Wherever soldiers were stationed across Vietnam, they left their children when they went home. The children’s mothers were women who had worked as cooks, laundresses, or janitors on military bases, or they were the temporary wives of officers and GIs, or they were prostitutes. Many of the women had other children with Vietnamese husbands who had left or disappeared during the years of war. Most of the children were cared for by their families, but some—those with mothers who had died, or whose servicemen fathers had left, or whose families had simply grown too large to manage—began to fill the country’s orphanages.
Public awareness of the orphans’ plight grew in inverse proportion to the popularity of the war as more soldiers left than entered Vietnam. American commentators debated the thorny ethics of international adoption, a solution for the “relatively few who are truly orphaned.” Estimates of their numbers varied wildly. Between three and four hundred orphans, the U.S. government said, spread across a hundred-odd orphanages. The South Vietnamese Ministry of Social Welfare estimated there were ten to fifteen thousand children fathered by American servicemen, but one American expert put the figure at two hundred thousand, using the number of bars near military bases and averaging how many bar girls, prostitutes, and “temporary wives” were in each.
By the early 1970s, the stewardesses who had flown R&Rs had listened to gunfire whistling past a plane’s door, examined bullet holes in the fuselage, and watched coffins carried across the tarmac and hoisted into the cargo hold below them. Some had hiked their skirts up their thighs and done a cancan to draw out a laugh from a group of especially exhausted men. When diverted flights had landed stewardesses overnight in a barracks in Da Nang or a brothel in Singapore, the women had watched the GIs eat breakfast with the previous night’s company. They had rejoiced with relieved and scarred men on homeward flights, keenly aware that not everyone was coming home. But nothing made these flights into anything that could be celebrated. The soldiers slowly retreating from South Vietnam received little fanfare at home. Sixty percent of Americans polled called the war a mistake. More than half called the war “morally wrong.”
Every Tuesday and Thursday, Pan Am’s commercial flights still touched down at Tan Son Nhut airfield, taking military contractors, nonprofit workers, and private citizens to and from South Vietnam. Flight 841 originated in San Francisco and, after stops in Honolulu, Guam, and Manila, landed in Saigon. Flight 842 traced an identical route back across the islands.
Increasingly, orphanage and adoption agency staff took seats on Flights 841 and 842. In 1971 the U.S. embassy urged the State Department to more seriously consider the plight of thousands of orphaned or abandoned children fathered by Americans, children who presented “a matter of serious and continuing concern.” Illegal but “lucrative” adoption, the embassy said, was growing more common. Fair-skinned children sold on the black market while the “racially mixed” children filled orphanages. The U.S. government called the situation faced by these children “unfortunate” but officially of no relevance to the administration.
The actions of ordinary citizens across all levels of society refuted the U.S. government’s claim that it bore no responsibility. Americans who still lived in Vietnam as government or aid workers and their teenage children volunteered with orphanages or worked at schools for orphans. Actor Dick Hughes ran children’s homes in Vietnam. Across various airlines, stewardesses, who were anything but naive about the stresses of war and the attitudes and experiences of the GIs fighting, volunteered to use their employee travel passes and time off to accompany some of the legally adopted, unrecognized children of American GIs to new families around the world.
A few hundred orphans made their way across the Pacific to families in the United States in the very early 1970s, and the number began to grow as the decade progressed. A military attaché convinced a businessman to carry a seven-month-old baby on his lap from Da Nang to Saigon. An orphanage director found herself in charge of eight babies on a Pan Am plane from Saigon to New York; she walked in constant loops from seats scattered around the cabin to lavatories to change the squalling infants. At the San Francisco layover, two of the babies went to new families, and the airline provided a stewardess to help with the six remaining babies on the last leg of the trip. An Air France stewardess shepherded a two-and-a-half-year-old to John F. Kennedy Airport. The child would suffer diarrhea until she adjusted to a new diet, the woman who had accompanied the girl from Saigon told the new mother amid tears and kisses.
One Pan Am stewardess watched as the chaperone for a set of twin toddlers tried to comfort them. The traumatized children’s miniature faces were red, their cheeks lined with stale tears, their shirts covered in streams of spit-up. After a quick word, the stewardess brought each one into the bathroom, wiped off the child’s cheeks and neck, and changed her into a clean dress. Their new parents—a military couple on Guam, the chaperone told her—should meet their children for the first time looking their very best, the stewardess thought.
On one withdrawal flight, a stewardess told a soldier he had to put the boot box he held on his lap under his seat. “Nope,” the man said. She repeated her request.
“Not gonna happen, missy,” he said. His rudeness surprised her.
An older officer tapped her on the shoulder. “Just trust me, it’s okay,” he said. She strapped into the jump seat. When the plane climbed into the air she heard the hooting and shouting of soldiers on their way home, and also a piercing, thin wail. When it was safe she walked back to the rows where the men sat.
“You have to tell me what’s going on, right now,” she said, mustering as much authority as she could.
“You promise we’re not going back?” the soldier said.
“We’re not going back,” she confirmed.
He lifted the lid of the box. The babies were so tiny, too tiny, born weeks too soon. Their mother had given birth in a field and died nearly immediately, he said. The soldier had brought them to a nurse, who’d said they would die. But they had not died.
I didn’t know that preemies were coated in downy fur, the stewardess thought as she looked at the twin babies in the boot box on the soldier’s lap.