Vietnam Babylift Personal Stories

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Twenty-seven years ago, what is now called "The Babylift" was "The Exodus" that brought American involvement in Vietnam to an end, and brought a cluster of "cross-pollinated" orphans to America...

The exodus was nearly aborted by tragedy (***Editor's Note: refers to the C5 Babylift plane crash on April 4, 1975***)...which occurred seven years after Martin Luther King had been assassinated on April 4, 1968.

(His assassination came)...exactly one year after his sermon "Second Thoughts on Vietnam", in which he risked his positive relationship with LBJ, who was orchestrating both the Civil Rights Bill and the Vietnam War, and expecting support on the War issue from those benefitting from the Civil Rights Bill.

American adults were going home; the children were embarking on a diaspora from a country which had suffered the abuses of war to a society which might hold the promise of a brave new world, in which Asian and Amer-Asian children could find new adoptive homes, according to the spirit of adoption - one of the central themes of the Bible.

Anyone of the children, either victims or survivors of the crash, could have been any mother's child.

The world became a lot smaller that year, and our hearts bigger and more compassionate.

(*** Editor's Note ... Byron Noone died two months after writing this essay. ***)