The fatal longing of Phuoc Ky Ennals: Rescued from Vietnam and given a loving home, he so wanted to become a real British soldier. But at 21 the young rifleman turned his gun on himself. Sandra Barwick reports

THE FIRST time Gene Tranoy, now Lady Ennals, saw Phuoc Ky he was a baby lying on his back, his eyes oozing pus, and the pus covered in flies. She counted 69 septic sores on his head alone. 'He was bald from plucking out the fuzz on his head,' she says. 'There were sores on his body, too. I couldn't count them. His head was flat from lying so long on his back. His bones were not developing. He couldn't see because of the pus. Beside him was a bowl with a dab of rice, and perched on the bowl was a great rat.'

It was the beginning of a life that was to end in May this year when that child, by then a man of 21, died by his own hand on a British Army training ground. Phuoc Ky, who was born into war, had been found in a bombed building in a Vietnamese village, the only survivor of a massacre near Hue. No one knew his name, or who his parents were. The baby had lain there for days, until his cries were heard, and a stranger brought him to the Buddhist orphanage in Saigon.

What the child's brief life had been like before that experience is unknown. It was 1974. At the orphanage they guessed his age was two, but an undersized two and so traumatised that at first they thought he was autistic. But Phuoc Ky, as they named the boy, had a will to live. Within two months he had learnt to stand and begun to walk.

'The first thing he did,' says Lady Ennals, 'was to go out on to the flat roof and splash about in the water from the monsoon. He would dance in the rain. I thought, what a spunky child this is]'

As he began to walk, the child singled out Gene, a teacher originally from South Carolina, who was in Saigon working as a volunteer for the Ockenden Venture, a British charity for refugees. 'I'd put him on my bike and he'd ride over Saigon with me. If anyone tried to take him off, he'd scream. He learnt my name: Gene] Gene]'

After a few months she left Vietnam for England, where she was later to marry Lord Ennals, then a Labour minister in the Foreign Office and chairman of the Ockenden Venture. In April 1975, the Daily Mail sponsored a flight of children out of Vietnam. The Ockenden Venture was involved in the arrangements for their reception. A phone call came the next day. 'It said,' says Lady Ennals, 'that one little boy had a piece of card strung round his neck saying: 'This is Phuoc, for Gene'. The mother superior of his orphanage, knowing the bond that the two had developed, had put him on the plane for what she no doubt thought was safety.

Lady Ennals went down to the home in Haslemere, where the children had been taken. 'He came running over and clutched me around the legs. He said, in Vietnamese, 'Hello lady] Hello Gene]'

For the next two years Phuoc came over to visit the Ennalses in London at weekends. One day he asked: 'Can I come to you and bring my pyjamas?' It was a five-year-old's way of asking to move in. They said yes.

He was sent to the local state primary school at Gospel Oak, in north London, and then to the nearest secondary school. His physique was slight, showing signs of past deprivation. But the back of his head began to round out. A wide smile shines out of family photographs of the time.

The worst wounds that Phuoc had suffered were invisible and unhealed. Between the ages of six and seven Phuoc's anger and hurt found some expression. Sometimes, over apparently trivial matters, such as being told it was time to go to bed, he would lose his temper. He would crouch over, fists clutched to his stomach, and grunt. In this inarticulate rage he would bang his head on the wall till it bled. And the child who had nearly cried himself to death had an inconsolable fear of abandonment. The intensity of his need for friends could make other children shy away. At school he tried to buy friendship with crisps and sweets.

'He was very possessive,' says Lady Ennals. 'If a new friend paid attention to anyone else he'd be angry. 'You don't like me,' he'd say. He was always clutching me. He had it in mind that he had followed me across the ocean. He didn't want to share my attention with anyone else, even David.'

Like many traumatised children, Phuoc had poor concentration, and academically did not shine. To him, homework seemed a lonely affair. And he misunderstood criticism: 'Teacher says my maths is bad,' he would say, angry and hurt. 'She doesn't like me.' Lady Ennals would talk to him at the end of each school day, trying to put the day's fear in perspective. He seemed to need to show courage. He would hold his hand over a candle to try to prove he could stand pain. Later, he would quote T E Lawrence: 'The trick is not to mind the hurt. Not not to feel the hurt. Just not to mind the hurt.'

Once calm, the true Phuoc came out: the funny, mimicking, joking, highly artistic, generous and responsive little boy, who loved to dance and sing. What this child most wanted was to belong. But his skin and features marked him out as different. Lord Ennals would sometimes find him in front of a mirror, pulling at his nose, trying to make it big, like that of the father he had chosen.

Lord Ennals, worried, tried to give him a sense of his own background, showed him photographs, played him tapes. 'But he didn't want to be Vietnamese,' he says. 'He refused to learn Vietnamese. He didn't want to know about Vietnam.' Lord Ennals was disturbed by this rejection of his roots and his appearance, so at 13 Phuoc was sent to live in a home in Oxford run by a religious order, the De La Salle Brothers, with other Vietnamese boys. 'I'm afraid he rather resented it,' says Lord Ennals. 'But he made a lot of friends there.' He did a catering course, and for a while worked in the kitchens of New College, Oxford. Paul Ennals, Lord Ennals's second son, had been an undergraduate there. 'All David's children had been high-flyers at university. Phuoc was very conscious he wasn't,' says Lady Ennals.

