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The Life We Were Given: Operation Babylift, International Adoption, and the Children of War in Vietnam |  | Author: Dana Sachs
Publisher: Beacon Press
Category: Book
List Price: $25.95
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Seller: justineu
Rating:  10 reviews
Sales Rank: 483418
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 288
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.2
ISBN: 0807042412
Dewey Decimal Number: 959.7043086914
EAN: 9780807042410
ASIN: 0807042412
Publication Date: April 1, 2010
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
In April 1975, just before the fall of Saigon, the U.S. government launched "Operation Babylift," a highly publicized plan to evacuate nearly three thousand displaced Vietnamese children and place them with adoptive families overseas. Chaotic from start to finish, the mission gripped the world—with a traumatic plane crash, international media snapping pictures of bewildered children traveling to their new homes, and families clamoring to adopt the waifs. Often presented as a great humanitarian effort, Operation Babylift provided an opportunity for national catharsis following the trauma of the American experience in Vietnam. Now, thirty-five years after the war ended, Dana Sachs examines this unprecedented event more carefully, revealing how a single public-policy gesture irrevocably altered thousands of lives, not always for the better. Though most of the children were orphans, many were not, and the rescue offered no possibility for families to later reunite. With sensitivity and balance, Sachs deepens her account by including multiple perspectives: birth mothers making the wrenching decision to relinquish their children; orphanage workers, military personnel, and doctors trying to "save" them; politicians and judges attempting to untangle the controversies; adoptive families waiting anxiously for their new sons and daughters; and the children themselves, struggling to understand. In particular, the book follows one such child, Anh Hansen, who left Vietnam through Operation Babylift and, decades later, returned to reunite with her birth mother. Through Anh’s story, and those of many others, The Life We Were Given will inspire impassioned discussion and spur dialogue on the human cost of war, international adoption and aid efforts, and U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 10
Outstanding! March 21, 2010
Robert Ballard (Waterloo, Ontario)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This account of Operation Babylift allows the voices of those directly affected by the experience to speak out. From caregivers to orphanage workers, pilots to volunteers, adoptees to refugees, orphans to doctors, Vietnamese to American, and politicians to judges, all provide their important perspective in this compelling tour de force of Operation Babylift. The politics, the controversies, the chaos, and the lifelong impact of the Babylift are offered a place in the conversation.
For anyone who has any connection to the Babylift, this is a must read! Yet, even for one not involved or unfamiliar with the Babylift, it raises timeless questions about international adoption, the chaos of war, and how decisions impact real lives long after they are made.
Yet, Sachs does something provocative and unique in her account of the Babylift - she makes no judgment about the event. She leaves that up to the reader to decide. With so many perspectives and voices interweaving throughout the book, we realize how complex, and controversial, Operation Babylift truly was...
--Bert Ballard, Ph.D., Operation Babylift orphan (April 1975), international adoption researcher, Vietnamese adoptee community activist
Good book March 21, 2010
Daniel E. Duffy (Hillsborough, NC)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
As Kurt Vonnegut wrote in review of a book by Vance Bourjaily, Dana Sachs
is a friend of mine. I would plug any book she wrote but I wouldn't cross
my heart and swear that it was good.
I swear on my heart that Operation Babylift is a good book. No one ever
told me that as you age you get to watch your friends turn into artists,
much better than the ones whose works you enjoyed in youth, because you
know exactly what they are talking about.
Dana has reached into one of the comets that lit up the night sky when
were five and ten years old, the mad evacuation of a few thousand children
from the falling Republic of Viet Nam, and told its origins and trajectory
and how the tail broke up and what it portends.
She has talked to almost everybody and consulted the archives, here and in
Viet Nam, with a Fulbright grant but without the doctoral-level funding
which would have required her to frame and discuss the events in the
discourse of a discipline.
She can just say what happened. The discourse she does engage with is
common sense, the questions that are going to come up if you talk about
the Babylift. Were they orphans? What happened to the mothers? Would
the children have been better off in Viet Nam?
I don't have a lot of common sense. My father's father was placed in an
orphanage by living parents and farmed out to fosters as free farm labor.
My mother's mother was abandoned as a Jew to the French state and raised
with loving righteousness by a village that took in such as she for pay.
Pop hated the adults involved in his childhood and paid for all their
graves in grim glory. Grandmere longed for her mother, and then for her
foster mother and village, who got her out of France ahead of the Nazis,
all her life.
But I love the way Dana follows down every possible issue from the common
sense of people who are not yet aware that we are all orphans. She goes
to such lengths as to find the Communist who entered Saigon in 1975 to
take charge of its orphans, another woman of Saigon who was a child on the
same block as one of the evacuated orphanages, on and on.
The book is indefatigable, yet short. It glows with wisdom, nuance,
acceptance, compassion, all earned from asking questions I would never
ask. It also has uncanny charm, the gravity I think of an occulted
planet.
