This Adoptee Discovered a Trove of Documents in a Nun’s Basement. The Rare Vietnam War Records May Rewrite the Story of Operation Babylift - SMITHSONIAN MAG

The April 1975 effort matched more than 2,800 infants and children evacuated from Vietnam with adoptive families. Today, the adoptees are searching for clues to their past—and reflecting on the complicated legacy of their evacuation

Nina Strochlic

October 8, 2025

Smithsonian Magazine October 8 2025

Aryn Lockhart couldn’t remember the plane crash she’d survived as a baby, but it often occupied her thoughts: popping up when she looked at her tattoo, a decorative cross overlaying a heart—the symbol of the order of nuns who’d cared for her—or at her three kids, adopted as she had been, but in very different times and circumstances.

She also couldn’t remember the first time she’d heard the story of her arrival in America. In those waning days of the Vietnam War, fighting consumed villages; food became scarce; and civilians feared reprisals by the encroaching Viet Cong communist forces, who battled American troops and the South Vietnamese army for control of the country. Some women left their children in orphanages, hoping they’d be safe and cared for. Many tried to flee the country by boat.

Thousands of miles away, images of orphaned Vietnamese children outraged the American home front as the war reached its close. The first attempt to evacuate them came in the renegade stylings of Ed Daly, the pistol-carrying president of World Airways. On a dark Saigon runway on the evening of April 2, 1975, Daly, frustrated by bureaucratic red tape, loaded 58 orphans onto a plane. Without authorization, he flew them to Oakland, California, where he was met by the blinding flashes of photographers. The stunt worked. The next day, President Gerald Ford announced that the United States would airlift 2,000 babies and children—many born to Vietnamese mothers and American servicemen fathers—from Vietnam to America. The rescue mission, which eventually evacuated more than 2,800 orphans, was quickly dubbed “Operation Babylift.”

In Vietnamese orphanages, a cadre of young nuns began organizing the children for evacuation. Moved by the humanitarian crisis as the war stretched on, many had come from abroad to volunteer at both Vietnamese and international orphanages. Some had even founded their own, with funds from foreign donors.

As the nuns packed, they hurriedly shoved records of children, personnel and operations into boxes. Half a century later, these forgotten papers would be discovered in a nun’s basement in Colorado. In them, adoptees would find the true story of what happened to them in the war’s final days.

Lockhart had been left in an orphanage in Vinh Long, though by whom or for what reason she didn’t know. Growing up in rural Virginia, she read a few letters from the nuns that offered clues to her earliest days. Black-and-white photos showed her as a baby in the sisters’ arms at the orphanage. Newspaper clippings described a plane crash.

In fourth grade, Lockhart submitted her personal story to a creative writing competition and won first place. In it, she recounted what she’d always been told: In the chaos of those final days of the war, she’d been selected to join the first official evacuation flight. She and the other babies were loaded into a U.S. Air Force cargo plane on the afternoon of April 4, 1975. The flight took off without issue, but at 23,000 feet, the locks of the rear cargo door failed. The doors flew open, and the pressure ripped off a chunk of the tail section. The captain spotted a rice paddy and aimed for it. On impact, the plane broke into four burning pieces. When the wreckage and rescue operation cleared, nearly 60 adults and 78 of the orphans were dead; 176 passengers had survived.

The next day, a separate flight brought many of the survivors to the U.S. As Lockhart grew up, this story continued to shape her life. In the late 1990s, she read an account on the internet about Lieutenant Regina Aune, the 30-year-old medical director of the flight that crashed. Aune, who died last year at age 79, had held each baby loaded onto that flight and had long wondered what happened to the survivors. Lockhart reached out, and soon they became so close that she started calling Aune and her husband, who lived in Texas, her “San Antonio mom and dad.”

Like many Babylift adoptees, Lockhart searched for information and found there was little to help fill in the blanks. The orphanages and hospitals that participated in the evacuation had burned their records to protect those left behind. Her trail relied on the memories of those involved.

Lockhart and Aune attended reunions of crash survivors together, and in 2014, on the 40th anniversary of Babylift, the two traveled to Vietnam and visited the rice paddy where their lives had become entwined. They held each other and cried. They lit incense at a small shrine. Lockhart visited an orphanage and saw how tenderly the nuns cared for the children. She realized that she hadn’t just been abandoned—she’d been loved. For the first time, she could visualize how her life would have turned out if she’d been left in Vietnam.

