War veteran reunites with lost love after 70 years thanks, in part, to Vancouver woman

After a lifetime of searching and heartache, American war veteran Duane Mann has finally reunited with his lost love Peggy Yamaguchi, partly thanks to Vancouver researcher Theresa Wong.

Mann posted on Facebook last month asking the public to help him find Yamaguchi, detailing the relationship he had with her almost 70 years ago.

The post captured the hearts of hundreds of people around the world and it eventually caught the eye of Wong, who found Peggy.

"I remember just bursting into my roommate's room, I think it was 1 a.m. or 1:30 a.m. at this point, and I was like, 'I think I found Peggy!' and she's like, 'What?'" Wong said with a laugh.

She was moved by Mann's search for Yamaguchi and used her sharp research skills to find the woman. Wong spotted her name in a newspaper article online, dated Feb. 3, 1956.

"I didn't go into it with the expectation that I would actually find her, so even now it's kind of hard to believe that such a small, random decision on a random Tuesday night could actually have real world consequences," said Wong, who works as a researcher for Lark Productions.

She passed along all the information she gathered to Michelle Bandur, a journalist with American television station KETV, who had been covering the 91-year-old veteran's story.

Wong's help proved useful as it finally led to the moment Mann had been waiting for his entire life – reuniting with the one who got away.

It turned out the two lived only a few states apart all these years: Mann lived in Iowa and Peggy settled down in Michigan with her three sons, one of whom has the middle name "Duane."

The two fell in love when Mann was stationed in Japan in 1953, and was called back home a few years later.

Mann and Yamaguchi had made plans to get married and wrote letters to one another, but Mann said his mother burned Yamaguchi's letters, as she didn't want him to marry a Japanese woman.

The two eventually married other people and raised their own families, but he still yearned for closure.

"She must have thought that I abandoned her and that just grew and grew and grew over the years," Mann said.

"Seeing her was really something ... it was a great relief of something that I was compelled to do for all my life," he continued.

Mann travelled with his son Brian to meet with Yamaguchi last week.

Brian said it was fun watching his father demonstrate characteristics of his younger self.

"It breathed 12 years of life into him because he just acted and felt so much younger than 91, which was a good thing," Brian said.

Mann advises anyone who is young and in love to "hang onto that."

"Because you never know when you turn a corner how your life might change. It happened to me. I hope it doesn't happen to many people," he said.