Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Life After Operation Babylift

NPR piece on a new book, The Life We Were Given, a book about the Vietnam babylift:
In 1975, the U.S. government airlifted nearly 3,000 displaced children out of wartime Vietnam. "Operation Babylift," had the best of intentions, but it also had profound consequences.

To begin with, many of the children were too ill to survive the flight, and one of the planes crashed, killing nearly 80 children. Also, the documentation on most of the children was sketchy at best, and at times, falsified. Some of the children were not actually orphans.

In The Live We Were Given, Dana Sachs explores the legacy of the evacuations. She focuses on the actions of three adoption agencies that were responsible for evacuating more than half the children. And she tells the stories of the children and their adoptive American parents.

There's an excerpt from the book at the NPR website. I just downloaded the Kindle version, so I'll let me know what I think after I've read it!

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