Vietnam War Orphans Plan Journey of Self-Discovery

Loan Shillinger has no memory of the country of her birth. She can only imagine the place, and does so often: the Buddhist temples, the rolling, verdant hillsides, the village of fishermen where she was born.

Above all, she imagines a tranquil country, not the suffering, napalm-ravaged Vietnam of countless movies. The sense of peace is important, because for years Loan Shillinger has lived with the idea that, as an orphan, she came into the world because of war, a “mistake” of war.

Later this month, Shillinger and a dozen other orphans will return to Vietnam as young adults, 21 years after they were spirited out of the country as part of “Operation Babylift,” the last-minute evacuation of 2,000 children in the final days of the war.

They will be looking, in ways they sometimes can barely express, to put flesh on the bones of the stories they have been told.

Americans remember Operation Babylift as a series of poignant, tragic images in the days the last U.S. troops pulled out and South Vietnam fell to the communists: a group of babies placed in boxes on the tarmac at Tan Son Nhut airport; the plane filled with children that crashed moments after takeoff from Saigon, killing 144.

Shillinger has scars and burns to remind her that she was a passenger on that ill-fated plane. She also has a picture of herself in the days after her arrival in the United States, a very unhappy 3-year-old with a broken rib. But she’s not going back to Vietnam to revisit the melodrama of her evacuation, or even to look for her biological parents.

“I’m going back because I want to be able to embrace the positive, the beauty that Vietnam holds,” says Shillinger, who was raised by her adoptive parents in Marin County and now lives in Illinois. “I know in my heart that Vietnam is a beautiful country.”

The young people will gather in Los Angeles this week before boarding a June 18 flight that will take them first to Hong Kong and then to Ho Chi Minh City.

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Their two weeks in Vietnam will include a series of pilgrimages to the sites that were important in their journey: the orphanages where Catholic nuns cared for them, the former U.S. Embassy where they obtained their visas, the air terminal where they gathered for the flight across the Pacific as the Viet Cong pressed their final assault on the capital.

All the alumni of Operation Babylift are now in their early 20s, an age when questions of culture and personal history begin to assume an overriding importance. The return is an opportunity to make more tangible the stories they’ve been told by their adoptive parents and the nuns and volunteers who looked after them in Vietnam.

“From what I know, I was put in an orphanage by my natural parents,” says Lisa Winter, who grew up in Minnesota and now works as a medical technician in Duluth. “I guess for whatever reason, because they didn’t have money, and they thought I would be able to have a better life.”

Winter has been told that she was placed on one of those crowded planes that flew out of Saigon in the dying days of the war, with “hundreds of babies, three to a box.”

“I don’t have any memories and I think that’s OK, that’s good, because it was bad times, a war,” she says. “They say I had a stone face, I never smiled. I didn’t have much emotion. You kind of build walls.”

The trip grew out of an Operation Babylift reunion held last year in Colorado, on the 20th anniversary of the exodus.

Meeting other adoptees from Vietnam, Shillinger recalls, was an encounter with a sort of “instant family.” While being adopted is by nature a solitary experience, the Babylift veterans soon discovered they had dozens of “brothers and sisters,” all of whom had undertaken similar journeys.

Lisa Winter’s mother, Martha, who will travel to Vietnam with her daughter, says she saw a remarkable change in Lisa after the Babylift reunion. “I noticed a lot of maturity, a settling feeling.”

Shillinger calls the reunion “an awesome experience. It was four days of being able to talk to someone who understands.”

Damian McCartney, who grew up in Sparta, N.J., says he too felt a sense of kinship with his fellow adoptees.

“Being an Asian American growing up in a predominantly white community and going to white schools, it was one of the few times I didn’t feel like a minority. It reaffirms the fact that you’re not the only one in the position of being an orphan or being adopted from Vietnam.”

The organizer of the trip--Global Spectrum, a Washington, D.C., travel agency--has tried to accommodate the adoptees’ hunger to learn more about the culture of their birth parents. The itinerary will include visits to temples and pagodas, performances by traditional musicians and dancers, visits to villages in the Mekong Delta, and a cruise down the Perfume River in Hue.

