“The Great Retreat” read the words on the magazine’s cover, white against the mud and grass of the photo. As Karen walked toward the rear of the plane, she saw the March 31 issue of Newsweek held in front of more than one passenger’s face.
The cover photo showed a Vietnamese woman standing against a barren field holding a baby girl in her arms. The woman wore a conical straw hat that cast half of her face in shadow. She held her mouth tight at its corners. Her eyes weren’t visible as she looked down at the child. The child wore a red shirt and no pants. Her head, arms, and legs hung limp. Mud smeared her round forehead and stomach, and dried blood spread over her plump legs. Her eyes looked out of the frame. She could have been alive; she could have been dead.
Karen had met the Norwegian purser Tori before, but none of the other women in this crew traveling from New Delhi to Hong Kong looked familiar. She enjoyed Lynne’s quiet, dry wit. In the galley, the women talked about Hong Kong—their favorite places, whether they would eat Chinese or French food. Karen felt a snap of guilt, thinking about food as the copies of Newsweek and the path of the airplane reminded passengers of the suffering below. Karen heard the pilot announce that the plane would go around Vietnamese and Cambodian airspace.
In Hong Kong, the stewardesses smiled at the passengers as they departed. Once everyone had left, they boarded the crew bus outside the airport and settled in for the short drive to the hotel. The stewardesses had still not settled on whether to have French or Chinese food when a man boarded the bus and began to read a telegram.
“‘Scheduled pattern canceled,’” the man said. Tori, Karen, and Lynne listened. “‘Depart April fifth for Saigon to pick up orphan charter. Two hundred ninety-five infants. One hundred children between two and twelve years. Sixty escorts—five doctors—ten nurses. Place infants two per bassinet under middle seats. Use only zones C to D to ensure constant surveillance.’”
The man made no mention of the previous day’s crash. The flight scheduled to continue north to Tokyo would head south again. A midroute diversion was not so unusual, but this passenger load was. Tori, Karen, and Lynne knew that flying into Saigon rendered a crew’s participation voluntary—they could not be forced to fly into a war zone—though none of them considered declining the assignment.
Tori stood at the front of the bus. Karen admired the way she took charge. “This is gonna be some work,” Tori said. “We’re going to have to be at our best. We’re going to have to be organized.”
The bus ride to the hotel was fifteen minutes or so, stop-and-go through downtown Hong Kong. Karen added the numbers in her head. The most children she had ever seen in one place was around a hundred and fifty, an elementary-school gymnasium’s worth of kids. And many of these passengers were infants. Karen could not envision what nearly four hundred infants and children on an airplane would look, feel, or sound like.
As the bus knocked down the city streets, Lynne looked out the window at familiar Hong Kong passing by: laundry above, shop doors open, women in skirt suits carrying structured purses or groceries slung over shoulders. Lynne’s husband, Alex, had just applied for a job here, a logistics engineering position at the airport. He had not officially been hired yet, but they were confident enough that they had begun to dismantle their Manhattan Beach life.
At the hotel the women took the elevator to their rooms. The usual clientele milled through the lobby—the stockbrokers and merchants in the city for business, the tourists exploring Hong Kong before venturing farther into Asia.
As Tori, Lynne, and Karen were entering their hotel rooms, Ingrid Templeton, one of the stewardesses on a different Pan Am flight into Hong Kong, was sitting in her hotel room watching the news reports on the C-5A crash into the rice paddy just outside of Tan Son Nhut. The plane had torn deep ruts into the field. Now filled with water, they reflected silvery sky. Across the field, mangled chunks of plane still smoked.
Ingrid heard a knock at the door and opened it to a bellhop with a telegram. Schedule pattern canceled; she would go to Saigon with an orphan charter.
Ingrid was three months pregnant; she had planned to tell her supervisor the next month, when she could not hide the bulge so easily. Although the new union had brought maternity and weight complaints against twenty airlines, the restrictions against pregnancy were still in place, and Ingrid would have to stop flying when she told her supervisor she was pregnant. She wanted to collect a paycheck for as long as she possibly could.
