A beautiful, sunny day is April 4, 1975, in Saigon, which will soon be known as Ho Chi Minh City. But there is violence and turmoil in the air. North Vietnamese forces have surrounded the city as it enters its final weeks, causing chaos as South Vietnamese citizens and US allies try to evacuate those who are most vulnerable to reprisals.
Untold numbers will ultimately be left behind, but more than 100,000 politicians, military figures, and others associated with the now-rapidly losing side will be airlifted for resettlement. Among the latter are dozens of orphaned infants and children, many of whom are “Amerasians” born of relationships between Vietnamese mothers and American soldiers, now destined for placement with families in the United States and other countries around the world.
The children were seated in the troop compartment on one plane, a massive C-5A US military transporter, according to lieutenant flight nurse Regina Aune, who was also present. Those in the cargo compartment “were placed on blankets and secured to the floor with litter straps and cargo tie-down straps”, she explained in her book, Operation Babylift: Mission Accomplished, published in 2015 to mark the mission’s 40th anniversary.
Young Vietnamese women hand over their children, sobbing at the thought of giving them to “strangers and foreigners from another country, speaking a language they couldn’t comprehend.”
Just after 4pm, the plane departs from Tan Son Nhut airport, carrying nearly 300 people, but mere minutes after takeoff, the locks on the rear loading ramp fail, causing the cargo door to separate and the plane to decompress 7000 metres (23,000ft) in the sky. Aune barely escapes being sucked out, and later recalls seeing her colleague “hanging by his arm, the rest of his body dangling into the void”.
The plane descends quickly because the flight controls have suffered severe damage. It is clear that the craft will not be able to make it back to the airport, so the pilots aim for a nearby rice paddy, throttling up to lift the nose before touchdown.
When it does hit the ground, the plane skids before skipping back aloft like a stone, then smashes into a dyke and breaks into four pieces. Aune is tossed along the entire length of the compartment, sustaining a broken foot as well as other injuries.
When she makes her way outside, she notices “wreckage and debris in every direction.” The flight deck is 90 metres (100 yards) away and upside down. Before assisting with the rescue, her dangling coworker managed to maintain control, and he now splints his broken leg with a crutch and seatbelts.
A human chain forms amidst the devastation to pass surviving children to rescue helicopters, and Aune helps shuttle infants to safety until she faints. Later that year, she will be the first woman to receive the Cheney Award, a US Air Force medal for valour and self-sacrifice.
Despite her and other people’s efforts that day, 138 people died in the plane crash, 78 of whom were children.
It was the first official flight of Operation Babylift – a US government-sanctioned effort to evacuate the orphanages of South Vietnam – and the highly publicised disaster thrust the mission into the international spotlight. In its wake, thousands of prospective parents in the US and other countries signed up to receive adoptees, and the young people, some of them American service members’ children, were dispersed across new homes in faraway countries.
In the end, more than 3,000 children would be taken abroad over the course of three weeks. While the legacy of the operation later came into question when it was found that some of the adoptees had living parents or relatives who had not, in fact, consented to their removal, now on its 50th anniversary, one thing is undeniable – it reshaped the identities and families of those affected by it for a lifetime.
A chaotic escape
US President Gerald Ford made the announcement to formally appoint an organization to help Vietnamese children, including the Holt International adoption agency, the Friends of Children of Vietnam, and several Catholic orphanages and other organizations, on April 3, the day before the crash. It soon became apparent that military efforts would be too slow as resources were stretched thin, so private flights operated by Pan Am and World Airlines joined the campaign.
“The people who deserve recognition never got it and never will,” Frederick M “Skip” Burkle Jr, medical director of the little-reported airlifts undertaken by World Airlines, tells Al Jazeera, referring to the many nurses, flight crews, and support staff who participated in the airlift.
By the time of Operation Babylift in 1975, Burkle, 84, had already served in Vietnam as a member of the medical corps, and was in charge of a hospital in Quang Tri’s battle-torn front-line region.
