Archives Built on Love: An Introduction

Some people have hospital bracelets and baby books. I have crash reports and New York Times headlines.

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April 4th, 1975. I was nine months old, loaded into the troop compartment of a C-5A Galaxy aircraft evacuating children from Saigon during Operation Babylift. Twelve minutes after takeoff, the mis-rigged rear ramp locks failed. The entire rear ramp and pressure door blew out, taking two of the four hydraulic systems with it. The pilot Colonel Dennis "Bud" Traynor maneuvered the plane around. We crashed in a rice paddy, miles short of the runway. Of 314 passengers and crew, 175 survived. 138 people died—mostly babies and the women caring for them. I was one of the survivors.

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For fifty years, my origin story was narrated by the media, documentaries, and books. Everyone wanted to tell the story of Operation Babylift. It was their story, not mine until 2024, when a nun changed everything.

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Sister Mary Nelle Gage had spent decades working with the children from Vietnam.  In Vietnam she was assistant director of Friends For All Children, the adoption agency that brought me over.  Today she still cares for us,  all of us. She is the custodian of over thirty-three boxes of the only comprehensive records documenting our adoption and transportation journey. When she needed help finding a home for those materials, she didn't call a university or museum. She called me. An adoptee. A crash survivor. A trade show director with a master's degree in instructional design. Not an archivist.

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When I asked her, "How can I say thank you for everything you've done for us?" she said: "I need your help. I want to connect as many adoptees with their records as possible.”  That was after she had given me an actual piece of the C-5A plane in a shadow box.

I had absolutely no idea where this was going. But I knew I couldn't say no. Because I wasn't just searching for my file. I was searching for the archive I needed to exist. One that recognized my humanity, honored my complexity, supported my healing, and gave back as much as it received. That archive didn't exist. So I built it.

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What I discovered along the way transformed everything I understood about preservation, memory, and care. When you build archives with love—not as sentiment, but as measurable, replicable action—something remarkable happens. People trust you with their stories. Artifacts offer themselves. Veterans find ways to process their trauma quietly. Adoptees reclaim authority over their own narratives, and fifty years later, at a random conference, the person who received you upon arrival as a baby appears at your display table, seeing what became of that work.

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This is the story of how an accidental archivist operationalized bell hooks's love ethic to create trauma-informed methodology for contested histories. It's about what happens when care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust become actual archival instructions. And it's an invitation to anyone who documents the lives of archivists, doctors, teachers, social workers, journalists, and families to consider the values that guide their work.

Because the archive I needed didn't exist. But it does now. And it's built on love.