In 1975, to hear the Americans tell it, the mass adoption of Vietnamese children was a story of rescue and redemption. These children were war babies, bụi đời, children of dust. A decade of death coupled with a thriving sex trade near US military bases had put nearly 20,000 children in more than a hundred orphanages throughout South Vietnam. By April, as the Viet Cong swept down the coast, mixed race children were said to be in danger. The Northern army would find foreign offspring and carve their livers from their bodies to eat, or so the rumors went. Out of fear and desperation, mothers relinquished their babies — many underweight, sick, or maimed by war — to the Americans. And the Americans took them away.

The popular narrative of Vietnamese adoption began like this:

And ended like this:

Aid workers called it a “salvage operation.” Cherie Clark, a nurse, recalled, “We were literally picking up babies and trying to keep them alive long enough to place them for adoption.” Clark ultimately sent around 1,200 children out of Vietnam through her adoption organization Friends of Children of Vietnam (FCVN).

President Gerald Ford announced Operation Babylift in early April, as it became clear that the US would withdraw its presence from Vietnam entirely. Ford described the babylift as a humanitarian “mission of mercy.” It was, just as importantly, a deflection from military defeat and abandonment. A month later, 2,894 Vietnamese and Cambodian children were on their way to American homes; approximately 1,300 others were adopted to Australia, Canada, and across Europe.

Some of the first children were flown away on a C-5A Galaxy transport aircraft, a plane whose interior could rival a gymnasium. Orphanage workers loaded the cargo hold with 200-plus children, an endeavor “like trying to carry loose eggs in the bed of a pickup truck,” as journalist Dana Sachs described in her book, The Life We Were Given. Twelve minutes after takeoff, a door in the rear of the plane blew out, ripping a hole in the side of the plane. The plane crashed into a rice paddy, crushing the cargo hold where the children were kept — 138 died, including 78 babies.

Operation Babylift continued without a breath. The next day, 324 children, including survivors from the previous day’s crash, were loaded onto a commercial Pan Am flight. This time, babies in white pajamas were packaged neatly in cardboard boxes. Boxes with babies were wedged under seats like carry-on luggage. Some babies were buckled into the red-and-yellow plane seats, slumped over like little dolls. In the ensuing weeks, the seven US and international adoption organizations in Vietnam competed to ensure space on planes for the children in their care.

A South Vietnamese lieutenant gave this bitter statement to the New York Times: “It is nice to see you Americans bringing home souvenirs of our country as you leave — china elephants and orphans. Too bad some of them broke … but we have plenty more.”

Americans had adopted children from abroad in previous decades, most notably from South Korea, but Operation Babylift created a story around adoption that transformed the displacement of a foreign baby to an American home into an act of charity. Out of the horrors of war came an opportunity for benevolence and absolution. “Everyone suffers in a war, but no one suffers more than the children, and the airlift was the least that we could do,” Ford wrote in his autobiography. This narrative has never been without its critics — Grace Paley, writing for Ms. Magazine at the time of the babylift, called it “a cynical political game” — but even those who acknowledged the alarming messiness of the campaign’s logistics thought of the adoptions themselves as a win-win. A Massachusetts senator put it this way: “Very simplistically, it is better to live in elitism in the United States than to be dead in Vietnam.”

As the first babylift planes started landing in San Francisco, it soon became clear that many of the children were not, in fact, orphans. Nhu Miller, a Vietnamese woman who was living nearby, came to the Presidio to interpret for the older children and found that some didn’t know where they were. They wanted to see their parents, siblings, grandparents. “When can I go home?” they asked. In the chaos, many lacked identifying documents; their papers had been lost, mixed up, or fabricated. “I went to help and saw people were just picking them out like puppies,” Miller said later.

How one viewed the babylift — as a mission to save children or to abduct them — depended in part on how one defined the purpose of adoption. Was it to provide for a child or to provide a child to eager Western parents? FCVN and other adoption agencies, as well as