“People came from all over the northern part of south Vietnam to see me because nobody could take care of them,” Burkle recalls. From ill local children to ill soldiers, these patients ranged in age. “And these were wonderful people. We laughed together. We made jokes together. The war was going on, but we didn’t discuss the insanity because we couldn’t understand that. You had to function in a setting that didn’t make sense, even though it did not. ”
After this he attended the University of California, Berkeley to study global health, a specialisation in which he would become an important figure, and it was there he received a phone call asking if he would join a medical team that was being put together by World Airways, to assist with the evacuation of orphans from Saigon.
According to Burkle, “I said I needed to make sure I could leave my classes.” He told the caller that he had previously overseen a hospital in Vietnam and spoke the language, “and they said, Wow! You’d choose to direct, right? ”
The US had a strategically important base there for more than 70 years, and the team was soon dispatched there. Operation Babylift was already in full swing, but they were told that the airport in Saigon would no longer receive civilian aircraft. The capital was under sporadic attack, and North Vietnamese forces had already taken control of Xuan Loc, the last defense system before Saigon, which had just two hours away.
“Everyone was looking around and they turned to me and said, You know the language. Would you be willing to go in? Burkle recalls. “And it was actually the last thing I wanted to do, because I knew that if my wife had known she would have said no. He described how, after receiving false reports of his death, she “went through hell.”
But he agreed anyway, and their flight continued from the Philippines, arriving in Vietnam on April 26 – three days before the operation’s final flight and four before the Fall of Saigon. During its approach to Tan Son Nhut airport, Burkle saw rockets crisscrossing through the air as they passed over the wreckage of the first Babylift plane.
According to Burkle, “The radio was yelling at us, Don’t land, don’t land.” “It was not safe. We made our approach as quickly as they could to avoid being shot down.
Saigon had swelled with millions of refugees and forward North Vietnamese forces, and now Burkle had to make his way to orphanages scattered across the city to find infants and verify lists of those slated to go.
“So I went to about five of these. How did I accomplish it, exactly? I don’t know how I was allowed to do it. The North Vietnamese obviously knew I was there, knew I was there, and knew they could stop me at any time, but I believe they were curious about what was happening in the wider world and what I was going to do with all of this? ”
Each orphanage was told to bring the children to Tan Son Nhut airport the next morning, and once they arrived they were divided between two planes. The most seriously ill, who had been suffering for years due to the war’s hardships, were placed in first-class seats, and a novel method was developed to secure infants in the cargo hold.
“We had file boxes, which, believe it or not, were just great to put an infant in and lay them on their back,” says Burkle, referring to cardboard cartons used for organising paperwork. I advised putting the straps through the holes and simply line them up because the planes were the C-130s that had straps and had straps that were attached to them. We got in as many as possible. On the sides and on top of each other. ”
More than 300 children, the majority of them infants and babies, were aboard.
There were also a number of Vietnamese adults, and a “cool, calm, and collected” American in a Hawaiian shirt who told Burkle: “Thank god, we’ve been waiting for you. I’m CIA. We must remove these individuals from the planet. ”
From there, the situation didn’t become any less chaotic. Just before takeoff, a Vietnamese saboteur was discovered and prevented from placing a bomb on one of the planes. At some point, the pilot began vomiting, explaining that he “just can’t stand the sight of sick kids”. The cockpit windshield then began to crack under the pressure when they finally started to take off quickly, “at 90 degrees – all we could see was blue sky and the engines were roaring.” But eventually, both planes made it to the safety of Clark Airbase in the Philippines, roughly three hours away.
Burkle chuckles, “I hadn’t slept at all.” He’d spent three days preparing the team, gathering orphans, and making the trip, “so I was pretty exhausted”.