In her hotel room Tori’s phone began to ring. She had turned on her television too.
“I don’t want to go,” a voice on the phone said.
“It’s your choice, of course,” Tori said. “None of us is required to fly into a war zone.”
Tori placed the phone back in its receiver. Minutes later, it rang again.
“I’m not going,” another woman said. More women from her crew dropping out.
Ingrid, in her hotel room, considered her options. She was thirty years old, pregnant, loved the work she had been doing for nine years. From San Francisco she had flown servicemen in and out of Vietnam. She had waited out mortar fire at Tan Son Nhut, taken a helicopter ride over Da Nang. She could handle this new assignment, she thought.
Outside the hotel, Kowloon had quieted. Across the street, the neon Rolex sign, with its swooping Chinese characters, had shut off. People were still walking along the road, their shoulders crooked with the weight of shopping bags, but the commuters passing through had gone home, and the buses had returned to the depot.
Tori’s crew was down to nine other women, then eight. Still fine by FAA rules, she thought before she got into bed, considering the angles. The role of purser, ideally, meant conducting a practiced orchestra. In an emergency the role grew more complicated. The safety of a plane full of people would come down to her. It was the price of leadership.
Lynne sat hunched at the desk in her room, writing to her parents on a blue onionskin aerogram provided by the hotel. “This is a very historic moment and I wanted you both to share it,” she wrote. “As with most things, I’m not too sure [if] I’m very excited or afraid at this moment . . . I’ll probably want to adopt all 390 kids when I see them.”
In her hotel room, Karen flopped across the bed. She thought of calling her parents but the expense didn’t make sense. She had no one else to call. A friend had told her she would have a difficult year after she divorced Alan. She had left him for good after Valentine’s Day, when she’d opened their trash bin upon returning from a trip and seen the detritus of a romantic date with someone who was not her. Now Karen lay on the bed in the Hong Kong Hyatt, grieving the failure of her marriage, about to fly into a war zone. Isn’t my life just grand, she thought, aware of her self-indulgence, feeling sad all the same. It was easier to pity herself than give in to the fear.
Tori tried to sleep. She had seen the news as she walked through the lobby. A U.S. Air Force C-5A had crashed; her plane could crash. But of the over three hundred passengers on board, more than one hundred seventy had survived. If we are prepared we will have our best chance, she thought. She reminded herself again that the preparation of her crew came down to her.
The women who gathered the next morning had earned their seniority. Five of the women from the original crew had chosen to fly to Saigon. Two more women, Joanie Carnell and Paula Helfrich, had flown in from Tokyo and Honolulu, respectively. Joanie had flown for fourteen years, Tori and Ingrid nine, Karen and Lynne six each. Paula had five years of flying and a well-earned reputation for thrill-seeking. Against all safety regulations she liked to strap herself to the tarmac in Honolulu at the outer limits of the landing strip and watch, screaming, as a 747 bore down toward the ground above her. Joanie, in contrast, had a dry personality, was English, and had been among the first women assigned to Pan Am’s San Francisco base a decade and a half earlier. She had flown countless R&Rs and sat out two typhoons on Guam. Neither Paula nor Joanie was the anxious type.
The cool recirculated air wafted through the permanent sunshine of thirty-five thousand feet as the 747 flew Tori and her crew over the China Sea to Saigon. There were no passengers in the seats to warm the recycled air, but the vivid yellow and orange upholstery gave the impression, if not the reality, of heat. The carpet underfoot stretched down the plane’s two aisles that looked to Karen to be the length of football fields. In nodes of two or three, the women worked with a dozen or so civilian volunteers from Hong Kong. The women assembled cardboard bassinets and slid blue plastic Pan Am carrying cases around each one. Some bassinets would be placed lengthwise, one to a seat and stretching the length of a man’s thigh, with a seat belt threaded through the handles. Others sat in piles atop seats in the rear of the plane where older children could sit in their own seats, interspersed with the infants. In the galley, row upon row of empty bottles refracted the light until Lynne mixed the powdered milk at half strength—the babies’ stomachs were not accustomed to milk—and filled them partway. Karen ferried bags of diapers and donated clothes to closets and stacked them up for the easiest possible access.
