Fighting in 1974 was the heaviest of any year of the war despite Secretary of State Henry Kissinger assuring Congress that the Paris cease-fire had put a stop to major combat. American soldiers no longer fought alongside the South Vietnamese, but munitions and men continued to support their army; over eight hundred million dollars was budgeted for 1974 and the Pentagon asked Congress for $1.45 billion for 1975.
The rush of refugees toward Saigon had begun in mid-March of 1975 when the North Vietnamese army prepared their drive south. In the face of this advancing threat, the president withdrew South Vietnamese troops from the highlands that pressed close to the border with North Vietnam; villagers across the region saw in the withdrawal the shape of a looming final defeat. Rumors spread that half of the country was to be immediately handed over to the North Vietnamese. Thousands of vehicles crowded the highway to Da Nang, hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians snaking along a ten-day march remembered as the “Convoy of Tears.” Only one of every four people who joined the column made it to Da Nang.
As the ground situation appeared increasingly dire, embassy staff remaining in Vietnam, along with USAID workers, contractors, journalists, CIA operatives, and NGO representatives, began to send lists of Vietnamese employees and informants to the U.S. embassy for evacuation. Pan Am, Citibank, Time, IBM, and more each had dozens of employees, many with dependents they wished to evacuate. Half of Saigon, it seemed to some onlookers, filled the lists. As to how they would all depart, commercial airliner, military airlift, sealift by cargo ships in Saigon’s port, and helicopters were all considered. But which airline would do what was unclear.
Children now flowed toward Saigon as stories of Communist brutality, especially toward the biracial children of American soldiers, spread among Vietnamese mothers. The violence reported as South Vietnamese troops and civilians fled toward Da Nang from the highlands—Communists and mountain tribes firing on the caravans of refugees, blood flowing “in tiny streams,” children and elderly who “fell everywhere,” wrote one Vietnamese journalist in a widely read newspaper—increased the mothers’ fear. Rumor had it that the incoming soldiers would kill all children fathered by American GIs. They would slit a child’s belly and eat the liver. Terrified mothers left sobbing children in orphanages in Da Nang and Saigon; workers reported babies dropped over exterior courtyard fences of the French-style villas where orphanages operated. Older children appeared clutching notes of identification. These joined the children who had formally been given up for adoption and those whose parents had, they’d thought, left them for temporary safekeeping.
In the last days of March, orphanage workers rushed to process the necessary visas and competed for space on flights. But even as the South Vietnamese military retreated, U.S. ambassador Graham Martin would not process visas at an expedited pace. To do so even for children with waiting adoptive parents, he feared, would confirm suspicions of an imminent large-scale evacuation of Americans. It could engulf Saigon in panic. A combination of forces—the reluctance to move forward with visas, internal opposition to the orphans’ removal from the country, lack of funds, and diminishing space on airplanes—threatened to ground them all.
Pan Am continued flying its regular biweekly flights amid the chaos. Lufthansa and Air France kept their planes flying into Saigon too. As March moved toward April, Pan Am’s passenger lists stretched to a thousand reservations. But each Tuesday and Thursday, only about two hundred passengers had successfully collected the paperwork, passports, and money required to purchase tickets. Names on passports did not match names on manifests. Most people who noticed this reported it to no one, given the increasing panic of South Vietnamese citizens jamming the airport, hoping to flee the country before the North Vietnamese fighters arrived and with them a Communist government that, many believed, would massacre all who had collaborated with the occupying Americans.
Flights departed hectically. A Lufthansa DC-10 took off with German nationals after the men bade sobbing Vietnamese women goodbye. One goodbye was especially dramatic: the Pan Am station manager watched one crying Vietnamese woman claw the face of a young American man who had not acquired a visa or ticket for her or their child. His face bloomed with red streaks as she dragged her nails from his eye to his chin. A chartered Pan Am 707 took off after curfew with employees of American banks and their wives and children. A South Vietnamese air force major and three fellow officers commandeered a plane to fly fifty-two passengers to Singapore. One flight with ninety-eight orphans ranging in age from one to fourteen were strapped into all possible areas of a DC-3 manufactured in 1942 with a commercial capacity of twenty-eight passengers and flown from the central highland town of Da Lat to Saigon. “Everything flyable in Vietnam is being used to ferry refugees,” a news article reported. An East German would have an easier time leaving the Communist bloc than a South Vietnamese had leaving Saigon, one expert said.
