Out of the Fog

The Verge‘s “American War” project—edited by Kevin Nguyen and Sarah Jeong, with support from more than a dozen others—marks a half-century since the Fall of Saigon with a collection of features that skip the rote banalities typical of anniversary coverage. Each feature, from Nguyen’s essay on the scale of Operating Rolling Thunder to Cathy Linh Che’s memoir of her parents’ roles as extras in Apocalypse Now, is an intimate reconsideration of some facet of the Vietnam War, from the tonnage of munitions dropped by US forces to our relationships with the war’s more enduring cultural narratives. Camille Bromley’s reported feature on Operation Babylift, which removed thousands of children from Vietnam and placed them with adoptive families in numerous countries, challenges the reductive, feel-good frame placed on a dramatic act.

Americans had adopted children from abroad in previous decades, most notably from South Korea, but Operation Babylift created a story around adoption that transformed the displacement of a foreign baby to an American home into an act of charity. Out of the horrors of war came an opportunity for benevolence and absolution. “Everyone suffers in a war, but no one suffers more than the children, and the airlift was the least that we could do,” Ford wrote in his autobiography. This narrative has never been without its critics — Grace Paley, writing for Ms. Magazine at the time of the babylift, called it “a cynical political game” — but even those who acknowledged the alarming messiness of the campaign’s logistics thought of the adoptions themselves as a win-win. A Massachusetts senator put it this way: “Very simplistically, it is better to live in elitism in the United States than to be dead in Vietnam.”

As the first babylift planes started landing in San Francisco, it soon became clear that many of the children were not, in fact, orphans. Nhu Miller, a Vietnamese woman who was living nearby, came to the Presidio to interpret for the older children and found that some didn’t know where they were. They wanted to see their parents, siblings, grandparents. “When can I go home?” they asked. In the chaos, many lacked identifying documents; their papers had been lost, mixed up, or fabricated. “I went to help and saw people were just picking them out like puppies,” Miller said later.