When US Air Force Col. Regina Aune heard the sound of an explosion aboard the gigantic C-5 cargo plane, she knew she had just seconds to get the hundreds of babies to safety. office.
“We knew we were going downhill,” Aune, the first woman to receive the Air Force’s Cheney Award for “heroic and selfless acts” after saving several children despite having a broken leg, told BBC Mundo. back.
“What we didn’t know was where, because a C-5 [al ser avión de carga] It doesn’t have many windows. All we knew was what we could see of the damage to the plane.”
The accidental flight of the Lockheed C-5A Galaxy of the US Air Force -in which Colonel Aune was traveling on April 4, 1975- is considered the first flight of the so-called Operation Babylift, a massive effort by the US armed forces at the end of the Vietnam War in which more than 3,300 babies and children were evacuated from the Asian country.
Other countries such as Australia, West Germany, France and Canada also participated in the operation.
“I have directed that $2 million be allocated to an international children’s relief fund to get 2,000 orphans from South Vietnam to the United States as soon as possible,” then-President Gerald Ford announced on April 3, 1975 from San Francisco.
However, the C-5 accident would not be the only Operation Babylift accident that irrevocably affected the lives of hundreds of people.
“There was a negative side to the operation and that is that not all of these children were orphans,” Christian Appy, a professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, tells BBC Mundo.
“Many critics argued that sending these children to the US without their parents’ consent was tantamount to kidnapping them.”
The impact
The C-5 reached 22,000 feet before the boom sounded. Colonel Aune says that it is a very particular sound, one that anyone with training can easily recognize.
“When you go to aviation school, of any kind, you have to go through the altitude chamber, and you have to experience that kind of rapid decompression,” he explains. “We knew full well that what had just happened was rapid decompression.”
“So we had the explosion that follows the rapid decompression, and I looked down and saw the South China Sea, which of course I shouldn’t be able to see, and that was the ramp door was gone and I could see how all the hydraulic fluid was leaking.”
The plane struck twice: first, sideways, into the Saigon River, launching the aircraft a few feet into the air before ending in a second violent crash that killed 138 people, many of them children.
Aryn Lockhart tells BBC Mundo that she thinks she was on that flight, when she was just 1 year old.
“I was adopted when I was 1 or so, and my parents have always believed that I was on that maiden flight,” says Aryn.
“I don’t have information about my natural family, I don’t even know my date of birth. The nun who had chosen me for my parents died in the plane crash and with her, all the information that might exist about my beginnings was lost.”
The beginning of the end
By early 1975, the escalating violence of the Vietnam War seemed to indicate that a chaotic end was approaching: troops from the communist government in the north were seizing more and more territory in areas controlled by the government in the south, despite that they had US military support.
When Colonel Aune received her orders for the first mission of Operation Babylift, she had only been in the Air Force for a couple of years. She had just married and was a first lieutenant in the Air Force.
“I think at that point everyone knew that the country [Vietnam] was going to fall [en manos de las fuerzas comunistas]”, he tells BBC Mundo.
“On the morning of April 4, we were told that we were going to have to get about 300 people out of Saigon. [una de las ciudades más importantes para el gobierno del sur]and that the majority were going to be children, many under 2 years of age”.
With the approaching arrival of the Vietcong, it was perceived in the South that anyone who had sympathized with the Americans, or with the southern government, was at risk. Even more so were the children that US soldiers had with local women.
Saran Bynum, another of the girls who came to the US from Vietnam as part of Operation Babylift, who is now a filmmaker in the city of New Orleans, Louisiana, says that was her story.
Children
Saran tells BBC Mundo that growing up as a woman of Asian and black descent – also, knowing that she had been abandoned by her mother – in one like New Orleans was difficult.
Particularly when he thought about the story of how his parents would have met.
“You know, sometimes when you’re dealing with trauma, especially if you’re a child, you express it. Sometimes you don’t even know why, but you express it.”
“I had a lot of anger inside of me, I didn’t trust male figures or men in general, because I heard a lot of people say that the war was horrible and that the women were prostitutes and that they had one-night stands, and that It’s pretty depressing,” he says.
But he says that a line from African-American actor Denzel Washington in the movie “Antoine Fisher” made him see further.