The one person Dana didn't talk was the prime mover of the Babylift,
Rosemary Taylor, one of those queen bees we all know from international
aid. She wouldn't cooperate with the book. Dana's deft presentation of
her nonetheless is a marvelous display of what it is not only to be from
the South but also to actually be kind and courteous.
Saints aren't saints because they are nice, or professional, or because
what they do makes sense. Taylor is a piece of work, who sent children
around the world because she loved every one of them as an individual,
whatever that can mean, in a world where every orphan also has family.
She glows in Dana's book like that maniac who stomps around Scripture,
whom we are all supposed to worship. It's a book about life as we live
it, the real stuff. Really should be in libraries.
Dan Duffy
Editor, Viet Nam Literature Project
A wonderful book. April 1, 2010
Kathy Steuer
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
"The Life We Were Given" is a beautifully and sensitively written account of "Operation Babylift," the harrowing evacuation of an uncertain number of Vietnamese orphans and non-orphan children who were boarded in orphanages because of wartime conditions. The title comes from a statement of a Vietnamese-American man who had been adopted via Operation Babylift; he is reflecting on his and other adoptee's need to accept and come to terms with the life he and other adoptees have lived because of their evacuation from their homeland. But, the book does not just give the varying viewpoints of some adoptees--also providing the nuanced perspectives of the birth parents, adoptive parents, orphanage and adoption agency operators and their staffs, members of the U.S. military, doctors and volunteers who helped in the days following the frantic arrival in the U.S. of flights of Vietnamese babies and children, South Vienamese locals, and a North Vietnamese communist who took over management of many South Vietnamese orphanages after the "fall of Saigon." Taken together, their reflections give broad scope to Dana Sachs's persevering effort to answer how and why Operation Babylift happened as it did, and what it means. The recollections of those in South Vietnam also give a fascinating and moving description of the frantic final weeks before the "Fall of Saigon." The almost daily descriptions of the plight, and the fears, of those in South Vietnam as they listened to the bombs and the fighting approach and as they heard the stories of the refugees who flooded Saigon while both the military and the rumors closed in. This backdrop frames the the agonizing decisions that birth parents and orphanage directors, in particular, made in haste and rising panic about the orphans` welfare -- including the fear of possible Communist mistreatment of the mixed children of American soldiers and Vietnamese women. The harrowing efforts of one mother of such a child to save her child by giving her child up for adoption, and their poignant reunion decades later, is so intimately described that it is almost too painful to read. While taking a sympathetic view of the participants and their actions, Sachs does not shy away from addressing the wrenching moral questions the operation posed and continued to pose for the treatment of children in war, the failure to help those who were not evacuated, and for international adoption then and now. This is a deep and meaningful book.
You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet April 29, 2010
Barbara Crain (San Francisco)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I'd rank this book right up there with Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried." So many brilliant moments and vignettes - I can't decide which is my favorite. The scariest one was when the medical team boarded the plane in advance of President Ford and the description of the conditions onboard. Dr. Stalcup and his medical team are heroes. Not the only heroes in this story, hardly at all, but what a job! Sachs's relationship with her interpreter Thuy was also very telling, reminding us that after all, we can be close with folks from another culture, another world, the other side. I understand the author's reluctance to reduce Vietnam to another story about the war and only about the war, since there is so much more to Vietnam, but I am grateful that she carved out this small piece of that war and wrote about it so brilliantly. Years ago, before I went to Cambodia to cover the last stages of the civil war there, I spent a lot of time reading about the region -- including Vietnam and Laos, too -- reading about the wars, the endless wars, and looking at all the photography that came out of that place - so much of it was about the innocents, the very young and the very old. I realized that the real story of war has little to do with generals or troop movements, strategy or weaponry. Sachs captures that brilliantly in this book. The real victims are innocence and the innocent. Desperate people doing amazing things to rescue a homeless and hungry child. Lieberman and Taylor, Stalcup and countless others named and unnamed in this brilliant book remind us so clearly who it is that suffers most. Such a subtle work of writing, it evokes the depth of the tragic American experience in Vietnam -- as well as the horrific experience of the Vietnamese themselves in that bewildering and savage war. I cannot imagine the person who would not be moved by the story this book tells.
Sachs is the reporter -- among all the writers who wrote about that war -- yes, Sachs is the reporter who finally got the story right. This book encompasses all of that conflict within the story of those babies tucked in cardboard boxes under airliner seats.
To the cynics and the wags who cry Enough! No more books! Too many already! And too many about Vietnam! I would love to hand them all a copy of "The Life We Were Given," and say, You ain't seen nothing yet.
An eye opening and thought provoking read, highly recommended May 18, 2010
Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
To let your child live thousands of miles from you for a chance at a better life was a sacrifice many Vietnamese parents made. "The Life We Were Given: Operation Babylift, International Adoption, and the Children of War in Vietnam" looks at the history of Operation Babylift, where the United States government helped relocate thousands of Vietnamese children from war-torn Vietnam. Dana Sachs reflects on her past well, and gives new insight on these tragic events. "The Life We Were Given" is an eye opening and thought provoking read, highly recommended.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 10
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