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

by Sachs, Dana

• ISBN13: 9780807042410
• ISBN10: 0807042412
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-04-01
• Publisher: Beacon Press

Summary

The untold story of the controversial U.S. airlift of thousands of children from a collapsing South VietnamIn April 1975, the U.S. government evacuated nearly three thousand displaced Vietnamese children just before the fall of Saigon. Chaotic from start to finish, Operation Babylift gripped the American public and was often presented as a great humanitarian effort.With sensitivity and balance, Sachs presents multiple perspectives: foreign adoption volunteers trying to "save" children; birth mothers making the wrenching decision to relinquish them; adoptive families waiting anxiously to adopt them; and the children themselves, struggling to understand. In particular, the book follows one such child, Anh Hansen, who left Vietnam through Operation Babylift and, decades later, returned to meet her birth mother.

Author Biography

Dana Sachs has written about Vietnam for twenty years. The author of two books, Sachs teaches at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington and lives in North Carolina.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. xi
Where They Came From	p. 3
All Americans Go Home Now	p. 21
A Sea of Human Need	p. 27
If You Are Out There, We Love You and We Are Looking for You	p. 53
Lost in the Shuffle	p. 57
Standing on Two Legs	p. 81
Good Intentions	p. 88
Mementoes and Scars	p. 106
Ship to Parents: Severe Orphan Syndrome	p. 122
There Was No One to Take Care of Them	p. 139
Photographs and Fires and Page	p. 149
I Wanted to See What Peace Was Like	p. 154
Hesitation and Resignation	p. 161
Resources	p. 179
Baby in a Burning Building	p. 184
Belonging	p. 212
Epilogue	p. 221
Acknowledgments	p. 226
Notes	p. 230
Index	p. 245
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