In April of 1975 as the fall of Saigon became inevitable, President Gerald Ford ordered the evacuation of babies and children from Saigon orphanages. A series of thirty planned flights aboard military aircraft would ferry the children to adoptive parents in the US, Australia and Europe.
The first flight, a C-5A Galaxy aircraft with 313 people aboard, lifted off from Tan Son Nhut airport at around 4 pm on April 4, 1975. It crashed shortly after takeoff, killing 138, including 75 children. Despite this tragic beginning the flights continued until assaults on the airport by the North Vietnamese Army forced them to end. During the program, close to 3,000 children were relocated.
The program drew criticism in part because not all of the children living in the orphanages were orphans. Some Vietnamese parents who could no longer care for their children sent them to orphanages with the hope of eventually bringing them home. Other critics accused the US of using the airlift as a way of turning the tide of opposition to the war in general.
In 2015, forty years after the airlift, twenty of those evacuees and their adopted families gathered in New Jersey for a reunion with some of the servicemen who took part in the rescue and to dedicate a plaque inscribed with the names of the 138 who perished in the April 4, 1975 crash. The tragedy of Operation Babylift is not only the tragedy of the children who died that day, but the separation of parents and children, and the evacuees’ loss of knowledge about their ancestors, culture, and homeland. After the war, DNA was used to try to reunite children with their birth parents. Some have made trips back to South Vietnam to connect with lost relatives and to learn about the land they left behind.
Ann Bryan who had been bureau chief of Overseas Weekly during the 1960’s was still working in Saigon as the war neared its end. Having volunteered at the orphanages for years, and having adopted two daughters there, Ann stayed behind as the evacuation of Saigon began in order to assist with Operation Babylift. By some accounts Ann was one of the last Americans to leave Saigon. My new novel, A SEASON IN SAIGON is a tribute to her and to the other female journalists who risked it all to tell the war’s hidden stories.
