Plane crash survivor looks back on harrowing evacuation from Vietnam during Operation Babylift 50 years ago
- Devaki Murch
- Apr 30
- 2 min read
DENVER (KDVR) —
Hope turned into heartbreak 50 years ago this month, when a cargo plane loaded with Vietnamese orphans bound for America crashed in a rice field. Devaki Murch was on that plane. Now she’s sharing her survival story – and the story of Operation Babylift – in a traveling exhibit.
“It’s a collective story of all of us,” Murch told FOX31 during a reception for the exhibit, which opened in February at Regis University in Denver.
It details the bold and historic effort to get Murch and thousands of other orphaned Vietnamese children out of that country during the final days of the Vietnam War, the heartbreaking plane crash that killed dozens of those children, and the new life in a new land awaiting those who did make it out.
Few know the story better than Devaki. She lived it.
“I survived a plane crash,” Murch said.
Just a nine-month-old baby, she was on board the first cargo flight out of Vietnam. It was an Air Force C-5 that malfunctioned and crashed a few miles outside of Saigon, killing 138 people, including 78 children. Murch likely survived because of where she was seated.
Older children seated in the cargo area at the bottom of the plane perished when the belly of the plane hit the ground and skidded for a quarter mile in a rice paddy near the airport. But the young babies, like Murch, were strapped into the upper portion of the cabin and made it out alive.
Most of the adoptees’ records were destroyed in the crash. Murch had no details about her birth or her birth parents.
“I don’t have a hospital bracelet. I don’t have a little lock of hair when I came home. What I have are front-page New York Times articles and I have survival manifests. That’s my baby records,” Murch said.
While sifting through some boxes kept by a Colorado agency that helped facilitate the adoptions, one file folder caught Murch by surprise.
“I opened it up and I went, Mommy! And it was my mother’s handwriting,” Murch said.
They were letters she was seeing for the very first time, detailing the efforts her adoptive parents went through to make her their own.
“It tracked the entire story before I became my parents’ child, before I existed in their arms, in that folder. And there are these letters from my mother who wanted a baby,” Murch said.
Now she plans to take her exhibition on the road, showing very personal artifacts around the country so everyone can learn the story of Operation Babylift.
“When you’re dealing with humans, you’re dealing with sensitive emotions, you’re dealing with history, you’re dealing with history, is you really, really need to do it properly,” Murch said.
You can learn more about the orphans and volunteers involved in Operation Babylift in a special report. “The Vietnam War: Flight to a New Future,” airing Sunday, May 4 at 9 p.m. ET on News Nation.
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