Yesterday, someone I just met mentioned that her and her two brothers were orphans from Viet Nam brought to Fort Benning, GA in 1975. I was astonished.

I was a member of the 139th MP Company at Fort Benning in 1975 and one of the Military Police assigned to protect those children. Her and her brothers may have bounced on my knee and suffered through my terrible Vietnamese some 33 years ago.

What impressed this 4 year old the most about Operation Babylift were the ladies at the airport who greeted the children. She said they all had blond hair and blue eyes and since she had never seen people like that before, she assumed they were angels from heaven.

What I remember about Project Babylift was the death threats against these children. Unbelievable as it may seem today, racist in the Fort Benning area made threats on the lives of these children. They did not want them "mixed" into our society. At least one night, shots were fired upon the school building housing the orphans.

The base was "open" to the public and the school was in a remote wooded area so it was easy to get to the school thru the woods without being seen.

>Security tightened and the school became a restricted area. Nobody (and I mean nobody) was permitted entry to school grounds unless they were on a very short list of authorized personnel. We secured the perimeter and patroled. We prepared and trained for any type of attack, including child abduction drills.
We were determined not to lose any children while they were in our care. Any of us would have taken a bullet to protect those precious children of war.

For a short period of time, they seemed like our kids.

Joe Fitzgerald
Email: xcop@xcop.com