Children of the Revolution: US Humanitarianism and Private Relief Agencies in the Vietnam War

In April 1975, during the chaotic fall of Saigon, the Ford administration and several US humanitarian and relief agencies collaborated to evacuate over two thousand children identified as orphans in Vietnamese orphanages. The mission, named Operation Babylift, intended the children for adoption in the United States. Though initially the public overwhelmingly supported the operation, controversy soon raged over the appropriateness of removing so many children from their home. Much of the public anger that ensued during the controversy charged the US government as the primary agent for perpetrating further harm on South Vietnam vis-à-vis the operation. With the Ford administration carrying the bulk of responsibility, a space opened in which aid groups actively negotiated public perceptions of their role in the mission. This paper explores the ways in which the volunteer agency Friends for All Children of Vietnam, one of the most vocal and visible participants in the operation, addressed critics of the operation. Specifically, this paper argues that the group FCVN inserted the private, intimate moments of the adoption process and its embedded assumptions of children as commodities into the public debates as a way to legitimize the operation as the only alternative available for children in South Vietnamese orphanages. In the ongoing public debates about the operation, the FCVN rearticulated its private practices of consuming children in a way that rendered them familiar and palatable to a questioning public. As a result, the operation is largely remembered as a success due to the beneficence and altruism of average American citizens willingly risking their lives and opening their homes to unwanted and unloved South Vietnamese children. As such the cultivated memory obscures the important role that consumption practices and assumptions played in legitimizing the operation.