THE VIETNAM BABYLIFT

...Plaintiffs' lawyers were mindful that the children would soon forget Vietnamese and facts that could aid in tracing their parents...

...Eager to speak with him herself, Brodyaga was told that no one had bothered to write down his name and that he was then on his way to Latin America...

...The State Department first rejected any and all tracing programs in Vietnam, later agreeing to, but not implementing, a plan for advertising in Vietnamese newspapers that some children (no names to be used) were in the U.S...

...Judge Williams finally agreed with plaintiffs' demand that he notify refugees of the lawsuit...

...Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit...

...Agency for International Development figures, at least 90 percent of the 10,000-15,000 mixed-race children in Vietnam had been living with relatives...

...government from returning the children to their parents without the lawsuit...

...I'll give the government the benefit of the doubt" (plaintiffs' legal brief...

...Ambassador to Saigon, that the Babylift would "create a shift in American public opinion in favor of the Republic of Vietnam" (then begging funds from a reluctant Congress...

...No one can say how many others will succeed eventually...

...In the grimmest case so far, a sheriff in the southwest obtained two children from Huynh Thi O fraudulently and then committed her to a mental hospital after she persisted in efforts to regain them...

...Even those refugees who suspect then: children are here seldom know their new names, the addresses of adoptive parents, or even the relevant adoptive agency...

...For their part (and with equal cynicism), adoption agency spokespersons also opposed a tracing program on the grounds that it would reopen wounds of guilt-ridden parents or lead to social ostracism for mothers of children of mixed race...

...Supplying a babymarket is an ugly business, as are hysterical anti-Communism, some means of assuaging guilt, and, above all, the use of children as political pawns...

...One example must suffice of how bizarre some Babylift precedents in fact were...

...The staff member then offered to take care of it-in exchange for a release signing over the child for adoption...

...With rather belated concern for the Vietnamese parents, the State Department expressed its wish to protect them from retaliation by the Vietnamese government (which, as Vietnam expert Garth Porter testified in court, seems to view the bereaved parents as victims rather than delinquents...

...You take three airplanes and two buses and you go upstairs to where the children are sleeping and that's where mother is," she repeats, but, unfortunately, it's not enough for Brodyaga's do-it-yourself tracing program...

...Last March Williams dissolved the class-action status of the case, thus, in effect, leaving it to Vietnamese parents to find their own children and to concerned lawyers to contemplate more than 2,000 separate cases -both impossible tasks...

...Hostetter expressed to me the hope that religious groups of various persuasions will take the lead in opposing intercountry adoptions generally and will "develop a conscience" on what he described as "another form of exploitation of Third World countries' resources...

...Doug Hostetter of the Methodist Mission to the United Nations told me in a personal interview recently that during his three years in Vietnam he came across incidents of the following ploy...

...Nguyen Da Yen et al...

...is a signatory) apparently made it illegal...

...as a means of assuaging guilt over the war or, in the words of Louise Bruyn, of "giving meaning to their lives...

...Even assuming all Vietnamese could read and lived in cities, it's a bit indirect...

...With all files at last in hand, attorneys discovered that documentation on 978 children was too meager to prove they were eligible...

...Chauvinism and racism are abundantly available and have marked more than a few adoptive parents' statements on custody struggles...

...Federal officials refused to investigate...

...They also make clear the tenacity of a government trying to avoid political embarrassment and of adoption agencies fearful of lawsuits from disappointed American couples, loss of state licenses, and criminal penalties, should any children they placed be returned to Vietnamese parents...

...Judge Williams declined to prod INS into relinquishing its Tecords or to stop changing a child's status from "ineligible for adoption" to "eligible...

...Nancy Stearns and the other lawyers for the plaintiffs insist that children taken illegally from parents who can be located must be returned to them...

...Neither government officials nor Friends of the Children of Vietnam will help her find the family My Hang, age seven, still talks of rejoining...

...tracing parents has been the second...

...benefit scale tilting a bit as affluent Americans bring their cars and suburban homes on along with them...

...Xay cha con chu, xay me di cho bu: If you lose your father, you still have your uncle;/If you lose your mother, your aunt will still nurse you-Vietnamese saying...

...Lawyers for the plaintiffs, although with barely the funds to proceed, have appealed the case to the U.S...

...and were retained by their adoptive parents...

...At age eighteen, if still with the Nelsons, he will be indoctrinated into the American way of life...

...A Doylestown, Pa...

...It took seven months (and an order from the Appeals Court) for INS to begin to make its records on the children available...

