Operation Babylift Collection

The Operation Babylift Collection, stewarded by Sr Mary Nelle Gage and Devaki Murch, preserves the last remaining records of one of the most complex and emotionally charged humanitarian evacuations of the twentieth century.

In April 1975, as the American–Vietnamese War ended, more than 3,300 Vietnamese children were evacuated to adoptive families across the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia. In the chaos of evacuation, nearly all nursery and adoption records in Vietnam were destroyed. On April 4, 1975, the first evacuation flight, a U.S. Air Force C-5A Galaxy crash-landed shortly after takeoff from Saigon. All records accompanying the children on board were lost.

Fifty years later, adoptee and C-5A crash survivor Devaki Murch was entrusted with shared stewardship of the last surviving records from Friends For All Children, the Boulder-based adoption agency that coordinated much of the evacuation. What arrived were 33 boxes of meticulously organized but completely unprocessed materials: transportation records, passenger manifests, nursery logs, correspondence, and legal documents—evidence of lives in motion, separated by war and held in fragments for decades.

What began as a logistical effort to process paperwork became a life-defining calling. Through careful archival processing, contextual research, and oral history, the documents began to speak — not as isolated lists, but as interconnected stories. Flight manifests were matched with military Air Command records. Nursery logs were aligned with arrival photographs published by local journalists. Materials long scattered across institutions, attics, and memory were, for the first time, brought into the same room. Context restored meaning. Provenance restored humanity.Central to this work is the understanding that adoption records are not neutral artifacts. For many adoptees, finding one’s name on a list is not just a record. It is proof of existence.

Receiving a file is not a transaction. It is a life-altering event. For this reason, adoptee files are never mailed or emailed without support. They are delivered in person whenever possible, prepared with care, historical framing, and access to resources. Across more than 30 file deliveries and 13 oral histories, there have been zero retraumatization incidents—an outcome of deliberate methodology, not chance.

This methodology now has a name: Love Ethic Archival Practice (LEAP). Developed through lived experience and community engagement, LEAP is a trauma-informed, community-centered framework for archives created at the intersection of conflict and care. Grounded in bell hooks’ six principles: care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust—it prioritizes people over process and relationship over efficiency. Archives are treated not as extractive repositories, but as sites of moral responsibility.

The Operation Babylift Collection is the founding case study for a broader framework called Archives in Love and War, designed to scale to other displaced and war-impacted communities.

This work honors the legacy of caregivers, pilots, volunteers, families, and children whose lives were shaped by acts of compassion amid violence. While each adoptee holds an individual past, this archive affirms a shared history bound by Invisible Threads, carried forward through care.