The Life We Were Given: Operation Babylift, International Adoption, and the Children of War in Vietnam

Dana Sachs, Author and Lecturer, UNCW

In April 1975, just before the fall of Saigon, the U.S. government launched "Operation Babylift," a highly publicized plan that would evacuate nearly three thousand displaced Vietnamese children and place them with adoptive families overseas. Many of these children had been living in orphanages their entire lives and needed loving homes, but a significant minority had parents who, because of the war, had placed them in these facilities temporarily because they found themselves unable to care for them. Other parents, including mothers of mixed-race children fathered by American G.I.s, panicked as the Communists approached and put their children on the Babylift out of fear that the new regime would murder them. Once the children flew overseas, however, they all became "orphans" in the eyes of the world, and their adoptions - except for in the few cases in which birthparents were able to legally dispute them - were final. To compile a comprehensive account of this story, Dana Sachs spent nearly a year in Vietnam, where she spoke with birthparents, former medical workers and nursery staff, orphans who remained in Vietnam, and political leaders who watched these events unfold at the time. Back in the United States, she interviewed adoptive parents, adoption agency staff, critics of the Babylift and, of course, the children themselves, who are grown now and struggling to understand what happened to them then. In her talk, Sachs will recount the story of Operation Babylift, describe her efforts to untangle the varying accounts of the evacuation, and discuss the ways in which these events raise timely questions about international adoption, humanitarian aid efforts, and the human cost of war.

Dana Sachs is the author of The House on Dream Street: Memoir of an American Woman in Vietnam (Algonquin, 2000), the novel If You Lived Here (William Morrow, 2007), and The Life We Were Given: Operation Babylift, International Adoption, and the Children of War in Vietnam (Beacon Press, 2010). With Nguyen Nguyet Cam, Sachs compiled Two Cakes Fit for a King: Folktales from Vietnam (University of Hawaii Press, 2003). With Bac Hoai Tran, she translated The Stars, the Earth, the River: Short Fiction by Le Minh Khue (Curbstone, 1996). Her essays, articles and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, including National Geographic, The International Herald Tribune, and Huffington Post. A graduate of Wesleyan University and the MFA program at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, she is the recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. She teaches at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.

For additional information on this speaker, see http://www.danasachs.com/
For online information on The Life We Were Given.... visit Beacon Press or pre-order at Amazon.com

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