...District Court, San Francisco on April 29, 1975 after Muoi McConnell and other Vietnamese-speaking volunteers at San Francisco's Presidio discovered the children had left families behind...

...a careless volunteer later revealed that FCVN had burned documents on all children before leaving Vietnam, lest they "fall into the wrong hands" (one wonders if those are the Communists' or those of the American adoptive parents...

...Some appear to have wanted to adopt at least as much for their own benefit as that of the children's, e.g...

...In many cases taken from parents pressured into signing adoption releases, destined for the homes of relatives, picked out of orphanages where they had been placed temporarily by parents unable to support them, taken from hospitals or even whisked off the streets, the 2242 Babylift children are still with us...

...At one time, the director for adoption told Brodyaga FCVN was being secretive in order to protect the mother from Communist retaliation...

...Also questioning the court's authority to give it orders, INS treated the case like "any other, bureaucratic, unimportant thing," Nancy Stearns told me in a personal interview...

...A desperate Hao Thi Vo resorted to kidnapping her two sons from their Connecticut adoptive father...

...The longer the Babylift issue remains unresolved, the greater the potential harm: to the children, to the Americans who love and may yet lose them, to the Vietnamese who still grieve for the children they may never find...

...The case has been argued by four attorneys whose concern for the children's welfare is exceeded only by their enormous patience (Nancy Stearns, Tom Miller, Mort Cohen, and Neil Gotanda of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City and the International Children's Fund in Berkeley...

...It's an obvious means of circumventing Nguyen Da Yen v Kissinger...

...In some cases closely tied to the U.S...

...While the confusion toward war's end made the Babylift an especially sloppy project, the pre-Babylift adoption agency record was nothing to be proud of either...

...Agency for International Development, agencies were ignorant of the Vietnamese practice of extended family care for parentless children, of existing foster-care options, and of the availability of more Vietnamese adults willing to take in a homeless child...

...Along with Marj Swann (another long-time anti-war activist associated with the American Friends Service Committee in Massachusetts) Bruyn established a wartime program of American aid to Buddhist orphanages and sponsorships for children in Vietnamese foster homes...

...Reports from Saigon since the war's end tell of orphanages being emptied, of children welcomed back into their own families or received by new ones, treasured among their own people, to be raised in their own land...

...couple won't give her two nephews to Jeanette Strump (Vietnamese despite her name), although their mother had written Strump's name and address on the children's clothes, tags, and even on their skin, before putting them on the Babylift...

...There was no incentive for agencies to encourage Vietnamese women to keep their children...

...To help ensure that there are no more Babylifts, the Board of Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church has, with Hostetter's guidance, drawn up guidelines on aid to children during war or natural disaster which specifically exclude intercountry adoption except in certain very restricted cases...

...At least one case has been documented of collaboration between an adoption agency (Friends of the Children in Vietnam) and an American couple to prevent a Vietnamese mother from regaining custody...

...San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle, April 25, 1976...

...Pickett in Blackstone, Virginia...

...While sometimes paternalistic and even selfish [and, one might add, naive], most, he feels are well-meaning...

...As Judge Williams would not consider her case, San Shie had to go through California state courts to win custody of Hien, at a cost of $5000 (which few other refugees could muster...

...If not, a seventeen-month effort to reunite non-orphans with their parents, to heal at least these wounds of the war, will probably come to nothing...

...One hopes other religious groups, secular groups, and concerned individuals would do the same...

...government their assistance...

...An adoption agency employee would offer hospital care for a sick child to parents who accepted it as an expression of genuine concern...

...When the fire is out and the mother is safe, does one keep running with the child...

...One assumes, perhaps, that the issue has by now been resolved satisfactorily or, on the contrary, that nothing can be done and that Vietnamese parents must learn, as best they're able, to heal yet another wound of so many...

...The International Red Cross and other agencies skilled at tracing have offered the U.S...

...Lacking (through its own fault) diplomatic relations with Vietnam, the State Department has also tried to explain away its own inaction, citing the supposed indifference and lack of cooperation on the part of the Vietnamese...

...INS is encouraging Americans to try to formalize adoptions in state courts even where children are clearly ineligible...

...to the individual child [rather than the social context, the political implications...

...Still claiming to know what is best for the Vietnamese and happy to oblige parents whose self-interest coincides with their own, adoption agencies are insisting that the traditional standard used in custody struggles, that of "the best interests of the child," be used even in interracial and intercountry adoptions of such extraordinary circumstances...

...What reprisals are in the offing in Kansas or Vermont...

...Most media coverage of the issue has been of the all trees/no forest variety, as journalists focus on individual custody struggles between American couples and Vietnamese refugee mothers who have managed to locate their children...

