In 1975, hundreds of babies came to Australia in shoeboxes. Suanne was one

A three-year-old girl stands barefoot on the scorching tarmac of Tan Son Nhut Airport in Saigon.

She is wearing a nappy, and a Red Cross tag hangs from her tiny wrist.

It’s April 1975. Panic had gripped southern Vietnam as the country braced for an end to two decades of protracted conflict: the Vietnam War.

Western troops had fully withdrawn from active combat two years prior, and Ho Chi Minh’s forces — representing North Vietnam — were days away from taking the southern capital of Saigon (modern-day Ho Chi Minh City).

Tens of thousands were scrambling to leave the country.

Amid the chaos, a mission was underway to evacuate thousands of children. It was known as ‘Operation Babylift’.

Among them was Suanne Prager. She’s the little girl pictured standing on the tarmac, immortalised in this photo.

A three-year-old girl standing on an airport tarmac wearing a nappy, green singlet, red cross tag on her wrist, eating a biscuit.

Suanne Prager waiting to board Operation Babylift flight on 17 April 1975. Source: Supplied / Ian Frame

Prager is one of around 3,000 children airlifted out of Vietnam in April 1975 and one of the 281 destined for a new life, a new family and a new world in Australia.

“I feel for that little baby that went through so much,” Prager tells SBS News.

Prager’s not sure whether her faint memory of a giant plane engine is real. But she imagines how her three-year-old self might have felt making the journey.

“[Thinking of] my Vietnamese home, the reasons I was given up. The handballing from homes to orphanages, to embassies, to who knows what … [to the] hospital in Australia and then to our adopted home,” she says.

I feel for that little person at the end of that journey because I know I was just deeply traumatised by that point.

When Prager arrived in Australia, she was malnourished and weighed just 7.7kg. Her teeth were rotten and most had to be pulled out in surgery, she says.

But after a few weeks in hospital, she went home with her new family in Adelaide, who later helped her to piece together her early years in Vietnam, and her journey to Australia.

“We imagined, my [adoptive] mum imagined, that no one had meant to get separated by war from their child.”

Pilots, nurses, doctors and children standing and sitting on the tarmac next to a A97-190 RAAF aircraft in Vietnam.

The first Australian babylift flight preparing for takeoff at Tan Son Nhut airport, 4 April 1975. Credit: Geoff Rose/Australian War Memorial.

A daughter’s search

While thousands of children were orphaned by the war, many were given up for adoption.

Prager wanted to know which was her story.

After several years of painstakingly searching for her Vietnamese family, Prager returned to Ho Chi Minh City in 2007, where she found and met her biological mother.

“She looked at the scar under my left eye and squeezed my cheeks, and she said: ‘I just know you are my daughter,'” Prager recalls.

It was an overwhelming moment for the pair, who had been separated by distance, time, culture and language.

“In the photos and footage of me [taken during the reunion], I’m just smiling. I’m filled with joy because over the years I had cried myself to sleep wondering if I would ever know my origins, my Vietnamese mother … just to know what she went through.”

(Left) Suanne Prager and her Vietnamese birth mother hugging. (Right) Suanne's birth mother wearing a blue minidress outside a US Army base.

(Left) Suanne Prager meeting her Vietnamese birth mother. (Right) Prager’s birth mother on a US army base in Vietnam in the early 70s. Source: Supplied

Prager’s biological mother died earlier this year, but their reunion helped her to understand her beginnings.

“I was born in 1971 to an American serviceman father. According to what my Vietnamese mum said, that endangered possibly me, possibly the whole family,” Prager explains.

“By April 1975, I think her mother [Prager’s maternal grandmother] in particular and even her siblings were really pressuring her to give me up.”

‘Shoeboxes … that’s how we came’

The US-spearheaded Operation Babylift and took around 2,000 children, with most of the rest of the children going to Europe.

But the mission started with tragedy. Its first baby lift flight crashed on 4 April 1975, just outside the Saigon airbase.

According to the US Defense Intelligence Agency, the crash killed 139 people, including 78 children and 35 US personnel.

Hope Lynch was meant to be one of the children bound for the US.

While she doesn’t know if she was meant to be on that fateful flight, she was deemed too sick for the long journey.

“I had pneumonia, salmonella, osteomyelitis; they thought that my right arm may have been paralysed and withered,” Lynch tells SBS News.