Phuoc then decided to join the Army as a regular soldier. During his childhood he had heard about Lord Ennals's courageous exploits in the Second World War. 'He worshipped David,' says Lady Ennals. 'I think he wanted to prove himself. Everything he did was to show he could manage, he could be brave.' At first the Ennalses were doubtful. Lord Ennals tried to persuade him to join the catering corps instead. It was no use. Phuoc wanted to be a real British soldier.

He passed out as a rifleman in Winchester in 1992, looking smart and happy. It was, he said, his proudest day. His ambition was to be an officer, as Lord Ennals had been.

According to the Army's inquiry into the case, Phuoc's main problem in the 2nd Battalion, the Royal Green Jackets, seems to have been lack of strength. Probably because of his early deprivation he was neither fit nor resilient. His knee kept playing up. On one training march in April he flaked out and was dragged to the end. As a result, Phuoc was seen as the weak element in his platoon. He was shouted at. The others gave him four nicknames: VC (for Vietcong, particularly sad since they had probably been responsible for the massacre in which his family was killed); Charlie (an American nickname for the Vietcong); Gook (ditto); and Bruce (after Bruce Lee, the martial arts actor). The other soldiers seem to have thought that he didn't mind. But to those he trusted, Phuoc made it clear that the names hurt.

He made few friends. His main confidantes became the women who worked in the Naafi canteen. They said that he didn't complain about anyone, but he told them what a failure he felt for letting his unit down. They watched Phuoc spend more money than he should on drink and food for other riflemen. He was trying, again, to buy friends.

Other soldiers thought him withdrawn. An officer who told Phuoc that if he did not improve he would be removed from the platoon described his reaction as 'inscrutable'. As a child in the orphanage, Phuoc had not been allowed to cry. In the Army, at 21, it seems he reacted in the way he had been taught: with silence and introversion. Nor did he want to tell the Ennalses that he had, in his own eyes, failed. 'I want to be a real soldier,' he told Lady Ennals. 'A real soldier is brave and can take anything.'

By March this year, Phuoc was desperate. He phoned Lady Ennals in despair. 'He said: 'Gene, I'm not getting on with my sergeant. He doesn't like me. He treats me worse than the others. He nags at me no matter what I do, I can't please him' He said: 'They call me names.' He was shouting at me then, as well as crying. 'You've got to do something]'.'

Lady Ennals told Phuoc that he misinterpreted criticism, assumed too easily he was disliked, as he had at school. She asked him to write down his complaints. Phuoc was angry, she says. 'You don't believe me, do you?'

Lord Ennals tried to telephone Phuoc. From Phuoc's earlier accounts, he seemed to have been getting on all right. Now, suddenly, he seemed to want Lord Ennals to pull rank on his behalf for some unspecific incident. Getting no response, Lord Ennals wrote Phuoc a letter in a brisk, pull-yourself-together, paternal tone.

No reply was ever received from Phuoc Ky Ennals. On 12 May, the day before Phuoc was due to go to Sennybridge, Powys, for training, his commanding officer told him that if he did not improve he would be removed from the platoon, and that the session at Sennybridge would show him whether he was fit to be a rifleman.

That night his friend in the platoon found Phuoc in a state of intense depression in the washroom. He told him: 'I can't take it any more.' On exercise on the 13th, Phuoc's performance was, as more or less predicted, poor, lacking aggression. He was sworn at for it, in typical Army fashion. In the truck afterwards, the thin young man was wet, shivering, and withdrawn. In this state someone poured white foot powder over him; the others laughed.

An hour and a half later, Phuoc Ky Ennals shot himself. He had been collecting spent cartridge cases on a rifle range; another soldier saw him place the rifle to his chest. As the soldier ran to stop him, Phuoc fell backwards. He died almost at once, without regaining consciousness. Whether the final act was deliberate or not (the coroner recorded an open verdict), Phuoc Ky's inarticulate rage and sorrow had finally been emptied on himself.

The coroner told the Army to try to stop racial abuse and the use of racial nicknames. But the Army's inquiry into his death, which took evidence from members of Phuoc's platoon and the Naafi, found 'no significant evidence of racial discrimination or bullying' beyond, of course, the nicknames (which one sergeant said Phuoc liked) and the foot powder incident. Phuoc, the investigators felt, was a 'spiritless character' prone to 'sullen depression'. The selection procedures had failed in admitting him as a rifleman. But it was conceded that there was a lack of pastoral care of Ennals within his company at all levels.

The Ennalses are anxious not to criticise the Army more than it has criticised itself, though they hope that the lessons from Phuoc's death will not be lost. Lord Ennals would like the Army, as the inquiry recommended, to set up a counselling service to support vulnerable young soldiers.

'I'm going to work for the Samaritans,' says Lady Ennals. 'That's going to be my small gesture in memory of Phuoc.' In memory of this soul the Army called spiritless; the little boy who danced in the puddles of the monsoon.

(Photographs omitted)