Pressed for Anecdote, Romney Recounts Tale of Missing Girl DAYTON, Ohio - For the second time in a week, a man stood at town hall meeting and urged Mitt Romney to brag about his altruism. The voter's anecdote of choice Saturday afternoon in Ohio was the time Mr. Romney shut down his Boston-based private equity company and headed to New York to help track down a colleague's missing daughter. "A couple of months ago they were attacking you for, I think, or one person did, the Bain Capital type of thing," said the man. But can we talk about the ad where the gentlemen who was your business partner from New York - you flew a company of 50 to New York to rescue his daughter. Can you tell that story? That story, in fact, was a large part of his 2008 presidential bid, when his campaign produced an ad around the tale. But Mr. Romney has not mentioned it this year, although a pro-Romney "super PAC" did re-air the old footage, prompting a mini-controversy. "Uh, yes, I haven't thought about that for a while, so let me see if I can get the facts straight," Mr. Romney said, before launching into his re-telling. Mr. Romney said that one of his partners, Robert Gay, came into his office at Bain Capital one day to say that his 15-year-old daughter had gone into New York City to attend a party without permission, and had never come home. She was lost, Mr. Romney remembered. "And so I said, "Let's close the firm, let's close the company,"" Mr. Romney said. ""Let's all of us fly down to New York and try to find her." And so we closed the business, we went home and packed our things, we got a hotel near the airport where we all went to, we set up a headquarters, we met with the detectives with the New York City Police Department, we hired a private investigative firm to help guide us through this process. At the time, Bain was an investor in Duane Reade, a major drug store chain, and Mr. Romney said they printed out fliers of the missing teenager, and had all the stores pass them out to customers, as well. "And so there we were, a bunch of folks in suits walking around in the parks of New York and in the streets and showing pictures and saying when we saw teenagers, "Have you seen this girl?"" Mr. Romney said. There were all these guys walking around asking kids if they'd seen a picture of this young lady, guys in suits and briefcases, and it made some big item in the news and we got a call into our hotline. They finally found her, Mr. Romney said, in a basement of a New Jersey home. As he finished his story, a murmur of approval rippled through the crowd. At another point during the event, Mr. Romney wondered aloud "how in the world can the commander in chief sleep at night." Responding to the question of a mother whose daughter is serving abroad in the 82nd Airborne at Bagram Air Base, Mr. Romney laid into President Obama over his handling of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. "One of things that I found most disturbing and hard to explain is how we can have our sons and daughters in conflict, risking their lives, and not have the president on a regular basis addressing the American people, describing what's happening, describing what our mission is, describing what the goals will be, describing how much progress we're making or whether there are setbacks and informing the people of America that there are other Americans making enormous sacrifice for our purposes and for our liberty," Mr. Romney said. The president needs to do that. In her question, the woman had explained that her daughter desperately wants to come home - ""There is no mission here, we have no definition of a mission,"" she said, repeating her daughter's words - and Mr. Romney echoed her concern. "If your daughter is not familiar with the mission that she's on, how in the world can the commander in chief sleep at night knowing that we have soldiers in harm's way that don't know exactly, precisely what it is that they're doing there," he said. Mr. Romney, who has repeatedly criticized Mr. Obama for setting a withdrawal date based on what he says is political expediency rather than the facts on the ground, said that he understands why the country is in Afghanistan, but wants to bring the troops home "as soon as humanly possible, as soon as that mission is complete." "We're going to finish the job of passing it off to them and bring our troops home as soon as humanly possible," he concluded.