OVID, MICHIGAN - Thirty-two years after 18-year-old Ben Sloat lost his life in Vietnam, his Army dog tags - bought last year from a street vendor in Vietnam - will find their way back to Sloat's mother in Ovid.

"I'm very thankful to the people who went through so much trouble and expense to find us," Jane Sloat said in an interview Thursday. "They must be very nice people."

Indeed, they must be. They'll come all the way from Illinois to hand-deliver the tags. And they'll do it on Monday, which, as you know, is Veterans Day.

The groundwork for this last leg of a fantastic journey was laid a few weeks ago, when Jane Sloat got a breathtaking registered letter from Peter Roskam, a state senator in Illinois.

Roskam's letter told an astonishing story: His parents - V.R. and Martha Roskam of Wheaton, Ill. - visited Vietnam about a year ago. It was a business trip for V.R. and Martha went along. In Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) they encountered a street vendor who was peddling, among other things, American military dog tags. He had 37 of them, bound together with plastic twine.

The Roskams didn't buy them right away, but the image of the dog tags, thrown into a box with other flea-market merchandise, haunted them.

"They felt a profound sense of sadness," said Sen. Roskam, who represents the western suburbs of Chicago. "My father, who's a Korean War veteran, said, 'Those aren't trinkets - we have to buy them and take them home.' "

Martha Roskam returned to the vendor the next day and paid $20 for all 37 tags. That, as it turned out, was the cheap-and-easy part of what quickly became their new mission - to return the tags to the GIs who wore them. Or their -survivors.

The first thing the Roskams did was enlist their son in the mission. "They said to me, 'You're a senator - figure out what we should do,' " he said.

The senator started at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis. After comparing some of the names and serial numbers on the tags, the people at the center confirmed that the tags were authentic. But they couldn't go much further than that.

"They have all kind of confidentiality rules," Sen. Roskam said. "That avenue was not particularly -productive."

The next avenue was much more productive, but a lot more expensive. The Roskams hired a private investigator. Working with the scant information on the tags - name, serial number, religion and blood type - the investigator nailed down addresses, or at least pieces of addresses, for 30 of the 37 names on the tags. In some cases the Roskams will be able to give the tags directly to the GIs who lost them, often in the chaos of battle. So far, four of the tags belonged to soldiers killed in action.

Ben Sloat, the youngest of four sons born to Victor and Jane Sloat, graduated from Ovid-Elsie High School. He had just turned 18 when the tank in which he was a gunner hit a jury-rigged bomb, killing him -instantly. Ben's brother, Bill Sloat, is managing editor of the Meridian Weekly, Ovid's newspaper. It was Bill who told me the story of the dog tags that will arrive in Ovid on Monday.

"The Roskams have gone to considerable expense and time to do the right thing," he said. "It means a lot to us."