The Children of the Vietnam War's ‘Operation Babylift' Have Turned 50. A Look at the Lives They Built.

Devaki Murch
Devaki Murch, who was one of the babies who survived the tragic crash of the first Operation Babylift flight out of Saigon on April 4, 1975, found her adoption records in a basement in Colorado and is now trying to connect dozens of people who survived the accident and went on to be adopted in the United States with the records of their past.
They are turning 50 now, the babies laid out on airplane seats, six to a row, held and fed by strangers who took turns caring for them as they took artillery fire and fled the bombs and booms of Saigon.
They were part of Operation Babylift, an effort led by the American military to rescue babies from Vietnamese orphanages ahead of the fall of Saigon 50 years ago this month.
'This is the least we can do, and we will do much, much more,' President Gerald Ford said on April 3, 1975.
The operation came after 10 grueling years of U.S. involvement in the 20-year-long Vietnam War, a conflict that took millions of Vietnamese lives, more than 58,000 American lives and divided the country. As the North Vietnamese closed in on Saigon in April 1975, American civilians were evacuated en masse.
The first Operation Babylift flight was catastrophic: The C-5A carrying more than 300 people crashed into a rice paddy 27 minutes after takeoff, killing 78 babies and about 50 adults, including 35 American military personnel.
The babies who survived didn't remember it.
And as children growing up in American homes, often as the only Asian American kids in their Wonder Bread hometowns, forgetting the crash or the airlift or the reason they were adopted was a matter of survival.
'My family was just amazing and wonderful,' said Devaki Murch, who was one of the 175 people who survived. 'I never felt like I was missing something or there was never a yearning to learn more.'
But with age comes introspection.
'The majority of us are about 50 years old now,' Murch said. 'And a lot of us have lived enough life to go back and maybe learn a little more and make those connections.'
She found these connections in the basement of the Colorado office of the adoption agency that worked in Vietnam, Friends for All Children.
'As I brought box after box up from the basement, it wasn't just adoptee files; there were about 25 boxes of those. There were lists, C-5 crash survivor and deceased lists,' Murch said. 'These remaining files are not just the records; they are a part of my personal history and the history of many others.'
For the first time, she found her infant name and hard-copy evidence of her babyhood:
'MIMOSA: female, Vietnam.'
She found the adoption application in her mother's handwriting, health updates and grammar school pictures the agency kept.
'It was my life that I had never before witnessed,' she said, explaining why she's now embarking on a massive project to find her fellow survivors and give them their backstories.
The evacuations continued for hundreds of other babies after the crash. Nuns and nurses who had cared for the children loaded them onto planes while under artillery fire. When he heard there was an 11-day delay between flights, American businessman Robert Macauley mortgaged his home to charter a Boeing 747 from Pan Am to fill the gap.
Between 2,500 and 3,000 children were delivered safely to the West, but some had enduring scars.
Carol Mason was terrified by loud noises, especially the thunderstorms that rattled the summer skies of her new home in Delaware County, Pennsylvania.
'I would hide under furniture. I mean, it was really crazy,' said Mason, who was 5 months old when she was airlifted out of Vietnam. 'And the doctor said that maybe I heard the bombs and all of that as a small baby.'
Mason was not on the plane that crashed. She was on the second Operation Babylift flight.
This month, she's organizing a reunion of the other adoptees she's found. She wants to build a community, helping adoptees connect with each other and their biological families, if that's what they want.
'I found that for many adoptees, this is their first reunion after 50 years,' she said. 'They've not started their journey, they haven't taken DNA, they haven't done anything.'
DNA makes it easier for the adoptees to find their backstories. One group bicycled through the Mekong Delta this month distributing DNA testing kits in villages, hoping to make a connection.
'I know nothing of my family history – not my parents' names, whether they're still alive or not, whether I have biological siblings or extended family, or how I got to the orphanage,' Jane MyHan Joy explained on her GoFundMe campaign to help raise money for Viet Nam Family Search, an organization helping reunite families. 'I don't even know if my birth certificate truly belongs to me or was fabricated to help get me out of the country during the chaos and brutality of the war.'