At just three months old, she was placed on a plane to Sydney instead, along with the smallest children who were transported in makeshift cribs made of cardboard boxes.

“I’ve seen photos and I’ve been told that I was also in a shoebox. Lots of tiny shoeboxes all in a row, that’s how we came.”

A small baby in a crib, looking malnourished, with a nametag next to her reading 'Hope'.

Hope Lynch at three months old when she had just arrived in hospital in Australia. Source: Supplied

In Vietnam, she’d been nicknamed Hy Vong – Vietnamese for ‘hope’. Her adoptive Australian family wanted to keep it.

Like Prager’s Australian family in Wollongong, NSW, they too helped Lynch to piece together the story of her first few months, through fragmented accounts.

“Just before the fall of Saigon, there was a group of nurses in a van that would go around the Mekong Delta, knowing there were people that were going to possibly put their children there in the hope that they would be found and taken to an orphanage,” Lynch says.

“I believe that’s what happened to me.”

A woman with long dark hair and wearing a black top gestures with her hands as she speaks

Vietnamese adoptee Hope Lynch telling SBS News she feels ‘very lucky’ to have been brought up in a loving family. Source: SBS News

Lynch never felt compelled to find out whether her biological parents were still alive, saying it would be like “trying to find a needle in a haystack”.

“I didn’t really start thinking about it until I had children of my own: The thought of my birth mother giving me up and how heartbreaking that would be,” she says.

So awful and so gut-wrenching to give up your child like that. I wonder, is she still alive? Does she think about me at all? I hope so.

Reunions taking flight

The second babylift flights to Australia (the first flights were on 4 April) took off on 17 April 1975.

The photograph of Prager was taken that day by Royal Australian Air Force Flight Lieutenant Ian Frame as he and fellow pilots cared for babies on the tarmac.

Twenty-five years later, Frame and Prager were reunited.

“It was just really, really exciting to meet someone who had brought me to Australia,” Prager says of the reunion.

A smiling man wearing a pink shirt hugs a smiling woman wearing a white top. There is a black-and-white picture behind them of airmen feeding babies from bottles.

Suanne Prager meeting RAAF Flight Lieutenant Ian Frame, with the photo of pilots feeding babies on the tarmac behind them. Source: Supplied

Working alongside Frame that day was Flight Lieutenant Hugh Howell.

“I was in Vietnam with the C-130, 37th squadron,” Howell tells SBS News.

“We were deployed up there right at the beginning of April, primarily flying relief flights between Saigon and an island called Phu Quoc. We were flying rice into the strip there.”

Old black and white photo of five pilots in overalls standing side by side, with an aircraft behind them.

RAAF Flight Lieutenant Hugh Howell (second from the right) in Vietnam. Source: Supplied

For 50 years, Howell preserved his pilot’s logbook, which shows the babylift flight from Saigon to Bangkok recorded on 17 April.

“I do recall that on the day of the babylift, we arrived quite early in the morning. The aim was to try and get off early while it was still cool,” he recalls.

“The buses with nurses and nuns arrived at maybe 6 o’clock in the morning. The nuns had the children all dressed up in pullovers. They must have thought it was going to be cold on the flight when it was actually going to be exactly the opposite.”

Split image: (Left) a blue book with gold writing on the front that reads Pilots Flying Log Book and (right) a list of flights written in pen

Flight Lieutenant Hugh Howell’s pilots flying log book recording the babylift flight on 17 April 1975. Source: Supplied

As the temperature rose on the tarmac, the young pilots suddenly found themselves caring for the babies.

“We were told we couldn’t take off until the other aircraft arrived from Bangkok with the doctors and the nurses on board. We had to convince the nuns to take [the children’s] clothing off and cool the kids down and keep them well hydrated.

“So, we ended up shoving bottles of water into them, and that’s when that picture that you’ve seen was taken.”

RAAF pilots holding Vietnamese babies, feeding them with bottles on an airport tarmac.

All hands to the bottles. Flight Lieutenant Ian Frame, Flight Lieutenant Hugh Howell and Flying Officer Ian Scott at Tan Son Nhut airfield on 17 April 1975. Credit: Australian War Memorial

Howell says the crew was eventually able to load babies into the plane — a C-130 Hercules.

