'I was about 6, and I'd been playing in the trash near the orphanage. 'I remember that flight, the one that crashed,' says Nguyen Thi Phuong Thuy. Despite the crash, the evacuation program continued another three weeks. South Vietnamese soldiers and civilians gathered at the site, some to help, others to loot the dead. Operation Babylift's first official flight crashed in the rice paddies outside Saigon, killing 144 people, most of them children. When, in early April 1975, Saigon was falling to Communist troops from the north and rumors spread that southerners associated with the United States might be massacred, President Gerald Ford announced plans to evacuate 2,000 orphans, many of them Amerasians. As adults, some Amerasians would say that they felt cursed from the start. 'Our society does not need these bad elements,' the Vietnamese director of social welfare in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) said a decade later. Defense Department said in a 1970 statement.

'The care and welfare of these unfortunate children.has never been and is not now considered an area of government responsibility,' the U.S. Their destiny was to become waifs and beggars, living in the streets and parks of South Vietnam's cities, sustained by a single dream: to get to America and find their fathers.īut neither America nor Vietnam wanted the kids known as Amerasians and commonly dismissed by the Vietnamese as 'children of the dust'-as insignificant as a speck to be brushed aside.

Schoolmates taunted and pummeled them and mocked the features that gave them the face of the enemy-round blue eyes and light skin, or dark skin and tight curly hair if their soldier-dads were African-Americans. Many were abandoned by their mothers at the gates of orphanages. They grew up as the leftovers of an unpopular war, straddling two worlds but belonging to neither.

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