The photograph shows a row of red-and-yellow striped seats inside the cabin of an airplane. They look like any seats on any commercial jetliner, though the mod color scheme does help date them to the 1970s. What’s odd about the photograph is not the seats themselves, but who occupies them: On each seat lies a tiny baby swaddled in white pajamas. As human beings, we view babies as vulnerable, and a solitary infant, in any context, seems strange and pathetic. These particular children look like dolls that some prankish three-year-old left forgotten on the sofa. A few of these children appear to be sleeping. One faces the camera, looking both curious and forlorn.

I first came across this picture in the spring of 2004, while reading about Vietnam on the Internet. I had been writing about the country for many years, but I had never seen the photograph, or heard about the event it depicted. Now, on the website, I discovered that in April of 1975, at the very end of the war in Vietnam, a group of foreign-run orphanages, with the help of the U.S. government, airlifted between two and three thousand children out of Saigon and placed them with adoptive families overseas. The website showed photos from only one jet, but, I learned, there had been many babies, and some four dozen flights that carried them out of Vietnam.

As a writer, my interest in Vietnam had, until that moment, consciously focused on the country as a country, not a war. Too much attention had centered on the conflicts of the 20^th Century and as a result, I believed, Americans knew little about the place, except that we had fought a devastating war there. Now, looking at this puzzling photograph of babies on an airplane, I reminded myself that every war produces its own set of bizarre situations. Apparently, Operation Babylift had been one such situation that emerged from the war in Vietnam. I moved along in my research and told myself to forget about it.

I couldn’t get my mind off those babies, though. April of 1975 marked the end of the war in Southeast Asia, the moment that, after three decades of conflict, Vietnam finally emerged into a time of peace. Right at that moment, however, thousands of children were airlifted away from their homeland. Why? It didn’t make sense to me. Months passed. Every so often, I’d make my way back to the computer, just to have another look. Each time, the same questions filtered through my mind: Who were these children? How did they end up on those planes?”

      --excerpt from The Life We Were Given: Operation Babylift, International Adoption, and the Children of War in Vietnam