Gloria Emerson,
whose book on Vietnam, Winners and Losers, won the National
Book Award for non-fiction in 1978, offers a sharply critical view
of “Operation Babylift” in this excerpt. The effort
to “rescue” thousands of Vietnamese children on the
eve of the U.S. evacuation was mounted by a number of U.S.-based
agencies and organizations, including Holt
Children’s Services, the Pearl
Buck Foundation, World Vision, and the International Social
Service. It was widely publicized and hotly debated after a military
transport plane carrying around 300 passengers crashed on April
4, 1975, shortly after take-off from Saigon. More than 100 children
were killed, along with at least 25 of their adult escorts. For
other views of “Operation Babylift,” see the text of
the New York Times ad that
ran on April 7, 1975, the “Statement
on the Immorality of Bringing South Vietnamese Orphans to the United
States, April 4, 1975,” and Agency
for International Development, Operation Babylift Report, 1975.
Operation babylift became a carnival: tearful,
middle-class white women squeezing and kissing dark-eyed children,
telling reporters that their new names would be Phyllis and Wendy
and David. It is not over yet. A spokesperson for AID, the government
agency providing military aircraft for the private agencies bringing
the children here, and said it was an “open-ended operation.”
The arrival of nearly 2000 children from Vietnam—I won’t
call them orphans since we now know that some of them did indeed
have parents—has aroused some of the emotions felt in 1973
when the American prisoners of war came home at last. Many people,
so moved and so grateful, forgot that if the United States had not
gone on bombing there would have been no prisoners. This time, only
two years later, there is the same self-congratulatory spirit, a
feeling of winning something at last, the need to prove to ourselves
what decent people we really are. It is almost forgotten during
these excited, evangelical scenes at airports that it is this country
that made so many Vietnamese into orphans, that destroyed villages
ripping families apart, this country that sent young Vietnamese
fathers to their deaths. Now we have decided the Vietnamese we will
“save” and “love” must be very pliant, very
helpless. . . .
Now the welfare of a few thousand children has
become a most successful propaganda effort for us to defend and
support the diseased government of Nguyen Van Thieu despite the
opposition to him in the South. Babies are a nicer story than the
26 million craters we gave South Vietnam, nicer than the 100,000
amputees in that wretched country, more fun to read about than the
14 million acres of defoliated forest and the 800,000 acres that
we bulldozed. It does not matter at all that on television a Vietnamese
foster mother sobbed bitterly and strained for a last look at the
child she had cared for as Vietnamese infants were put on a plane
at Tan Son Nhut. There are clearly no attempts being made to find
foster parents in Vietnam who could take a child; we do not want
to give money for that. . . .
Vietnamese living in the United States have tried
to reason that all children in their country must be helped and
this can best be done by ending the war. The first step would be
to stop sustaining the government of Thieu. “You have been
killing us with your kindness for twenty years,” Le Anh Tu,
a 26-year-old Vietnamese woman living in Philadelphia, says. On
a recent local radio talk show, called the “Saturday Night
Special,” she asked listeners in favor of adoption if they
really cared for the welfare of Vietnamese children, if they would
be willing to return the children once peace came. The answers were
shocked refusals at such an idea. . . .
We will never have the happy ending we want. President
Ford’s chief refugee coordinator, Daniel Parker, the administrator
of AID, suggested at a congressional hearing that 3000 to 4000 more
Vietnamese children be airlifted to the United States. The confusion
is immense. The argument grows a little louder, but not loud enough.
On the day of the crash of the U.S. C-5A transport
plane carrying 243 children and 43 accompanying adults, a South
Vietnamese army lieutenant spoke his mind. “It is nice to
see you Americans taking home souvenirs of our country as you leave–china
elephants and orphans,” this officer said. “Too bad
some of them broke today, but we have plenty more.”
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