Ed Daly, CEO of World Airways, made himself a protagonist of the retreat from the highlands to Saigon. Under embassy contract, the airline had flown Americans and refugees from Da Nang to Saigon amid the crush from the highlands. But at the end of March 1975, as the ground situation there grew more dangerous, the embassy canceled World Airways’ charters. Daly only grew more determined to contravene Ambassador Martin’s insistence on doing less rather than more. When Daly asked Martin what security at Tan Son Nhut would do if his planes took off for Da Nang without clearance, Martin replied, “I imagine they’ll shoot you down.” When Daly asked what Martin would do, the ambassador said, “Applaud.”
Daly ordered a plane to Da Nang to evacuate women and children anyway. On March 28, an air traffic controller at takeoff at Tan Son Nhut told Daly’s pilot to taxi straight to the hangar, but Daly had instructed him to “experience radio failure.” The plane lifted into the air. The two pilots, three stewardesses, CBS news crew, and UPI reporter on board had barely touched down in Da Nang when one stewardess, Jan Wollett, saw thousands of people running toward the plane, motorcycles and bicycles, trucks and jeeps and personnel carriers rushing faster yet. The plane did not stop moving. Jan stood at the cockpit door and watched as a man jumped off a truck, raised a pistol, and began to shoot. She had the unnerving feeling that she had stepped straight into a Western. The doors of the plane were opened and the stairs lowered. Even as the plane continued to taxi slowly, it began to take on passengers. Jan stood at the door watching the roiling crowd mass around the moving vehicle. Screaming people clawed at others as they ran next to the plane, pushing them aside. At the back of the plane, Jan saw one of the other stewardesses on the stairs reaching over the railing, pulling people up, and she moved to help. Below her on the stairs, Daly waved his pistol in the air. A family of five—mother, father, infant, two children—ran alongside the stairs, and Jan reached for them. Shots rang out; the five crumpled to the asphalt—whether they had tripped or been shot was unclear—and another man rushed past them, up the stairs, and into the plane. A woman pulled on Jan’s arm. Jan grabbed the woman’s hand but before she could yank her up, a man began trying to climb over her. Daly hit him with the butt of his gun and Jan saw a spray of blood. Good, she thought, and she turned back to the cabin to seat the people on board. They were mostly men in South Vietnamese military uniforms. “Take off, take off,” one man was screaming.
“Where are the women and children?” Jan shouted at no one. A grenade flashed under one wing and shook the plane as it took off at the end of the tarmac. Bullets had damaged the gas lines and the plane lost fuel by the second, but it lifted. Human bodies dropped from the wheel well as the plane climbed.
In the newsreel of the scene broadcast by the CBS Evening News the next night, the newsman’s voice was stiff with disdain. “As calm fell on the smug men who had managed to fight off their friends and relatives to get on, the hardworking cabin crew took a count,” the newscaster read. “Two hundred and sixty-eight people were on board, among them five women and two or three small children. The rest were some of the men whom President Thieu said would [stay behind to] defend Da Nang.”
The stewardesses had looked across the seats at the faces. As Jan walked the aisle, she saw a man whose intestines spilled from his body. She tied a towel around his waist. She bandaged another man’s head with a shirt. As the stewardesses passed around cool towels—really, they were rough-edged squares of galley curtains they had dunked in melted ice—the men handed over bullets, guns. One strapped a bandolier around Jan’s chest; another hung a pistol off her fingers; yet another placed a grenade atop the pile of ammunition she carried. She walked to the cockpit. “No smoking,” the Vietnamese CBS sound engineer said over the PA system.
The plane crept through the air at ten thousand feet—no higher, since the main cabin would not sustain pressure. The air was hot and fetid. Daly offered Jan a Coke, and she held it to her lips only to feel the warm liquid running down her chin and onto her uniform. She passed it back. She realized that the gas line had held only when she looked out the windows and saw buildings racing alongside. At dinner later Jan drank and drank the beers Daly gave her and she never felt drunk. At the hotel, every time she closed her eyes to sleep, she saw splayed and broken bodies.
In a way, the 747 had been destined for wide-scale evacuation. Among Juan Trippe’s arguments for investing in the enormous airplane during a time of financial austerity almost a decade earlier—before the full scope of the war in Vietnam had revealed itself—had been its airlift capability in the event of a national emergency. Trippe no longer helmed Pan Am but the airplane he had pushed to market now permeated the American airline industry.