There, the children were moved onto a single 747 which carried them to San Francisco, where public health officials were initially reluctant to let the children deplane due to concerns over potential contagions. However, they gave in, and Burkle was permitted to travel back to Oakland after being told by a State Department official that she should not discuss this with anyone. This did not happen. ” ” ” ” ” ” ” ” ” ” ” ” ” ” ” ” ” ” ” ” ” ” ” ” ” ” ” ” ” ” ” ” ” ” ” ” ” ” ” ” ” ” ” ” ” ” ” ” ” ” ” ” ” ” ” ”
His wife picked him up from the airport and he finally got some sleep before attending class the next morning. “Nobody knew a thing about what I’d been up to for the last four days. ”
Burkle went on to have a prominent career in global medicine and was frequently tapped to provide health crisis assessments in war zones and other disasters in places like Myanmar, Somalia and Iraq. In the case of Iraq, President George W. Bush appointed him as the Coalition Provisional Authority’s first health minister in 2003, but he was immediately fired after Burkle declared the nation a public health emergency as a result of its devastation to the healthcare system.
“I didn’t last very long because I declared that what Bush was doing was wrong,” he explains, “and they had to declare Iraq a public health emergency or they were going to lose a lot of lives. They didn’t like that, so I was sent out. And of course, it turned out to be one of the worst ever public health emergencies. ”
Picked out ‘like puppies’
Public opinion of the operation during and immediately following it was positive, and there was a general assertion that a great humanitarian victory had been achieved. However, certain aspects of it quickly came into question.
Almost immediately, there were reports of Vietnamese mothers and relatives protesting that they had handed over their children for care without realising they would be evacuated from the country. The majority of these adoptees, if ever, would never reunite with their families.
Then there were issues with the adoption process itself. While some agencies had secured homes for children under more or less normal adoption circumstances, children without placement were gathered in San Francisco, where one Vietnamese translator later said aspiring parents were picking them out “like puppies”. Many of the birth families’ records were muddled, forged, or illegibly absent, making identification challenging and resolving future reunion efforts.
And in some cases, children were placed in homes with people who were entirely unfit to be parents. Later, there would be reports of racism, neglect, and abuse.
But it would be inaccurate to describe Operation Babylift as either entirely benevolent or inherently harmful. As many adoptees have explained, the reality was much more complicated.
The search of a lifetime
The adoptees, the majority of whom now reside in the US and some in Australia and Europe, had little to no memory of Vietnam in the years that followed.
“Growing up, I just wanted to be that all-American boy,” says Saul Tran Cornwall, whose Vietnamese parents relinquished him to a Holt orphanage shortly after his birth in 1972. “I wanted to fit in and be popular. Although I wasn’t sure what assimilation was or meant, I was doing it. I knew I was from Vietnam and that I was adopted, but I didn’t really explore the cultural heritage of that. ”
Canh Oxelson, born in 1971 to a Vietnamese mother and African American soldier, had a similar experience early on. “I was an all-American swimmer. I wasn’t white, Asian, or Black. I was a swimmer. That is how I perceived it. ” But once Oxelson graduated from university, new questions about his identity emerged. “I figured, gosh, I’m not a competitive swimmer any more and never will be, so who am I? ”
During his high school years, he had dreamed of making it to the Olympics, where – just maybe – his birth parents would recognise him. He began to seriously consider looking for them after swimming was over.
As it turned out, his adoptive parents had been saving money for years for just such an eventuality, and, in the late 1990s, as he was approaching the age of 30, they went to Vietnam as a family where they visited the Sacred Heart Orphanage in the city of Da Nang.
“It was one of the first times an adoptee had come back with their adopted family, so for them it was like seeing what they had hoped for and all they sacrificed for as nuns – they got to see it come full circle. ”
It was a powerful experience for Oxelson, who is now 53.
“Adoption is like a story that’s being told to you,” he explains. “And it wasn’t until I met people who were there at the beginning that I thought ‘oh my gosh, the story that I’ve been told for years is true! It was amazing to see my name appear on the registry. I’ll never forget: Number 867, and it had my full birth name, my birthday, and the date I left the orphanage. ”
But at the time, that was as far as his search went. It would take over a decade before he would finally reconnect with his birth family.
Cornwall’s journey to finding his took a similar amount of time.
It wasn’t until college (and shortly after spending two years working in post-adoption services for Holt – the very agency where his journey began as an infant) that he connected with Vietnamese and Asian refugees, prompting him to delve into his heritage. He joined the Holt Motherland Tour through Vietnam in 2000 to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Operation Babylift at the age of 28. Visiting Vietnam, however, struck him like a normal tourist trip as he felt no connection to the country, and his early endeavours to find his family proved fruitless.
