This Adoptee Discovered a Trove of Documents in a Nun's Basement. The Rare Vietnam War Records May Rewrite the Story of Operation Babylift

"Aryn Lockhart couldn't remember the plane crash she'd survived as a baby, but it often occupied her thoughts: popping up when she looked at her tattoo, a decorative cross overlaying a heart-the symbol of the order of nuns who'd cared for her-or at her three kids, adopted as she had been, but in very different times and circumstances. She also couldn't remember the first time she'd heard the story of her arrival in America."

"On a dark Saigon runway on the evening of April 2, 1975, Daly, frustrated by bureaucratic red tape, loaded 58 orphans onto a plane. Without authorization, he flew them to Oakland, California, where he was met by the blinding flashes of photographers. The stunt worked. The next day, President Gerald Ford announced that the United States would airlift 2,000 babies and children-many born to Vietnamese mothers and American servicemen fathers-from Vietnam to America."

A large April 1975 evacuation moved more than 2,800 infants and children from Vietnam to the United States. Many evacuees were born to Vietnamese mothers and American servicemen. Images of orphaned Vietnamese children galvanized American sentiment and prompted an airlift after an unauthorized flight by World Airways president Ed Daly. Young nuns in Vietnamese orphanages organized children amid war, scarcity, and fear of reprisals by Viet Cong forces. Adopted survivors now search for clues to their origins and reflect on the complicated legacy of evacuation, identity, memory, and family across decades.

Read at Smithsonian Magazine