St. Luke's Mom Tells Story of New Life

Meeting Paul and Sandy Pinkerton was obviously a pivotal point in the life of Audrey Insoft. They facilitated the adoption of her son Alexander, an eighth grader at St. Luke's School, as well as hundreds of other Vietnamese children. But what inspired her to write a book about them?

“The book has a very personal meaning for me because of our own adoption and our story is embedded in the book.  But aside from that, Divine Fate is a good human interest story,” says Insoft.

In 1968, Paul Pinkerton left his own childhood behind and went to Vietnam in the belly of a transport plane. He came home a different person, head full of the horror he had somehow survived. He discovered that healing for his Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome could begin only when he returned to Vietnam to look for POWs/MIAs.

Meeting his wife Sandy was another catalyst. Abandoned by her mother at the age of 5, Sandy was also scarred by her dysfunctional childhood. Together they turned their focus to the abandoned and forgotten orphans of Vietnam, facilitating 400 adoptions. Once adoptions to Americans ended in Vietnam, Sandy and Paul started a charitable organization to help disadvantaged children.

“It’s a story about what motivates people to choose the work/careers that they do,” says Insoft. “Paul was motivated by guilt and trying to repay the Vietnamese people for the acts he'd committed during the war. Sandy was trying to give children homes because she never had a stable one and always felt unloved by her biological mother.”

For Audrey Insoft, writing this book was part of a legacy of healing that she is excited to share with the world.