As Lynne stood in the galley, Austin Lee—the Hong Kong station’s head of public relations, who had volunteered to help on the flight—told her about the crash of the C-5A. She had not known. The children they would pick up were not only orphans, as the airline’s message had said; some were also survivors of the crash.
Quiet talk about the crash spread through the empty plane like ink through water.
The plane could have gone down for any number of reasons, Karen thought. Ingrid listened to what she thought was someone saying a prayer over the PA system. Joanie reached for more diapers. Austin Lee’s camera caught Paula mid-laugh, her head thrown back.
The pilots dipped the plane low as it approached Saigon. Tori knew the captain had been told to keep the tail number for this refugee flight clearly visible to the North Vietnamese troops surrounding the city. Karen leaned toward a window and snapped a photo of the flat land to the east of Saigon with gray rivers twisting back and forth, a dozen tiny white puffs of cloud between plane and ground.
People on the plane strapped themselves into seats near wherever they had been working.
The plane landed on the tarmac and rolled to a stop. Tori pushed open the door and proceeded down the stairs. Lynne looked out as jeeps and buses began to drive toward the plane. The 747 stayed far out on the tarmac—as far from the terminal as possible, it looked to her. Lee snapped a photo. In profile, her face radiated calm thoughtfulness.
Death was not the thing Lynne feared most. Adults had made it out of the C-5A crash alive, Lee said. The worst possibility, to Lynne, would be living when children died.
Adult arms formed a firemen’s chain on the tarmac. Doctors, nurses, ground staff, and escorts passed the babies from one set of arms to the next. Men balanced infants in the crooks of their arms. The older children walked from the buses onto the plane, their legs twiggy against the gray of the tarmac. Pan Am station chief Al Topping stood a full head above the South Vietnamese police around him. As a tall, wide-shouldered Black man, Topping had grown used to sticking out in Vietnam. Between rounds of patting down the children, he pushed his aviator sunglasses farther up on the bridge of his nose. He could not be too careful; if someone had bombed a military transport filled with orphans, an explosive device on a child was not out of the question.
Their tiny bodies were unbelievably hot, Karen thought as a set of hands passed her an infant, then a second and a third. Karen stood inside the plane, moving through the warmer air near the door into the cool of the plane once, twice, six times, eleven times, carrying infants. Her arms were full and a child with no leg had lost his crutches in the crush, so he hobbled down the aisle. The babies in her arms screamed as Karen placed each inside the nearest cardboard bassinet. She straightened and reached for another baby. Her eyes met those of the woman handing her the child. Both of the women’s eyes brimmed.
Tori stood in the galley taking stock. She counted heads, then lost count. The women were performing perfectly. She walked back down the steps to the tarmac.
“Ma’am,” a doctor said, approaching her. “We’d like to bring our nurses.”
The Seventh-Day Adventist hospital had three nurses, he explained, young Vietnamese women who wanted to leave before the Communists arrived. They had no visas. They had no documentation at all. But the doctor would vouch for them, he said. The women stood behind him.
Tori looked at the women, calculating. There was a low chance they were capable of sabotaging a plane full of war orphans. Something similar, though, might have happened to the previous day’s plane. But the adults were so outnumbered by the wave of needy children. Extra hands, trained hands, would help. “I can’t authorize that,” she said. “I’ll ask the captain.”
The doctor nodded and turned away.
“Strip-search them and lock them in the lav,” the captain instructed Tori when she asked about the nurses.
Tori returned to the doctor and the nurses by the plane. One by one, she patted the women down. She ran her hands across their white uniforms, behind their legs, under their armpits, around their necks, under their hair. She led them onto the plane.
“Just stay in the bathroom until we’re cruising,” she said as she locked the door.
Karen continued up and down the aisle, two infants at a time. In the galley, she saw a Vietnamese immigration official leaning over the adoption forms. As he walked out, she overheard a volley of dialogue between two adoption agency workers.
“Well, you’ve got to fill this in somehow . . .”
“I don’t know . . .”
“Give him a new name.”
