10 April 2024, NIICE Commentary 9048
Caleb Mills
By early April of 1975, the writing on the wall was clear for the South Vietnamese government in Saigon. Two years after the last American soldier had left Indochina, communist forces had finally broken through the Republic’s frontlines and were quickly swarming the Mekong Delta. Within weeks, General Văn Tiến Dũng’s 100,000-strong coalition would begin the final assault on the capitol, bringing about a swift end to the decade-long conflict. As US diplomatic personnel began preparations to evacuate the city, they received a special order from Washington; they were to take Saigon’s orphans with them.
The directive was peculiar as it was dangerous; an evacuation would require vulnerable cargo aircraft to enter contested airspace near Saigon. In addition, designated security and medical staff would be given the legally muddled task of rounding up thousands of Vietnamese orphans in a matter of days for departure. Officially, South Vietnam had only given the United States permission to evacuate orphans who were currently in the adoption process. But considering the accelerated timeline within which the operation was taking place, verifying such a distinction would prove next to impossible. While searching the streets for evacuees, volunteers would not have the time to exercise standard adoption protocols or to even be sure that the child they were taking was actually an orphan. As a result, the extraordinary decision was made to simply take as many children as they could.
“It was just total chaos,” Regina Aune, a military nurse who took part in the operation, said later in an interview. “I took (the babies) from whoever was bringing them on board, they handed me the baby and then I handed the baby to the next person, till we filled it up.” Lt. Aune was assigned to the mission’s inaugural flight, which would tragically crash less than 30 minutes after take off. While Aune survived, and was later recognized for her service, the accident claimed the lives of 78 children who were aboard the flight.
By April 11th, as North Vietnamese forces approached Saigon, the operation reached a frantic crescendo. Navy Doctor Skip M. Burkle Jr. was one of the many volunteers sent searching for orphans in the city. “I entered these orphanages without any lighting,” Dr. Burkle wrote in the Journal of Military Medicine in 2017. “I tripped almost immediately over an infant who was stuck to the floor in his own faeces. I just looked at all these babies in disbelief.” Burkle recalled the row of bassinets which contained dozens of nameless children and faced a critical decision. “I’ll take them all,” he said.
Saigon fell on April 30th, marking the unceremonious end of South Vietnam. By that time, over 2,000 children had been airlifted out of the city. Over 90% were under the age of eight, and almost 60% were boys. Nearly 20% were racially mixed, lending credence to the belief that many of the children were fathered by American soldiers. Thousands of the refugees were eventually adopted in the United States and Europe.
The orphans received a hero’s welcome when they arrived at the San Francisco Presidio military base. President Ford and the First Lady travelled personally to greet the refugees, holding the soon-to-be American citizens as a fascinated media intently documented the affair. Quickly, the harrowing account of the Vietnamese orphans elevated them to near-celebrity status. Some Hollywood icons, including Playboy editor Hugh Hefner, got involved in their transition to life stateside personally. Using his private plane, nicknamed the “Big Bunny”, Hefner flew dozens of orphans back to New York where prospective guardians awaited.
There were, of course, those who found certain aspects of the hurried exploit troubling. Questions regarding the haphazard nature of the operation, particularly within the academic community, began to surface even while it was taking place. On April 4th, a coalition of concerned university faculty from around the country released a joint statement condemning the endeavor entirely. “The war in Vietnam is a moral issue, and the ending of the war is a moral issue” the letter read. “The attitude that ‘we know best how to help them,’ is the same attitude that sustained our immoral involvement in Vietnam for so many years. The Vietnamese children should be allowed to stay in Vietnam where they belong.”
A few weeks later, a Senate subcommittee hearing would reveal yet another startling detail to the public. Hundreds of the evacuees had not been orphans at all, let alone up for adoption overseas. In fact, there were several documented instances in which the children told diplomatic personnel that they had families that were alive and well in Vietnam. It was revealed that it was common for families to keep their children in Saigon’s orphanages to ensure that they were safe and well-fed when the conflict reached its height. In other cases, parents knowingly tried to get their children on the planes, fearing political persecution.
Worst of all was the revelation that due to the language barrier, many Vietnamese parents simply did not understand what the word adoption truly meant. For many, the concept implied temporary separation from their children, not termination of legal guardianship. When some of the parents finally found their way to America after the war, they received the shocking news that their children were no longer theirs.
One such case was that of Mrs. Hai Thi Popp, who sued for custody of her two children who had been evacuated from Saigon during Operation Babylift. In a letter made public by her lawyer during the trial she wrote, “To understand my story, think you are caught upstairs in a burning house. To save your babies’ lives you drop them to people on the ground to catch. It’s good people that would catch them, but then you find a way to get out of the fire too, and thank the people for catching your babies, and you try to take your babies with you. But the people say, ‘Oh no, these are our babies now, you can’t have them back.’ I don’t understand. Vietnamese don’t do like that with children. We love them too much to do that.”
Despite these heartfelt appeals, only a few of the orphans would ever reunite with their biological families. Most of the cases languished in legal purgatory for years or were dismissed entirely.
As legal inquiries died down, what eventually emerged was a narrative of self-admiration, perpetuated by a media eager to frame the story as an example of America’s superior values in practice. Some articles, like even the recent 2015 New York Times piece “Adoptee Grateful to be an American”, glamorize the operation while only briefly acknowledging its controversial nature. Others, like the Gerald Ford Museum’s interactive presentation on the event, ignore the debate entirely.
To many Americans at the time and today, Operation Babylift represented a positive chapter in the Vietnam saga. President Ford, who felt guilt over the decision to abandon South Vietnam to its communist neighbors, later recounted in his memoirs that in the operation he saw an opportunity for redemption. “I ordered American officials in Saigon to cut through any red tape that might stand in the way of the children’s escape,” he wrote. But Ford’s self-styled mercy flights have clearly left behind a far more complicated legacy than many would like to admit.
The swift and systematic removal of thousands of minors by an occupying force, without proper verification of familial ties or legal status, would in most instances constitute a violation of international norms. What started under the parameters of a limited retrieval operation greenlit by South Vietnam ended up becoming a sporadic, if not well-meaning, haphazard collection of any children found in nearby shelters. The government in Saigon had only given the United States permission to take orphans who were currently undergoing the international adoption process; not orphans in general or children whose parental status could not be verified. In essence, the United States unilaterally assumed custody of thousands of Vietnamese orphans without the consent or knowledge of their homeland, and in some cases, their own biological parents.
The tragedy of good intentions is that they are, in themselves, not virtuous. What separates chaos from calm is not ethics, but discipline and prudence. President Ford’s order to vacate Saigon’s orphanages demonstrated a benevolent, if not poorly constructed, sense of duty. If the administration had matched those upright intentions with an equally fervent adherence to the original objective of the operation and detailed-oriented planning, a better outcome might have been achievable. Hundreds of mistakenly taken infants would never have been uprooted in the tumult of Saigon’s fall, and the Vietnamese children who tragically lost their lives aboard Operation Babylift’s first flight might still be alive. The uncomfortable truth is that the United States, a signatory both metaphorically and literally to an international human rights regime that it helped create, circumnavigated basic standard protocol to the detriment of many of the children it claimed to protect.
Caleb Mills is a Resident assistant with the South China Sea Newswire and a former research assistant with Vanderbilt University’s Latin American Public Opinion Project.
