Help Devaki preserve the history of Operation Babylift

A story has a life of its own, and a life has its own story

If there is anything I have experienced in the past year, it is the magic of being on the right track. When you are on the right track, the doors not only open but invite you in and seat you at a table set for you. I have come to appreciate this feeling of being on the right track more deeply as I've delved into my history as a participant in Operation Babylift, a significant event in the Vietnam War.

Operation Babylift was an initiative by President Gerald Ford to evacuate adoptees out of Vietnam in the final month of the war. Amid the chaos of conflict, children had been cared for, loved, and sent to adoptive homes overseas. In April 1975, time was running out. Responding to unofficial airlifts bringing children out of Vietnam, President Ford contracted Lockheed to use a C-5a cargo plane to transport children out of Saigon. This initial flight of Operation Babylift had a malfunction 27 minutes into the flight turned back, crash landing in a rice paddy, killing more than half of the passengers, children, volunteers, and crew.

The resilient and brave children who survived were taken back to the orphanages, receiving care and treatment. Once stabilized, they were flown to their destinations on alternate carriers. These carriers, both commercial and private, were part of a massive effort that resulted in over 2,000 children being brought out of Vietnam as a part of Operation Babylift. Given the circumstances of the war, meticulous records were maintained onsite and in the United States for the agency I was adopted from in Vietnam and Boulder, Colorado. Most of the children that arrived in the U.S. were flown into San Francisco and brought to the Presidio, an army post in San Francisco, to meet their families or continue their journeys to their final destination stateside or overseas.

In the final days of the war, when the fall of Saigon was imminent, any evidence that incriminated those who assisted the U.S. in any way needed to disappear. All of the records lining the office of Friends For All Children were burned. Over 3,000 records, notes, letters, certificates, and pictures were all destroyed, a loss that we still feel today.

The office in Colorado had birth certificates, intake records, correspondence with adoptive parents, home studies for placement assessments, legal papers, notes, and pictures of the children. When Friends For All Children shut their doors in the late 1970s, some records went to Boulder County social services, and others remained in the care of Sister Mary Nelle Gage, a volunteer who had worked with Rosemary Taylor in Vietnam during the war.

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, convoy lists from the Presidio of the carriers, flights and dates children left San Francisco, addresses of the children and their homes they were destined for. More lists and roll calls in the nursery with the status of the children post-crash. 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, I found my name on a list. It was a list of the survivors of the C-5 crash.

MIMOSA

Female

Nguyen My Thi Phuong

Vespoli

Hard copy evidence that I was in that place and time and survived.

Miraculously, out of all those boxes, mine was on top of a random stack of adoptee files. I opened it up, and the whole story came to life. My mother’s handwritten application letter to adopt a child, my second-grade and third-grade class pictures, intake forms listing my approximate arrival at the orphanage, and several options of children for my mom were crossed off until the one remaining was me. There was paperwork documenting my health, status, adoption updates after my placement, and INS documents. It was my life that I had never before witnessed, and the emotional impact of this discovery was profound, a mix of joy, sadness, and a deep sense of connection to my past.

The files were a heartbreaking, beautiful, mind-blowing reality of war, life, and death - and I have only looked at 7 of them.

I opened boxes of letters from parents to Sister Mary Nelle and Sister Susan McDonald, with updates and pictures of the children as they grew up.

Then there were the letters between The Women, personal correspondence between Sisters in a time of war and exhaustion. Overwhelmed and stretched to their limits, they worked with full hearts and dedication. The women supported and cared for one another as much as they cared for the children.

Three of the 31 boxes now at the top of the stairs. They are the only remaining records of that time. The records that were not burned andRosemary Taylor’s notebooks and journals were gone when she passed away. This is it.

I began organizing and sorting because that’s what I do. I started transcribing list after list into a spreadsheet, cross referencing and sorting again to track individual children recorded on multiple lists - disputes with three different identifying names, often misspelled. I sorted and ran reports- focusing on April 1975, specifically the C-5 crash survivors’s age range, average age of survivors, and geographic distribution of placements. Has any of this been analyzed before? Have these lists ever been cross-referenced?

Then it hit me:

The last time these individuals listed on these passenger manifests, crew lists, survivor and deceased lists, and orphanage roll calls were together - was when they were loading on the plane.

That’s what it’s been like all year! And there are 28 more boxes to go!

This is big –not just for my personal story but also for the other adoptees, families, volunteers, and military involved and for the history of that time.

What started as a desire to thank you morphed into a quest to find a repository for the records and has now become a mission to preserve and protect these files and documents. This mission is urgent, as it is crucial to honor and respect the work, journey, and lives of everyone on those lists. The urgency of this mission cannot be overstated, as these records are not just about my personal story but also about the other adoptees, families, volunteers, and military involved and the history of that time.

The Operation Babylift Collection begins with exploring these boxes and the world of archives. Recognizing the need for structure, understanding, and legalities of the process requires educating myself in archival studies. I have joined the Society of American Archivists and am looking at Certificate programs for Archival Studies. I have become an “Accidental Archivist”.

This project will begin as I learn how to organize and manage a new collection, inventory and catalog the documents, and share my experience and findings as I move through the process through exhibits, gatherings, and a lot of networking and learning.

The second part of the project is developing a database of the information on all of these lists and reports, which can reference corresponding notes, articles, documents, and files. This database must be searchable, accessible, secure, and protected.

I told you this was big.

I want to commit to this project for the next year (or more). I was hesitant about engaging publicly regarding anything related to the legality of the adoptions, the plane crash, the lawsuit, or the Vietnam War. I realized that as an adoptee born during a time of war, you have a unique vulnerability to controversy because you don’t have a solid foundation of a past to stand on.

That is what I can do. When asked, “How did I feel when I found my name on a list?” I felt like a jigsaw puzzle piece was put into place. It wasn’t life-changing, it wasn’t something I didn’t know- it was a validation that I exist - and that is something.

PLAN

Our focus this year is on the survivors of the C-5 plane crash. By identifying them, and connecting the files that we have with the survivor lists, we can track their journey. Organizing and cataloging the documents and files will lay out the roadmap for the data project and inform us of what is available to create a cohesive resource. Immersing ourselves in the archival world and developing a network to recognize the diverse perspectives and issues contributing to Operation Babylift will be key in designing the project into a multifaceted story that will resonate with all of us.

Q1 2025

Q2 2025

Q3 2025

Q4 2025

WHAT IS NEEDED:

Let's do this!