Escape from Saigon

 

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Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Epigraph

A Note to Readers

Introduction

Prologue

Map

1.
A Little Boy All Alone

2.
A New Life in Saigon

3.
At Home at Holt

4.
A Family for Long

5.
No Way Out

6.
The Crash of the C-5A

7.
Operation Babylift

8.
The Flight to Freedom

9.
Into the Eye of the Storm

10.
A Real American Boy

11.
Return to Vietnam

Afterword

Multimedia Recommendations

Sources

Acknowledgments

Photo Credits

Index

By the same author

Copyright

 

For Alison,
born in my heart

The author's Vietnamese daughter, Alison (center, baseball cap), with children in the Mekong Delta region of Vietnam, near the orphanage where she once lived

 

War, no end to it, people scattered in all directions …

—P
HUNG
K
HAC
K
HOAN

Vietnamese poet, 1528–1613

A Note to Readers

The events I recount in this book are based on documented historical fact and the recollections of those whose stories appear, and as memories are necessarily subjective, they may differ from those of others. I have reconstructed conversations from the memories of these individuals, bearing in mind that many of the incidents in this story occurred in the 1970s and that people rarely have perfect recall after so many years.

Introduction

I will never forget the fear. In the first days of April 1975, the baby daughter we had never seen was trapped in Saigon, South Vietnam, half a world away from us. Alice Spring was only six months old. She had been brought to Saigon for medical treatment from her orphanage deep in the Mekong Delta. When her health improved, Friends For All Children, the humanitarian agency we had worked with for two years in hopes of adopting a Vietnamese orphan, told us about her. Would we be interested?

Yes! we cried. Send her immediately! That was in January 1975. We knew it would take until summer to complete paperwork so she could come to us. We settled in to wait, loving her from afar.

But in March it suddenly became clear that South Vietnam was about to fall to the North Vietnamese forces. We began to wonder if we would ever hold our baby girl. In a very short time, Saigon was surrounded by Communist troops. The only safe way out of the city was by air, and commercial airliners were no longer flying into Saigon.

It seemed like a miracle when the American government responded to pleas for help to evacuate the orphans in Saigon who were already assigned to adoptive homes abroad. Our hearts were filled with joy.

But on April 4, we awoke to the horrifying news that the first planeload of orphans on Operation Babylift had crashed. The children were from our agency, Friends For All Children, and many were dead. Was Alice Spring on that flight? When we finally learned she was not, we rejoiced, even as we grieved for the families who had lost their children.

Today, Alice Spring, renamed Alison, is a happy, healthy adult—a college graduate and a mother. Growing up, she remembered nothing about being evacuated in the nick of time from a doomed city, nor did she remember her homeland. In 1996, shortly after Vietnam reopened to the West, our family journeyed with Alison to see that homeland. We were enchanted by the beauty of the country, the warmth of the people, and the delicious cuisine—all part of the rich Vietnamese culture.

But the highlight of our journey was meeting the brave and wonderful people, many of them Catholic nuns, who had cared for Alison as an infant and made certain, when she became sick, that she got to Saigon and to help. We saw Newhaven, the care center sponsored by Friends For All Children, where she grew strong during the months leading up to the Babylift. With us on the trip was Mary Nelle Gage, a Sister of Loretto from Colorado who had worked at Newhaven. We also met with Rosemary Taylor, the Australian at the heart of Friends For All Children, who many believe single-handedly did more to assist the orphanages and orphaned children of South Vietnam than any other person during the war. She explained the challenges of trying to care for overwhelming numbers of children, many very ill, in a country at war, with too few supplies and too little medicine.

We returned from our trip humbled by the devotion of these volunteers in South Vietnam, both the Vietnamese and those from other countries. My daughter owes her life to them, and so do thousands of other adoptees and other Vietnamese children.

I have long felt that the story of the plight of the war orphans, and of the Babylift itself, needed to be told. With my daughter unable to remember what happened to her at so young an age, I looked for an older Babylift child with memories of that fateful time. Matt Steiner, who was eight years old when he was evacuated, turned out to be that person. Unlike my daughter, who is full-blooded Vietnamese, Matt is Amerasian, with a Vietnamese mother and an unknown American father. When his family could no longer provide for him, he was fortunate, just as Alison was, to be cared for by an international relief agency that could help him find an adoptive family. Matt and Alison both know they were lucky, even if Alison never knew her biological parents and Matt lost his.

Innocent children have always been the victims of war, and never more so than in the last century. At the beginning of the twentieth century, 90 percent of war casualties were soldiers. In the last decade of that century, 90 percent of the casualties were civilians. Many of those were children. More than 1.5 million children died in the Holocaust of World War II. In the 1990s, more than two million children died in wars around the globe.

Orphaned children, and those left behind by parents unable to care for them, are also the victims of war. In South Vietnam, more than a million children were orphaned by the war and only a few thousand made it to adoptive families. Of the rest, some found their way to relatives, if they were fortunate enough to have them. Others tried to live on the streets, fending for themselves, while still others were taken to orphanages, where they might grow up if they were lucky enough to get the food they needed and if they didn't catch a fatal disease. Some never grew up at all, but instead turned their faces to the wall and refused nourishment, perhaps because even at such a tender age, they'd had enough of the world.

A young boy and his brother flee the fighting in South Vietnam's central highlands

As you read this story of the other side of war—not of soldiers and battles, but of orphans and people trying to help them—my hope is that you will think of all the other children in this world whose lives are scarred by war. And when you have the opportunity, I hope that you will do whatever you can to help children, wherever they live, who are in harm's way and cannot help themselves.

Prologue

Vietnam is an ancient land, both beautiful and mysterious. It lies along the eastern coast of Southeast Asia, half a world away from the United States. It is rich in natural resources, and since its earliest history, these riches have been coveted by other nations.

Though Vietnam has been conquered many times, its people have always fought valiantly to expel invaders, including the Chinese, who ruled Vietnam for a thousand years, ending in the early part of the tenth century. The French arrived in Vietnam in 1859 and left in defeat in 1954.

That same year, because of conflict over who would control the country, Vietnam split in two. North Vietnam was under Communist rule, and South Vietnam struggled to establish an independent republic. Both North and South wanted a unified nation, but each wanted its own form of government. Thus began the long war between the two Vietnams, a war that would take many lives and leave no family untouched by sorrow.

1

A L
ITTLE
B
OY
A
LL
A
LONE

His mother gave him the simple Vietnamese name of Long.

When he was born in 1966, Long's mother—whose name he no longer recalls—was living with his American father. Deep in memory, Long carries a vague image of this man. It's like a photo. In it, he sees his parents together. His father has blue eyes and hair the color of sand. He towers over Long's petite Vietnamese mother, so lovely, with silky black hair and laughing brown eyes. They look very happy.