But it was a different swashbuckling airline CEO who once again dived into the chaos of international disaster to shape its outcome, and he did it with a different airplane than the one Trippe had had in mind. After flying a first, small load of orphans out of Vietnam soon after his failed refugee flight, Ed Daly told reporters that he would pay to fly nearly one thousand infants to the United States on a DC-8 and another four to five hundred to Australia on a 727. “Let ’em stop us,” he said. But Ambassador Martin had tired of Daly’s swagger. Rather than allow World to fly the children out, the U.S. government matched Daly’s offer of a pro bono flight for the orphanage’s charges. A load of military and medical supplies for the remaining South Vietnamese army had arrived on April 1. The U.S. Air Force C-5A Galaxy cargo plane, the biggest transport plane in the world, would bring munitions to the South Vietnamese army and return to the United States with children. The South Vietnamese government understood that foster parents in foreign countries were waiting to receive fourteen hundred orphans. The deputy prime minister wrote, “Their immigration, plus the fact of million people leaving the sections occupied by the Communists, will provide a good propaganda for Vietnam, especially including the TV and newspaper of America exploiting deeply this event.”
On April 3, President Gerald Ford announced an orphan airlift, code-named Operation Babylift. “I can’t guarantee that every single South Vietnamese war orphan will get here but I can assure you that we intend to do everything possible in that humanitarian effort,” he said in a news conference from San Diego. The Red Cross offices in San Francisco reported switchboards alight with phone calls from prospective adoptive parents. “It is the President’s obvious intent to spare no expense or trouble where the welfare of these helpless victims of war are concerned, and the nation will applaud him for it,” read one newspaper editorial. The front pages of newspapers carried stories about the late-night arrival of the first group of fifty-seven orphans, and a toll-free hotline that USAID had set up in Washington received twenty-seven hundred phone calls.
On April 4, Karen, Lynne, and Tori flew on a regular flight path in two broad arcs from New Delhi to Bangkok and then up and around Vietnamese airspace to Hong Kong. This was the first time all three of the women had flown together. Their minds flitted among the usual concerns, their actions now the muscle memory of repetitive flight. Karen, on her jump seat between meal services, read whichever book she had tucked into her bag and considered how she would spend this brief layover in one of her favorite cities. Lynne, serving in the upstairs lounge, studied the passengers. Tori, one of the two pursers on the plane and among the most senior of the crew, kept control with her definitive gaze.
The three stewardesses did not know that on the ground below them, two hundred forty-three children waited in a convoy of half a dozen buses on the hot tarmac at Tan Son Nhut. None had an official exit visa. A senior official eventually allowed them to board the U.S. Air Force C-5A.
Orphanage workers, escorts, and an air force colonel carried the smallest infants, some of whom were blind or injured, through the enormous hold and up a slim ladder to the flight deck of the cargo plane. The press snapped photos of babies and children placed on the plane where ammunition had just been unloaded. Upstairs, a first lieutenant strapped them in two to a seat. Downstairs, the older kids lay on blankets, strapped down using the same restraints that had secured arms and ammunition westward across the Pacific. Most of the escorts—many dozens of them—were embassy and female Defense Attaché Office and Defense Intelligence Agency staff, about to be quietly ferried out of the country. With the escorts crouched in the aisle, gripping armrests, the plane took off.
Approximately twelve minutes later, the C-5A crashed into a rice paddy. Concrete dikes split the fuselage into chunks. The bottom half of the plane sheared off with the impact. The older children, the orphanage staff, and many of the Americans, nearly all contained in this lower level, were killed.
Amid the flames and smoke of the burning plane, survivors ran across the field, turning over the bodies of children in hopes that they would not drown in the shallow water. Helicopters soon thrummed overhead to take survivors back to Tan Son Nhut. About sixty children were recovered, though it remained unclear who, exactly, they were. The passenger lists were inconsistent. Numbers compiled later would indicate that seventy-eight children and between forty and sixty adults had died in the crash.
In Saigon, the event was seen as possible sabotage. On the day of the crash, the South Vietnamese Interior Ministry announced it had uncovered a plot to overthrow the president. It was the second such announcement that week. The citywide curfew was set back an hour, to nine p.m. Anyone resisting arrest, a loudspeaker blared through the streets, would be shot on sight.
Karen, Lynne, and Tori did not know it yet, but their 747 would soon become part of this sequence of events. A businessman-philanthropist had mortgaged his Connecticut home to write a check that would allow a U.S.-based adoption agency to charter a Pan Am flight. Another agency leveraged its own funds to hire a second plane. Both airplanes would be diverted from regular flight routes in the region—including the one from Hong Kong on which the three women now went about their standard business—to fly to Saigon and then to the United States with the evacuated children.
The Pan Am Saigon station chief was instructed to allow no Vietnamese airport staff to board either plane on arrival; in these first hours after the crash, all were seen as possible saboteurs. He was also to keep whichever jet arrived second waiting in the air. Two 747s on the Tan Son Nhut tarmac presented too much of a target. The airline wanted potential loss of crew and equipment mitigated. Once one plane was wheels up, the other would swoop down to land.