She reached out toward a new duo of infants, scooped them into her arms. The knowledge that not all the children were orphans did not appear in a single moment, with the agency staffers’ dialogue; rather, it had grown with an accretion of details. At thirty-one, Karen had been anguished over the possibility of not having children. She understood being a mother was the most essential and powerful thing a woman could do, a human experience she did not want to miss. She knew maternal love to be fierce, sacred. She tucked one infant and then the other into bassinets. The scope of the present disaster—the fear that could drive a mother to hand her infant over to an unknown future—overwhelmed her. Empathy became anger as she moved down the aisle. What the hell did we do to these mothers that they’re sending their babies away? she thought.
The women organized the children on the plane by age and health. The youngest babies went into first class, where the escort-to-infant ratio was highest. In the main cabin, older babies went two to a bassinet. Children who could sit up were in the middle of the plane, with bassinets under their short legs, and the oldest were in the rear. The ill or injured would go upstairs to a makeshift sick bay in the lounge. The doctors assessed their needs. Some infants required IV fluids, but a razor was needed to shave a patch of their scalps where the needle would enter. Tori nodded and again sought out the pilot, then the flight engineers. One of the men had to have a safety razor handy. But no. She moved through the plane, flagging down any adult male, and eventually she found a razor. She had not known that infant IVs went into veins in their scalps.
Finally the children were settled in their seats. Al Topping stepped into the plane momentarily before locking it up. The din and the scent of the frightened children was unbelievable. He could not imagine being on the flight. The second plane was in the air above Saigon, ready to swoop toward the runway for a second load of children. He headed back to the airport to give the order for it to land.
From the front of the cabin, the seats appeared empty, as if the plane were a ghost ship, nothing but sound and smell. As Karen walked through the aisle, she saw older children pressing their faces against the windows or reaching for babies. She went to her jump seat and strapped herself in.
Once the plane had reached cruising altitude, Tori began to circulate. A few of the children spoke French. She could communicate with the older ones. She checked their bracelets, which carried a combination of Vietnamese and Anglo names, destinations, and medical conditions. These facts were the barest of clues to the chaos from which each child had been sent. A child bound, eventually, for Luxembourg might wear a scribbled name tag reading Lux Enbollrg; a baby named Ne Tuan might bear a note reading loose stool. Tori carried those children whose bracelets indicated an illness upstairs to the sick bay.
IV lines crisscrossed the first-class lounge. The doctors moved around the room, attending to the survivors of the previous day’s crash and to the sickest of the children. There were cases of hepatitis, meningitis, and chicken pox. In an attempt to keep diseases from flooding the plane, all sick children were to remain upstairs.
Tori found a little boy with chicken pox in the general cabin; she gripped his hand and walked him upstairs, then returned to checking on the others. Within minutes a French-speaking little boy tugged on her skirt. The sick child had gone back downstairs to be with his friends, he told Tori.
“Take me to him,” Tori said. Together they found the little boy. Tori walked him down the aisle and back up the stairs.
Karen watched men—volunteer escorts from Hong Kong—changing diapers expertly on aisle-seat tray tables. They had probably never changed their own children’s diapers, she thought, but here they were. She admired their dexterity and lack of fuss.
In the aisle, a snowdrift of torn paper gathered. Escorts had passed out coloring books, colored pencils, and small toys indiscriminately. The smaller children had ripped up the coloring books and then torn apart emergency pamphlets, airsick bags, magazines.
A young teenager, one of the volunteers—Karen saw him as a California-surfer type, with his long hair and easy gaze—offered an arm to the injured boy who had lost his crutch. In his other arm he carried an infant. Karen continued down the aisle, stepping over children, on her way to the galley for a bottle of milk. She folded down a jump seat and sat to try to feed a baby, but he would not take the bottle. He moved his face back and forth as she chased his moving mouth with the bottle’s nipple. His nose was incomprehensibly small. Behind her sat a little girl. When she thought Karen was not looking, she reached out to touch the American woman’s blond hair.
