Remembering one of Vietnam War's youngest victims
By Noreen O'Donnell
THE JOURNAL NEWS
(Original publication: May 20, 2006)
Lana Noone's adopted daughter arrived from Vietnam after a tortuous journey, a sickly infant with holes in her lungs, an enlarged heart, open sores and scabies.
The three-month-old child was tiny and malnourished, and Noone remembers being afraid when she first saw her. The little girl was that sick.
"I couldn't believe she had flown halfway around the world to die," Noone said.
But 31 years ago this month, Heather Constance Noone did die. And Lana Noone could do nothing but promise her that her life would not be forgotten.
Tomorrow in Hyde Park, at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library and Home, she will talk about her daughter as part of a program on children and conflict. Her remembrances are to be paired with an exhibition on Anne Frank, one of the most famous young casualties of war.
Noone, who lived in Yonkers when she first married and later moved to Long Island, wants people to know how Heather lived and died. She talks about the child — and the "Operation Babylift" that brought her here — in the hopes that her story moves someone.
"I realize that I'm just a tiny little cog in all of this," she says. "I want people to have something that speaks to their heart. And I think maybe that can have a ripple effect."
For her, making sure Heather's life would not be forgotten has become a mission. It's a good way to heal, she says.
Her talk is one of a series of events being put on by the Hudson Valley Coalition to Promote Tolerance to accompany the exhibit: "Anne Frank in the World: 1929-1945." The exhibit, from the Anne Frank Center in New York City, continues until May 31 at Locust Grove, the former estate of Samuel F.B. Morse overlooking the Hudson River in Poughkeepsie.
Heather Noone was one of 2,600 orphans flown out of Vietnam in a 1975 airlift that brought children to the U.S. The Communists were approaching Saigon, and many of the children had been fathered by American GIs. The little girl, who was given the name Mai Ngoc Tran at an orphanage, had no birth certificate or even her own visa to the U.S. Only her death certificate showed that she had lived.
So when Noone gives her talk, she will bring a quilt made from remnants of the clothes the Babylift children wore, a painting that commemorates Heather's arrival in New York on April 23, 1975, and mementos of an anniversary trip she took to Vietnam last year with her other adopted daughter, Jennifer Nguyen Noone. The items are all to help make Heather's brief life more vivid.
Meanwhile, the Anne Frank exhibit sets Frank's family photographs against the backdrop of Europe and the world wars. Some were taken by Otto Frank, Anne's father, an amateur photographer who chronicled his family's life with his Leica. You see the Franks as an ordinary family — Otto Frank and his brother, decorated officers, in their German Army uniforms during World War I, a school photo of Anne, the Franks gathered together.
"Beautiful pictures of the family in the beginning, dressed in their beautiful clothing," said Elaine Blum, who worked to get the exhibit to Poughkeepsie. "You see the family going downhill until the very end."
In contrast to intimate pictures of the Franks, others show the rise of the Nazi party and its march toward genocide. Democracy is abolished. Popular anti-Semitism flourishes. Jews are rounded up and deported. The Frank family goes into hiding.
There's a replica of Anne Frank's room with the hidden staircase and of her diary.
Blum draws a parallel between Noone and those who helped to hide the Franks in Otto Frank's office annex. Neither turned away. Noone worked to save the Vietnamese orphans.
Miep Gies and the other friends of the Franks risked their lives to bring food and supplies to the family.
After Heather Noone left Vietnam, the tiny child was hospitalized repeatedly on her way to New York. Noone remembers that her doctor, who had worked in Europe after World War II, said Heather reminded him of the children who had survived the refugee camps. At his urging, they kept her at home as long as they could.
"He wanted her to be at home and to feel a family's love," she said.
Finally five days later, the little girl was hospitalized for the last time. Noone remembers rolling rattles across the top of her oxygen tent. She smiled twice.
Heather Noone died on May 17. She had been in New York for 24 days.