Murch has no desire to find her biological family this way. But she is sharing her findings to help others like Joy.
'For some of us at this age, you've reached your own successes, you have this confidence in who you are and now you can actually truly acknowledge, instead of denying, those groups, this history you're part of,' she said.
Murch brought some of the files to Washington. They're now part of a collection in the Library of Congress.
Aryn Lockhart also survived the crash. She found the medical crew director who also survived that flight, Lt. Regina Aune. The two formed a bond and wrote a book together, 'Operation Babylift: Mission Accomplished, a Memoir of Hope and Healing.' Lockhart calls her 'Mom.'
They visited the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington several times to honor the crash victims. It's a common journey for survivors of the crash.
On a visit in 2017, Lockhart posted a photo of herself on social media showing her hand resting near the name of one of only eight women on the memorial: Mary T. Klinker, who was a 27-year-old Air Force captain and nurse when she died in the crash.
Klinker and Aune were in the cargo area of the C-5A Galaxy when the flight took off from Tan Son Nhut Airport. Someone started getting sick and Aune ran upstairs to get medication. That saved her life, because when the plane crashed minutes later, nearly everyone in the cargo area, including Klinker, were instantly killed.
One of Lockhart's former classmates saw that photo of Klinker's name at the memorial wall. She reached out to her old friend to tell her she's dating one of Klinker's nephews, Chuck Klinker. So Lockhart, Aune and the Klinkers all connected and later dedicated a memorial to the nurse in her hometown of Lafayette, Indiana.
These journeys of discovery are fraught for the Operation Babylift generation.
Some were among an estimated 100,000 children fathered by American troops and left in orphanages. Some were given up by parents who couldn't care for them. Others were orphaned by war. There have long been allegations that many were snatched from impoverished families to feed the adoption market.
Though they looked like thousands of Vietnamese children who immigrated to the United States in the late 1970s, their experience growing up in America was different.
The refugees who came with their families after 1975 – many by boat – grew up with Vietnamese language and culture. They usually kept their Vietnamese names, constantly pronouncing 'Nguyen' and 'Phuc' for their new neighbors. But most of the Operation Babylift kids adopted by White American families started their new lives as Carol or Kevin or Susan.
'I didn't want to find my biological family or learn much about Vietnam; I just had no interest,' Mason said.
She remembers the first time she ever had Asian food, when one of her friend's parents proudly served 'your favorite food' to her. It was chicken lo mein.
'I'd never had anything like it before,' Mason said. And it was Chinese.'
When she was 25, her mom was flipping through a magazine when a photo stopped her cold. It was a flight attendant on one of the Operation Babylift flights with an infant in her arms.
'And my mom just said 'Oh, my goodness! My baby's in a magazine!'' Mason said. And that was the first time Mason became interested in learning more about her story.
The timing was uncanny because her mother was killed by cancer a year later. 'It was almost like she knew that doing this, learning about Vietnam, would open up a whole other world for me. It would give me more people to connect with when she would be gone,' Mason said. 'Like she was leaving me a gift.'
Since then, Mason found that flight attendant who held her, and they became friends. She began connecting with other Operation Babylift kids, forming a tight network of people who related to their unique upbringings. They went on vacations together and bonded with each others' families.
About 10 years ago, Mason bought a DNA testing kit. 'And I let it sit in my cabinets for three years before I actually spit in the tube, because I was, like, 'I was okay. I was happy. I didn't need to find something else.' '
She got a hit and found two relatives in California – an uncle and a cousin. She visited them two months ago.
'That was amazing to actually be able to look at someone and say, oh my goodness, we resemble each other,' she said.
As they were marveling at that moment, her uncle asked, 'Have you ever returned to Vietnam?' Mason said. 'And I told him 'No. It's something I've always thought of doing.' ' She had been putting her energy into helping other adoptees find their families and connect.
As far as she was concerned, she had no one to go visit. She couldn't imagine where to go or who to see.
'So my biological uncle said, 'Well, we're planning on going at the end of next year, why don't you come with us?,' ' she said.
She said yes.
'I'm looking forward to going back with them, with my family,' she said. 'While they show me the country that I came from.'

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