“[La película] is based on the true story of Antoine, who was dumped and enlisted in the Navy. And there’s a scene where Antoine is furious and Denzel’s character asks him why he’s so angry. And Antoine says: ‘My mom abandoned me, my dad doesn’t love me, why should I care?’
“At that moment, Denzel looks him in the eye and tells him that in order to see your past you have to understand it, learn to forgive and move on. That was a key moment for me.”
That sentence led her to find the orphanage where she was born in Vietnam and to find out that many babies like her were born from love stories between soldiers and local women, something that she was able to confirm through a DNA test.
One of the paid DNA services helped Saran contact five of her paternal cousins and finally find her father, who had died of cancer in 2015.
Today, Saran has been able to establish a relationship with her dad’s blood family.
“I went to visit my uncles during Thanksgiving,” Saran told BBC Mundo. “They all told me separately that my dad knew I existed. Although he didn’t know if it was a girl or a boy, he knew that he had a baby in Vietnam.”
And beyond, she was finally able to find proof of the love that had engendered her: “[Mis tíos me dijeron que mi papá] He had had a girlfriend and that he had shown them the photo and they thought he had been in a relationship while he was there.”
“That gives me hope, that my biological mother can be alive and that she is thinking of me every time I have a birthday, every Mother’s Day…”.
Last
For others like Aryn, the weight of the past is less about their identity and more a subject of immense curiosity.
“In a certain way, I just accepted that things were the way they are,” he tells BBC Mundo.
Aryn says that she learned about Operation Babylift like someone might learn about the exploits of their uncles and grandparents.
“I always knew about the operation. I think my parents always made an effort to make sure that I was aware of where I came from, of the great sacrifices – if you can call them that – that were made so that I could be here.”
That is not to say that his beginnings had not aroused his curiosity. In fact, such was the curiosity that Operation Babylift aroused in him that he managed to contact several of the people involved in it, including Colonel Aune.
“Over time we became very close. And we actually went to Vietnam together and decided to write a book,” Aryn says, explaining that the operation is a theme that comes up over and over again in her life.
“It’s a complex and beautiful story that people tend to connect with […] The fact that there were people involved as volunteers, like us”, Aryn continues, referring to the children who were evacuated in the operation, “makes us see the general context and recognize that our experiences, during that very specific moment, are unique”.
The repercussions in the war
Historian Christian Appy tells BBC Mundo that, historically, Operation Babylift is the beginning of the end of a conflict that could have been avoided.
“The US was the main aggressor,” he explains.
“If the US had not intervened to support the French reconquest of Indochina after World War II, Vietnam would have been reunited as established in the Geneva accords of 1954, under a single democratically elected government, avoiding the war that killed three million people.”
And although he understands the reality of the war, he says he has a hard time understanding the position of some members of the US government at the time.
Especially since he was able to create confusion about what was really happening on the battlefield and was able to avoid making decisions that, perhaps, could have saved lives.
“Ambassador Graham Martin had the crazy idea that the US could still maintain control of South Vietnam, despite receiving reports from the CIA and from members of the embassy telling him that they should start evacuating,” he says. appy.
The landing
The second hit from the C-5 sent Colonel Aune flying down the corridor, causing serious fractures, including one to a vertebra in her back.
“The injury I was most aware of was the broken bones in my foot,” explains Aune.
“And it’s the kind of silly thing you think about, because I lost the shoe on my left foot (the broken bones were on the right) and I thought that now I was going to have to stand on the broken foot that was the one with the shoe”.
In his story, there is never a moment of doubt.
It is something that, according to his account, his surviving flight companions have emphasized to him.
“This is a phrase that I do not remember saying, but that other members of the crew claim to have heard me say,” he says with absolute modesty: “They say that I approached Major Wallace and asked him to relieve me of duty because my injuries they would prevent me from continuing, and then I fainted.”
Talking to her, it seems that she doesn’t give more credit to her actions than to those of her crewmates in that fateful C-5 that started Operation Babylift.
“I’ve always felt, and I told General Jones that day when he gave me the Cheney award, that the entire crew should have received it, not just me…”
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BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-65329089, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-04-23 04:10:06
Rafael Abuchaibe (@RafaelAbuchaibe)
BBC News World
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