...That's the place where we really can be reached the closest...

...In Vietnam they would be a fisherman or dirt farmer" (New York Times Magazine, May 9, 1976...

...Like the INS spokesman, the directors of the two adoption agencies most frequently cited in post-Babylift problems (Friends of the Children of Vietnam and Friends for All Children) did not bother to reply to my questions on their procedures or motivation...

...Angry, confused by the controversy in which they find themselves, their wish to shelter homeless children betrayed by the Babylift organizers, the adoptive parents seem, in many cases, to be well-meaning...

...At least a dozen refugees have managed to find their children...

...The custody struggles have been fierce, although there are exceptions, like John DeCamp of Nebraska, who relinquished two children after being moved by their tearful reunion with their mother...

...Thus the longer they delay, the stronger the defendants' case...

...How sad it is," the journalists seem to moan, "that the Babylift should have come to this, that a humanitarian project should end in battles where both sides are so worthy...

...FCVN finally outdid even itself by notifying Brodyaga that a priest from My Hang's village had recently given them information about her while passing through Colorado (where FCVN is located...

...Still sniffing (hoping for...

...One wonders how many local judges will choose to see "best interests" in terms other than affluence, status, upward mobility, and Americanism...

...They're still waiting, unable to proceed without State Department approval...

...With misplaced congeniality, he declared he wouldn't order the government to do something "I think [it is] going to do...

...Officials pleaded a shortage of clerical staff and duplicating machines, taking, at each stage, literally months to do a few days' work...

...Among those INS declared "eligible" were: 212 children from the An Lac Orphanage, whose group release listed a single family name for all of them...

...Should the higher court agree with plaintiffs that Williams erred in his handling of (all the major issues in) the case, it could be assigned to another district judge more capable of dealing with its complexities...

...This can mean adoption of an individual child rather than protesting a war which might have killed its parents or giving financial aid to keep the child where it belonged...

...With the child restored to health, the "benefactor" then presented a bill which the startled parents could never pay...

...Their lawyer described the child in an Iowa court as having an identity with the Nelsons...

...was filed in U.S...

...Yet the Babylift had to come to this...

...Even identifying My Hang by the wrong name, FCVN staff told Brodyaga the child's files were in order and would follow shortly, then that they were with an employee temporarily out of town...

...Attorney Tom Miller, International Children's Fund The Vietnam Babylift of April, 1975 was so cruel, so manipulative a public relations stunt that the past sixteen months have only dulled the shock...

...Parental releases for 533 others had been signed after March 15, 1975, i.e., in conditions of panic and confusion, and were therefore considered involuntary and invalid...

...v. Kissinger et al...

...Never abandoning the fiction of their neutrality and with enough gall to shock (if plaintiffs hadn't long since become immune), the defendants who have stymied the case for over a year assert that the passage of time since removal from Vietnam, even if the removal was illegal, precludes the return of the child in the "best interest of the child" (plaintiffs' legal brief...

...government officials and adoption agencies alike to save face by blocking a lawsuit designed to determine the children's identities and their parents' wishes are little known...

...The ball, however, is in the United States' court," plaintiffs' attorney Tom Miller told me, in an apt, if unintended pun...

...and defy the claims of refugees who find their children...

...The Convention further stipulates that the children's right to return to their homeland should be guaranteed...

...After all, Miller emphasized, "there is [and was] nothing to prevent the U.S...

...FCVN has given Brodyaga a runaround as imaginative as it is deceitful...

...In fact, as Tran Tuong Nhu and Tom Miller write of their experience with adoption agencies in Vietnam, "All the agencies basically functioned on the premise that the Vietnamese were incapable of looking after their own children...

...FCVN explicitly instructed adoptive parents, Brodyaga told me in a personal interview, "to disregard the facts [the children] tell us about their families," as they are inventing stories in the process of "trying to work through all the stuff that's happened to them...

...Later they claimed they had an adoption release (whose specifics they wouldn't reveal), then didn't have one...

...Stated opposition to tracing programs obviously masks the fear that the origins of the Babylift will be exposed...

...Thus the churches which fund many adoption agencies and ought to know better should take the responsibility here...

...Bonnie and Johnny Nelson of Forest City, Iowa, are trying to prevent four-year-old Doan Van Binh (renamed Ben) from returning to his mother (now living in Great Falls, Montana...

...Article after article enumerates the advantages each set of parents seems to offer, with the susan abrams is a free-lance writer and peace activist living in Cambridge, Massachusetts...