“I want to see the way of life,” says McCartney, 21, now a student at Allentown College in Pennsylvania. “I’m trying to go in with an open mind. I think I’ll gain a better understanding of where I came from. That will help me to basically accept why I was given up.”

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McCartney has few illusions about finding his biological parents during the trip. Instead, he wants to know, “What kind of place did I come out of? What kind of town could I have lived in? How did they make a living day to day?” Also making the trip with McCartney and the other adoptees will be several parents, other relatives and Sister Mary Nelle Gage, a Colorado nun who cared for the children in Vietnam.

Unlike most of those she cared for, Gage has vivid memories of Vietnam and the final days of the war. She remembers the pungent smell of automobile exhaust in Saigon and the chop-chop of helicopters that passed over the orphanage every morning about the same time the laundry workers put the babies’ diapers on the clothesline.

Mostly, Gage remembers worrying about the health and safety of the hundreds of children she cared for. Tapeworms, diarrhea and a dizzying array of diseases attacked the infants. Some came to the orphanages battered and bruised. Cleft palates were common. Pictures of the day show often-emaciated infants, so small they could fit in a box meant to hold a dozen cans of Nestle’s infant formula.

“It’s a dream come true, to be going back with the babies,” Gage says. “We just gave every ounce of energy to get those kids to survive and leave that country,” she says with an ironic laugh. “And now they’re all going back.”

Gage and the adoptees will also have a reunion with Rosemary Taylor, the Australian teacher who set up many of the orphanages. Many of the returning Babylifters have read Taylor’s book, “Orphans of War,” an account of her efforts to keep the orphanages running and to set up adoption agencies abroad.

Gage says she plans to show the adoptees four of the nurseries where they lived, tin-roofed stucco buildings in the old French colonial style, scattered from Da Nang to Saigon and the Mekong Delta.

“I have no idea if the places are going to be attractive or in disrepair, or whether they’re going to be repulsive looking,” Gage says. Standing before those old buildings is sure to bring back memories, she says, especially of the children and orphanage workers who died in the plane crash. “I don’t know what that’s going to do to me.”

Another pressing concern has been how to deal with the desires of some of the adoptees to search for their birth parents.

“They know that this is their flesh-and-blood beginning,” Gage says. “They want to see where they are from and experience being in that environment.”

The odds are against them, Gage says. Shame and secrecy often surrounded the birth of the children, many of whom were fathered by American soldiers. Those who left the newborns at Rosemary Taylor’s nurseries often provided unreliable or inaccurate biographical information.

When one young man going on the trip wrote to Gage asking for help finding his parents, the nun grew concerned that some of the adoptees might be setting themselves up for a traumatic disappointment. She wrote them all a letter.

“For most of you, your documented history began with us in Rosemary’s nurseries,” she wrote. “We do not know your parents’ names, we are convinced that they loved you too much to let you die sick and malnourished in their arms but [wanted] you to live in the loving arms of another.”

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Loan Shillinger, a paralegal, has her own vision about how she came into the world. An Amerasian, the daughter of an African American serviceman, she was 3 years old when she left Vietnam after surviving the plane crash near Saigon.

“None of us want to accept or embrace the reality of perhaps being a mistake, that mom was a whore, that whole horrible scenario. I have my own story. It’s like ‘Miss Saigon.’ You know, soldier and mother fell in love. And la, la. . . .” She laughs.

“I don’t expect to run into my mother or my father. I’m going there to see where I should go now, what I should do next.”

It’s the country she wants to see. She hopes to find a part of herself in Vietnam and its sights, its sounds, the taste of the air.

“I’m putting together a picture of a little girl,” Shillinger says. Sometimes, she listens to an audio recording her adoptive mother made of her when she arrived in California. “I listen to the voice of this little girl and I think about who I am now. I’m trying to complete the circle.”

What she’s already learned about her birth and journey to the United States has fed the sense of destiny that she already carries, the feeling that “I was meant to be here for some reason, to do something with my life.” She’s considering studying law and specializing in the field of child protection.

“I was born in a war, I was in three different orphanages and then in an airplane crash. And yet I’m still here. I definitely serve a purpose. That’s how I look at it. I’m lucky to be alive.”