are deceased. The Roskams are in the process of returning six more and are searching for the addresses of six others. A handful of the tags were unidentifiable.

Yesterday Miller, a retired electrician and lifelong Dinwiddie resident, was added to the list of recipients

"It means a lot to a soldier, especially a foot soldier," Miller said. "A family like the Roskams, to go through all that trouble to give them back, shows the love and fellowship and that people do care."