“Have you seen that fourteen-year-old with long hair in row twenty-three?” a flushed woman asked Karen as she stood for another bottle. Karen nodded. “That’s my son. He’s becoming a man tonight,” the woman said proudly.
The French-speaking little boy tugged on Tori’s blue skirt again. Again his friend had escaped, he said. And he had to use the toilet, but he was not tall enough.
Tori found a box for him, waited outside the lavatory, and then they found the escaped child again. Everyone, absolutely everyone, Tori thought grimly, will have chicken pox by Guam.
Lynne leaned over seats, holding a bottle in each hand, trying to feed two squalling infants at once. When they each latched on, she leaned the bottles against the bassinet, grabbed more bottles from the galley, and moved on to the next set of babies. She hoped the pilots would find the cleanest, clearest airstreams. Turbulence would frighten the older children and rock the precarious bottles from the mouths of the younger ones.
Lynne attended to the babies who were wet or hungry or both. She handed hamburgers to the older children. Lynne felt gratitude and respect for the competence of the women with whom she worked. No one needed Tori to tell them what to do. They responded to the need they saw with instinctive direction and authority. Men waged war with no consideration for the disastrous consequences, she thought. Across industries and professions, they sought ugly power. And women worked together to clean up the mess.
Tori began to understand what had occurred to Karen: Some of the children had parents. Some tiny wrists wore no medical bracelets. They could not be identified as orphans. She lifted her feet above the debris and the toddlers now crawling through the aisles while pasting a smile on her face for the older child whose wrist she now examined.
By the time they landed in Guam, it would be night. For the time being, the stewardesses reached over children and lowered the window shades, hoping that the darkness would signal sleep for at least some. It worked. Karen moved through the cabin with a flashlight, checking for moving rib cages. She pressed her hand against scrawny bellies, making sure the small bodies had cooled as the plane’s temperature stabilized.
Tori settled into the first seat in business class, bulkhead space in front of her, so that her crew knew where to find her. Volunteers brought her a rotation of infants who would not take bottles, and Tori tried to coax them to eat.
Joanie looked at her watch. She’d been on her feet for nearly eighteen hours, she realized. A little girl had all but attached herself to her, following her around the plane as she changed diapers and swapped empty bottles for full. They sat together on a jump seat now.
As Karen carried trays back to the galley, she saw a little girl leaning over a crying baby boy. Karen smiled at the girl as she picked her way around them. Heartwarming. She watched as the little girl raised her hand in a closed fist and then punched the baby.
Karen dropped the trays in a sharp clatter and grabbed the child’s shoulders. She raised her own hand, ready to slap the girl, then stopped herself. Her face felt tight. She picked the girl up and handed her to the fourteen-year-old volunteer. She brought the baby, now screaming, up the stairs. The teenager and child followed.
“He looks fine,” a doctor said as he ran fingers across the baby’s tiny face. The little girl’s name was added to the list of children with special requirements.
The stewardesses were quietly making do amid the overwhelming need. There was a perverse gorgeousness at work, Lynne thought as she looked around. Tori was in the bulkhead surrounded by a cluster of children. Joanie was still trailed by the little girl. Karen was shining her flashlight into bassinets. Paula, ever animated, was telling the older children stories. The civilians too had found their tasks.
The plane began its descent. Another crew would board the plane and steward the children on to Honolulu, then San Francisco. With nowhere near enough seats, Tori now sat on the floor in front of the seats in which she had strapped children. A few of the older kids with whom she had been speaking French sat next to her. She wrapped her arms around all the children she could, and then the plane was on the ground. The pilots had performed marvelously, she thought.
Tori remained on the floor as the doors opened, as the rest of the women stood to brief the oncoming crew. Karen watched their faces as they walked aboard, the widened eyes, the incongruity of their starched uniforms set against the disorder. Lynne went down the stairs, as did Karen. The stewardesses gathered on the tarmac.
Tori did not want to leave. “The new crew is just like me,” she tried to reassure the children. “You see? The same uniform, different faces, but the same kind of people.”
Joanie sniffed as she hugged the little girl goodbye.
Cars waited outside to take the crew to the hotel. Tori climbed into one and began to cry.