Sixteen years later, he returned to Vietnam, this time with his adoptive father, who had served in the war. And while “that was really special,” I was essentially done with Vietnam in 2016. He’d been three times, and online and DNA searches had turned up little beyond some distant relatives.
But then, in 2022, he received a Facebook message from Vietnamese adoptee Trista Goldberg, the founder of Operation Reunite, a nonprofit that works with FamilyTreeDNA to assist Vietnamese adoptees in reuniting with their birth families.
“You might want to sit down for this,” her message read. “We have some news. They appeared to have found his father, he said.
For Oxelson, DNA made the difference as well, linking him to a person who turned out to be a half-niece and whose grandmother proved to be his mother.
The men exchanged stories with various relatives in Vietnam, including his mother, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, and in the case of Oxelson, his mother. As Oxelson put it, ultimately the reunion gave him the sense that “I’ve climbed the mountaintop. To me, that’s what it felt like – one of those monumental, lifetime achievements. ”
Cornwall has continued to build his relationship with his birth family, and Oxelson has gone on to search for his father, eventually following the clues to Orangeburg, South Carolina.
He claims, “We’re close. “In fact, the genealogist believes that she has identified my grandmother or great-grandmother. ” And while he admits that there is always the possibility of another dead end, he is optimistic and undeterred. One might be searching for identity for their entire life. ”
An ‘unscripted journey’
Trista Goldberg, a genealogist, has assisted countless adoptees in their search for family and heritage.
“It’s been 50 years. It’s a little crazy, Goldberg claims. “Something I think is important – and you don’t realise this until you get a little bit older in life – is that your roots are really important whether you’re adopted or not. ”
She was born in 1970 to a Vietnamese mother and an American service member, and she became deeply interested in finding her mother in 2002. “After my own search I thought other adoptees could use assistance. ”
Goldberg was aided in her search by a unique link to her mother’s native country. Before being sent abroad at the age of four, she had lived with a Vietnamese foster family, the father of which had left a note among Goldberg’s things that was later discovered by her American adoptive mother. Her adoptive family granted her visa to resettle in the US after her foster family fled Vietnam to Guam with the wave of the “Boat People,” a mass exodus of about 800,000 Vietnamese refugees who emigrated by sea, frequently in great danger.
“So I grew up with my Vietnamese foster family and was exposed to a lot of Vietnamese culture that most adoptees are not,” Goldberg explains. I adopted customs as a child. I was able to celebrate the holidays of Tet. So when I came back to Vietnam, it wasn’t a mystery. It was already present in my system. ”
Additionally, her foster father was still able to assist with the search for her birth mother in Vietnam. Through this connection and the assistance of her private investigator adoptive father, Goldberg discovered that her Vietnamese family had relocated to the US in 1991, and thanks to a nascent tool called the internet, she managed to track down a brother living in the state of Kansas in 2000.
Goldberg developed the ability to search the internet and make phone calls to a select group of Vietnamese people because they could not understand Vietnamese. Her search efforts were to be further honed with the introduction of DNA testing, which led to her partnership with the genetic ancestry company FamilyTreeDNA. We were actually the beta testers for the autosomal DNA, a method used to determine parenthood. ”
Since then, she has helped countless adoptees reconnect with their birth families.
She claims, “I don’t do the work for them.” “I just point them in the right direction. I believe that is a better way to plan your reunion because some of the beauty of a reunion can be missed if you are forced to participate in it automatically without actually struggling. I commend their courage, because it’s a really unscripted journey to take. ”
Goldberg, Oxelson, Cornwall, and dozens of other adoptees are celebrating the 50th anniversary of Operation Babylift and the end of the war by taking part in a number of events in the US and Vietnam.
“It really was a humanitarian mission,” Oxelson asserts when asked about the criticisms that have been levelled at Operation Babylift over the decades. You might find a political bent in this, but being in the middle of something like that is a different experience. I think your basic humanity comes out.
Source: Aljazeera
Leave a Reply