For some Babylift adoptees, the past was just a distant backdrop. For Lockhart, it was the dominant presence. Being a survivor of the crash meant she had to do something big, impactful. “I couldn’t just live an ordinary life,” she says. She ended up traveling the world with the Department of Defense, living in Germany and later landing a job as speechwriter for the superintendent of the Air Force Academy in Colorado. Each time she visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., she’d run her fingers over the names of the crew of the downed flight. One day, she read a story about a man who decided to change the world one small act at a time. She decided to do the same, by adopting three children and paying it forward.

In 2015, Lockhart and Aune co-wrote a book called Operation Babylift: Mission Accomplished, about how the crash had shaped the course of their lives. In it, Lockhart surfaced one nagging question: Once, a nun involved in the operation had suggested that she wasn’t actually on the flight as a baby. But everything else she’d been told—from her parents to the news reports of her arrival in the U.S.—indicated she was.

When fellow adoptee Devaki Murch picked up Lockhart’s book that same year, she couldn’t put it down. Murch had been raised in Hawaii with loving adoptive parents. Her parents never buried her history, and she grew up knowing that she’d also been on the plane that crashed. When she was around 10 years old, in April 1984, ABC’s “20/20” aired a segment on the crash that she taped on VHS and watched on repeat. When she sought more information about her past, her mother told her there were no records—she’d been born in the middle of a war. Murch found she was OK with that.

The knowledge that she’d survived the crash, however vague, had shaped her outlook, just as it shaped Lockhart’s. “Death didn’t take you, so you can do anything,” Murch says. “There’s a reason you’re not dead.”

Most Babylift memoirs she’d read before were the product of unhappy childhoods, but this one was different. She could relate to it. “I felt like [Lockhart] extracted thoughts and feelings out of my head,” says Murch. “It was like reading my own journal.” After finishing the book, she Googled the author and discovered they looked almost like twins. She’d often witnessed an uncanny recognition among Babylift adoptees that went beyond physical similarities. “Our own personal narrative has been fed to us from the media, and it’s all the same, more or less,” Murch says. “Anyone on the [plane] crash can tell you the whole story, and it’s applicable to 95 percent of us because there’s such limited knowledge.”

Later in life, some Babylift adoptees would call a nun in Denver to learn facts about their early lives: their real birthdays and birth names, their hometowns. With a steel-trap memory, Sister Mary Nelle Gage, now 81, was the de facto historian for these children, whom she’d once shepherded out of Vietnam.

In 1973, Gage had volunteered with orphanages in Saigon, accompanying adoptees on flights to America and soliciting $5 donations at church bingo nights to pay for the formula, diapers and medicines the nuns needed to shuttle orphans out of the war zone.

Two years later, at the start of Babylift, Gage was in San Francisco to welcome the incoming planes. It was chaos. The rules were constantly changing, creating a dazzling maze of bureaucracy and logistics. Some of the incoming children hadn’t yet been placed with parents, so convents or nearby nursing homes agreed to temporarily care for them.

Before the evacuation, the sisters kept methodical records, and each child was sent to their new home with a book containing reports of nearly every diaper change. But in the spring of 1975, these details were long-forgotten luxuries. Many of the children who left with Babylift didn’t have the previously required exit visas or passports. As Saigon fell, one volunteer packed up as much documentation as she could and shipped it via cargo transport to San Francisco. The rest—likely two-thirds of the total record—was left behind.

In the 1980s, Gage and other volunteers hosted the first reunions of adoptees and their families. “These children share a very unique history, and they should get to know one another and learn something about their heritage,” Gage recalls thinking at the time. In the 1990s, when the adoptees were in their 20s, they started coming to her with questions. “The question was very difficult to vocalize: What was wrong with me that my mother wouldn’t keep me?” Gage says. She’d tell them, “Nothing was wrong with you. What was wrong was the world in which you were born.”

In the spring of 2024, Murch visited Gage at her Colorado home. Murch still marveled at how, when they’d first met as adults, Gage had instantly recalled her name from the orphanage records. During the visit, Murch talked to Gage about how to preserve the history stored in her head, and the sister mentioned she had some boxes downstairs.

When Murch went to investigate, she found a historic trove. Fragmented and disorganized, the records flesh out the behind-the-scenes efforts of the last large-scale evacuation of children from the war zone. Some had belonged to Gage or nuns who’d died over the decades, but the bulk had been previously stored in the offices of the organization that arranged the adoptions. Gage had always wanted to organize them, but the years had passed, and she’d been busy. Apart from the individual files she’d reach for when adoptees contacted her, little else had ever been seen before.

In Gage’s basement, Murch felt chills as she pulled out papers: a handwritten inventory of the children at different orphanages across the region, dated April 2, 1975. A list of the healthiest babies fit to travel. The names of those loaded onto the first flight, with gender, family name and destination noted. After the crash: a ballpoint version of the same list, sorted by dead or alive. Then, Murch recalls, a “replacement list” assigning new orphans to the families of those who hadn’t survived.