“The babies who were in cardboard boxes — we didn’t have the centre seating up in the aircraft — so we put them in a line of boxes down the centre of the aircraft. I think they were sort of side-by-side, and then we just put a cargo strap over the top to hold them in,” he says.

“The aeroplane itself was very hot inside. It’s very, very noisy in the back of a C-130. These children would never have seen anything like this … heading off to a new world.”

Babies in cardboard boxes strapped into seats on a commercial plane to the United States.

Babies in cardboard boxes on one of the commercial flights to the United States. Credit: Robert Stinnett, April 12, 1975.

But their mission was also struck by tragedy.

“The really sad thing is that once we got airborne, we were the last flight out. One of the children, an eight-month-old baby, actually passed away,” Howell says.

“We were a bit annoyed, as the feeling was with the crew that had we been able to get away earlier in the morning, maybe that child would have survived, but we don’t know.”

Despite the loss, Howell says he is proud of the part he played.

“I think Qantas got the credit more than us,” he jokes, referring to the commercial flights that transported the children on their final leg to Australia.

But we did our job and we’re proud of doing that part.

“I think we should be very proud of the fact that we as a country looked after these children, and it was Australian nurses that were instrumental in making this happen.”

Around a dozen babies and children, and a dozen adults standing and sitting on the tarmac beside a large grey RAAF military aircraft. The adults looking after the children.

Flight Lieutenant Hugh Howell (centre) caring for children ahead of Operation Babylift flight on 17 April 1975. Source: Supplied

Uncovering origin stories

Just a few months ago, Howell was also reunited with another babylift adoptee, Dominic Golding.

“That was very emotional. I loved it. That was absolutely great,” he says.

Golding, who grew up in Mount Gambier in regional South Australia, is now a disability advocate living in Canberra.

A man in a maroon polo shirt with his arm around the shoulder of a man in an olive green t-shirt who has a dog on a lead next to him. They are standing in front of a RAAF plane in a museum.

Hugh Howell and Dominic Golding reunited fifty years after Operation Babylift. Source: Supplied

Though he doesn’t remember the flight — he was just four months old at the time — Golding carries a constant reminder of it: a tattoo he got during a trip to Vietnam for his first adoptee reunion.

“One night in the hotel room, I decided to draw my tattoo, which is just the [year] 75 and the aircraft,” he says.

“I took it to a local tattoo shop in Saigon, or Ho Chi Minh City, and a whole bunch of adoptees came with me, and they all decided to get the same tattoo as well.”

A close up of a forearm with a black tattoo of the number 75 with the outline of a RAAF aircraft over the top.

Dominic Golding’s tattoo commemorating ‘Operation Babylift’. Source: SBS News

He also uncovered his origins through documents, stories, and trips to Vietnam. “I was apparently found outside a burning building in Cholon, which is the Chinese district or Chinatown of Saigon. Hence why I’ve got a hearing loss,” Dominic says.

“I was placed in a temple. That’s where the doctors found me, and then I was placed into World Vision for evacuation.”

A complex legacy

Reflecting on Operation Babylift, Lynch says she’s grateful to those who brought her to Australia.

“I’d love to meet them. It was a massive thing to do,” she says.

All those children that went onto those planes and came not just to Australia but to America and to Europe. It kind of blows your mind that it happened.

Prager says she’s also deeply thankful for Operation Babylift, but recognises her experience differs from some adoptees. Sadly, many of them had identification tags removed during their flights to Australia, which made it difficult for authorities to figure out which baby belonged to which family.

“I think war leaves so many legacies. My experiences, thousands of Vietnamese war orphans around the world, we share some similar experiences, some completely different,” Prager says.

For Golding, who has researched Operation Babylift extensively, the motivations behind the mission are complex.

A man with tattoos on his left arm sitting in a black armchair holding his brown dog.

Dominic Golding believes he was discovered as a baby outside a bombed building in Saigon. Source: SBS News

He says while there was a humanitarian aspect to the mission – the notion of ‘saving’ children, particularly those fathered by American soldiers who may have been targeted by Ho Chi Minh’s government — a mass inter-country adoption was always going to be fraught.

“Adoption has always been part of that kind of Cold War response to dealing with communism. I don’t necessarily agree, but some would argue that adoption is a form of warfare, that you were moving children out of countries,” he says.

Challenges with racism, identity and belonging are also common experiences for inter-country adoptees.

