People & Events: Operation Babylift (1975)

A U.S government plan to transport

Vietnamese orphans out of their war-

torn country began in disaster. The very

first flight to leave Saigon, on April 4,

1975, crashed several minutes after takeoff, killing 138

people, most of whom were Vietnamese children. Critics in

Washington questioned the Ford administration's political

motivations. Others criticized the government for assuming

that the children would be better off in America. But

perhaps most disturbing was that many of the children

were not orphans at all.

During the final days of the Vietnam War, the U.S.

government began boarding Vietnamese children onto

military transport planes bound for adoption by American,

Canadian, European and Australian families. Over the next

several weeks, Operation Babylift brought more than 3300

children out of Vietnam.

As the Communists advanced into South Vietnam, rumors

about what they would do were rampant. Many South

Vietnamese were desparate to escape. Children fathered

by American soldiers were rumored to be in particular

danger. Heidi Bub's birth mother, Mai Thi Kim, feared that

her daughter would "be soaked with gasoline and be

burnt." For a mother desperate to protect her mixed race

child in the face of an advancing enemy, a chance to send

the child to America was a ray of hope.

From the start, Americans debated the Babylift's purpose,

execution and justification. American Ambassador to

Vietnam Graham Martin claimed that the evacuation "would

help reverse the current of American public opinion to the

advantage of the Republic of Vietnam." President Gerald

Ford made use of the photo opportunity, standing before

television cameras on the tarmac at San Francisco airport

to meet a plane full of infants and children.

Bay Area attorney Tom Miller, who would become involved

in litigation over the Babylift, called it "one of the last

desperate attempts to get sympathy for the war." A

Congressional investigation suggested that there was "a

total lack of planning by federal and private agencies."

Newspaper headlines asked, "Babylift or babysnatch?" and

"The Orphans: Saved or Lost?" And a Vietnamese orphan

character appeared in the satirical "Doonesbury" cartoons

of G. B. Trudeau.

Some Americans asked whether fear

made it right to take children from their

homeland. A Vietnamese American

journalist, Tran Tuong Nhu, wondered,

"What is this terror Americans feel that

my people will devour children?" Some

felt that guilt may have been a

motivation. Relief agencies in Vietnam were accused of

being "Saigon's baby business." The New York Times

quoted a Yale psychologist, Dr. Edward Zigler, who said:

"We've been ripping [the children of the airlift] right out of

their culture, their community... it's some kind of emotional

jag we are on."

There were some Americans who welcomed the Babylift,

including American aid workers in South Vietnam. Sister

Susan McDonald cared for 100 infants at a Saigon

orphanage. As the North Vietnamese moved closer to the

city, living conditions worsened. Food was in very short

supply, and gasoline was so expensive that McDonald

would buy it by the quart. The orphanage depended on

supplies from overseas, and when these -- including food --

were no longer forthcoming, the children's lives were at

risk. McDonald had been looking for a flight to move the

children in her care to safety, but commercial flights had

ceased. When the military invited her to participate in

Operation Babylift, she gratefully accepted.

On April 26, 1975, McDonald boarded a plane with 200

Vietnamese children and 14 caretakers. The plane stopped

in the Philippines to get the sickest children to a hospital,

and after more than a week in a refugee camp, the rest of

the children continued their journey in a seated cargo

plane. The babies were placed in small cardboard boxes

lined with blankets. The two hundred children landed in

Seattle at the end of a long and strange journey.

Tran Tuong Nhu, one of a small number of Vietnamese

Americans living in the Bay Area at the time, volunteered to

assist with Babylift arrivals in San Francisco's Presidio. She

and the other volunteers were surprised to hear children

talking about their living family members. Many of the

children did not appear to be orphans at all.

Nhu, Miller, and others approached the federal government

and adoption agencies with their concerns about the

situation. When they received no response, they contacted

the Center for Constitutional Rights and filed a lawsuit

against Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the federal

government, and the adoption agencies.

In Vietnam, poor families would

sometimes place children in

orphanages if they could not feed them.

But in such cases, parents did not

intend to give them up, and would often visit their children.

Many parents, especially of Amerasians, were concerned

about their children's safety. In some cases, parents put

their children on a Babylift plane, and later left Vietnam

themselves as refugees, with the intention of finding their

children later. "Many of [the adoption records] lacked the

consents from the parents," said Miller. When Mai Thi Kim

brought her daughter Hiep (Heidi Bub) to the Holt Adoption

Agency in Danang, she was given no papers whatsoever.

A worker with the U.S. Agency for International

Development in Saigon, Bobby Nofflet, recalled the

tumultuous days of Babylift: "There were large sheaves of

papers and batches of babies. Who knew which belonged

to which?"

The Babylift lawsuit argued that many of the children in the

airlift were not orphans, had been given up under duress

during wartime, and that the U.S. government had an

obligation to return them to their families. Attorney Tom

Miller said that he brought Vietnamese birth parents into

the courtroom to plead for their children, but to no avail.

Judge Spencer Williams eventually threw out the Babylift

case, declaring it to be 2,000 separate cases, and not a

class action suit. "He sealed the records, and told us we

could not contact any of the Vietnamese families and let

them know where their children were," said Miller.

Only in cases where parents had found their children

independently could Miller's group represent them.

Eventually only twelve children were reunited with their

Vietnamese parents, but only after many years and

lawsuits. Many children were caught in court battles

between their birth parents and their adoptive parents.

For a number of Babylift adoptees, finding their birth

parents is essentially impossible, because no records exist.

In recent years, many have established connections with

each other based on their shared experiences.