...in Great Falls he would be known as 'that Vietnamese kid, an alien.' There [he] would have no identity...

...Operation Babylift was, one discovers with dismay, simply the last (if best publicized) chapter in a rather sordid adoption history...

...The plaintiffs' attorneys, on the other hand, brought forward a number of reliable witnesses, including American Friends Service Committee and Mennonite Central Committee staff in Vietnam after war's end, as well as Americans who had been present at reeducation sessions...

...a child whose adoptive parents admitted to the INS they had obtained a perjured release from an orphanage director stating the child was an orphan, even though they knew he had never lived in the orphanage and that his mother was alive (she has since tried to regain custody...

...Yet it has long been evident that the supposed rescue mission more closely resembled a kidnapping and that at least 1500 of the children are not eligible for adoption...

...Lisa Brodyaga is unique among all the American adoptive parents in her open and persistent attempts to help clear up the Babylift mess...

...Public and media response to the program amounted to only the tiniest fraction of that which the flashier Babylift received...

...Trotting out old and new variations on the Babylift-era slogans "We saved them from Communism" and "Growing up American is best," the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and adoption agencies have been aided by crudely manipulated adoptive parents and by Judge Spencer Williams, the defendants' apparently willing accomplice in delay...

...a bloodbath, dismissing Red Cross assurances of protection for all parties and, as ever, undaunted by reality, the State Department was, however, unable to muster any evidence in court for the fears it professed...

...Homeless children, if removed from their native land in time of war, should be cared for in a neutral country by "persons of a similar cultural tradition...

...Sadly one wonders what Ben Nelson and hundreds of other Babylift children will be when, as non-white children in white homes, they begin to question their identity, to confront racism they've been ill-equipped to deal with, and perhaps discover the circumstances under which they arrived in the U.S...

...Tracing experts stress that effective programs require actively seeking out individual families...

...The agencies supplied a babymarket in the U.S...

...Verne Jervis, INS Information Director in Washington, declined all comment on a dozen points I raised about INS motivation and delays, including the possibility that stalling was designed to make the plaintiffs give up the case and/or to spare the government embarrassment...

...Nguyen Thi Phuc has just lost her custody struggle for two sons (at first in the care of a child molester) to the commander of Ft...

...Also aware that the pain of separating children once again from a loving family would increase with each passing month, they urged speed...

...Why else make no efforts to locate parents among refugees in the U.S...

...The will to accomplish so much had been lacking under Thieu/American control...

...She was found dead in his home last June, in what the man claims was a suicide...

...The concerted efforts of U.S...

...Struggle Only a few of the steps in the struggle over the children can and need be described here-enough to hint at the plaintiffs' frustrations, which have been almost unknown, nationwide, to potential supporters...

...Anticipating the great press coverage which would mark the children's arrival in the U.S., Martin commented that the effect "will be tremendous" (as quoted in a letter from Phan Quang Dan, Saigon's Deputy Premier for Social Welfare, from whom Martin had sought permission to evacuate the children, as published in the New York Times, April 7, 1975...

...A decision is expected this Fall...

...They too were unimpressed by evidence that only 20 percent of Babylift children (whom they themselves had brought here) were of mixed race and that even according to (U.S...

...The Methodists have also passed a resolution calling upon the House Judiciary Committee to investigate the Babylift and the actions of the Immigration and Naturalization Service...

...They made it clear (to all but the ever-anxious defendants) that their fears were unfounded...

...If alternatives to intercountry adoption made the Baby-lift unnecessary, the Geneva Convention of 1949 (of which the U.S...

...Gaining access to the children's files was the first part of the struggle...

...Not hampered by such scruples, INS presumed eligibility often where a child's very identity was unclear, thus "placing" (in plaintiffs' words) "the burden of proof on the children to establish their own ineligibility for adoption...

...The blame for engaging in intercountry adoptions doesn't lie with the American adoptive parents, Hostetter stressed...

...To weight the "best interests" as urged would be to accept the given, to obscure the past...

...The reasons, Bruyn told me, may lie with American "individualism and response to the personal...

...Joan Thompson, one of those organizing opposition to the lawsuit, commented: "We think this is the best country possible-the kids have so [sic] much better chance to grow here, to be what they want...

...If, however, he is "jerk[ed] out of the Nelson home . . . what will [he] be...

...however, he never got around to doing so...

...now dependent on South Korea and other countries) for couples tired of waiting for white infants and unwilling to engage in the "black market" for babies or to adopt an older, handicapped or (ironically) a mixed-race child...

...One remembers the explanation of Graham Martin, U.S...