Stacks of paper listed some 350 adoptees like a directory. Murch found her name and a note scrawled next to it: no birth records “due to failed postal delivery.” The reason there was no record of her birth date or hometown was because the mail hadn’t been delivered inside war-torn Vietnam.

In all, Gage had 23 boxes of adoptee folders and dozens more containing everything from notes to letters to photographs to old slides. As Murch went through them, Gage would fill in the blanks from her memories, recounting stories of each child and their adoptive family.

Murch recruited her neighbors to transcribe the lists, and a database began to take shape. A printer scanned unedited memoir manuscripts written by the nun who oversaw the evacuation. Sometimes, surrounded by papers, the documents appeared to arrange themselves like a Ouija board telling her a story.

As Murch began to publicize her findings, she was besieged by inquiries from adoptees who wondered if her archive might hold the road map to their quest. “When you have absolutely no record of your life and suddenly someone shows you a list with your name on it, that validates the fact you were in that place at that time,” she says.

Murch began to envision the papers housed in a formal archival collection or museum, such as the future Vietnam War museum being designed by Texas Tech University. She quit her job directing trade shows and pivoted to working full time on building an adoptee database out of the archive. One of the manifests listed every child and adult on the flight that crashed outside Saigon on April 4, 1975. In one, she found the name the nuns had given her: Mimosa.

But as Murch kept scanning, she noticed something: Across all the lists she’d found of the crash, five in total, Lockhart’s never name appeared. The two had recently met at an event at Regis University in Colorado, so she texted Lockhart: “I am not seeing you on any of the C-5A manifests.”

Lockhart had just returned from Vietnam, for the 50th anniversary of the evacuation. In the decade since her first visit, she’d begun to question the larger implications of Babylift. Before the war, international adoption was unheard of in Vietnam and infrequent in the U.S. By the end of the conflict, foreign adoption was commonplace, though increasingly controversial. Soon after Babylift’s finale, lawsuits testified to the outcry over whether the babies should have been taken at all.

Growing up in America, Lockhart learned little about her early upbringing, culture or heritage, only what she’d survived to get there. Her parents and those of the other Babylift adoptees thought they were doing the right thing, she says. “They erased our history so we could be American.”

With the help of a friend, Lockhart went to Vinh Long to search for her birth family. On the street where the orphanage once sat, they talked to passers-by and searched for clues. One man started crying when she told her story. “I’d been told my entire life about how lucky we were to have been saved from this war,” she says. “These people feel sorry for me because I lost my country, my people, my family. For the first time, at 50 years old, I felt I could grieve what I lost.”

When she heard from Murch, Lockhart asked her adoptive mother what made her so certain she’d been in the crash. That’s what they’d been told, her mother said. Then, when her parents brought her to a doctor, he’d noted her eardrums had likely burst in a rapid decompression, as seen in a plane crash. Also, the nun who’d matched Lockhart with her new family, a Malaysian missionary named Ursula Lee, had died in the crash. These three facts were all Lockhart’s mother knew for sure about her daughter’s past. Presented with the new evidence, her mother grew defensive. Was Lockhart sure Murch’s files were comprehensive?

Lockhart didn’t know. Suddenly, she felt deeply uncomfortable, like she’d been unwittingly perpetrating a fraud. Her life choices had been shaped by Babylift and the second chance at life she’d gotten after the plane crash. Now, a half-century-old backdrop was crumbling under her.

Murch unearthed one other clue: Some of the newspapers covering the subsequent flight that took Lockhart and 324 other children to America on April 5, 1975, didn’t clearly distinguish between passengers who were survivors of the plane crash and those who were only evacuated later. Their adoptive parents accepted that narrative. But questions persisted: Gage wondered if Lockhart had been put on the fated plane and just didn’t make it onto the list in the chaos.

Lockhart came to recognize that her questions may never be answered satisfactorily. “What I had to do is accept my life is a gray area,” she says. “Does [that] make me wrong?”

As Murch works to make the archive accessible to all Babylift adoptees, more questions will be paired with answers, five decades after these individuals’ lives were upended by the Vietnam War.

Now living in Colorado, Lockhart is considering writing another book. In it, she’ll probe her life after the crash and how she came to adopt her three kids. She’s decided not to search for further answers as to whether she was on the plane. She’ll live with the holes.

“If I dig further, is anything going to change for me?” Lockhart asks. “I don’t think so. I’m not going to unadopt my kids. I’m not going to change my beliefs.”