Dr Indigo Willing is also a Vietnamese adoptee: She arrived in Australia before Operation Babylift in 1972. She is the founder of Adopted Vietnamese International, which she set up to create a community for adoptees.

A woman with orange hair in pigtails sitting at a desk with another woman and flicking through old photos and documents.

Dr Indigo Willing has spent decades researching inter-country adoption. Source: SBS News

“We’re making our own family,” Willing says.

“Even though we don’t know each other, the adoption story and experience really bond us.

We really are piecing [our past] together from the kindness of strangers and from the haziness of people’s memories.

Willing became the first inter-country adoptee to do a master’s thesis on adoption from Vietnam, and her research and advocacy have helped those in the adoptee community.

“Some of the findings that really were quite sad [are] the isolation and loneliness that a lot of the Vietnamese adoptees felt growing up,” she says.

“Not knowing other Vietnamese people, then this double blow when they did find Vietnamese people that they didn’t connect [with] because they didn’t know the language or the culture. [It’s] sort of like a double loneliness.”

An open passport for a baby. On the left page is writing and on the right page is a picture of a baby and a lock of hair.

Dr Willing has her baby passport from when she was adopted in 1972. Source: SBS News

The struggle to connect with Vietnamese culture is something Lynch has experienced firsthand.

“In 2019, I took my family [to Vietnam] and I didn’t know how I was going to feel. When I got there, I didn’t feel that pull that I thought I would,” she says.

“I think I’m just too Aussie. I think because I’ve had such a great family, my mum and dad, my upbringing. I just didn’t feel like that was my home anymore. And I felt a bit sad about that … but Australia is my home.”

Golding says he hasn’t struggled to connect with his Vietnamese roots, but faced racism and ableism when he was growing up.

“I’m a person with disabilities as well as being Vietnamese, so I struggled a lot in terms of integrating,” he says.

“But me personally, I’m incredibly bogan,” he says with a laugh.

“But also having gone back to Vietnam a number of times, I very much identify with being Vietnamese.”

A pilot in a jumpsuit carrying a baby in a bassinet in an outdoor carpark

RAAF pilot Flight Lieutenant Ian Frame carrying a baby ahead of the evacuation flight on 17 April 1975. Source: Supplied

Fifty years on, Operation Babylift has left a complex legacy — one that Willing wants more people to recognise.

“We can’t frame this as a simple act of humanitarian rescue or a story of rags to riches. It’s not a fairytale,” she says.

“It’s a typical migrant journey with complications and a lot of unrecognised trauma … that there weren’t resources for when we were growing up.

“There’s the typical story of being left on doorsteps … [but also] reports [children] were taken from orphanages in the final days [of the war] without parents knowing about it.

“It was a very, very messy time and very hazy.”

A Vietnamese woman holding a very small baby in a red beanie and green jumper, waiting on an airport tarmac.

Many babies were sick and in the chaos surrounding the mission, many didn’t have identity documents. Source: Supplied

Remembering Operation Babylift

For the 30th anniversary, SBS aired ‘Operation Babylift’, a documentary produced by Vietnamese refugee Dai Le — now the independent federal MP for Fowler in western Sydney.

At seven years old, she fled Vietnam with her family in April 1975 and spent four years in refugee camps in the Philippines and Hong Kong before settling in Australia.

As a producer and journalist, she became fascinated by the stories of Babylift adoptees.

Dai Le looking concerned inside Parliament House.

Federal MP Dai Le produced a 2005 documentary about Operation Babylift. Source: SBS News

“This group of young people or adoptees left Vietnam around the same time that I did, but they had another layer of trauma,” Le says.

“A lot of them were half Vietnamese: ‘Amerasian’ — either black Americans or white — and they came to Australia at the time of the ‘White Australia’ policy and [were] adopted into families that were predominantly white Anglo-Australians.

As they reached their teenage years, they went through this traumatic period of identity crisis.

War orphans and adoptees, Le says, are an important part of the story of the Vietnam War and Vietnamese migration in Australia, which shouldn’t be forgotten.

“I hope that on this 50-year anniversary of the fall of Saigon, that we will not forget the airlift of the orphans,” she says.

“Every year when we mark April 30th, the Operation Babylift adoptees were never part of that story, and they need to be brought into that story.

“They need to be acknowledged. They were part of the history of the war in Vietnam, and they are part of our Australian community now. They should not be left out.”

Breaking