Word: airlift
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...more than a month after the airlift of orphaned and abandoned Vietnamese children that preceded the collapse of the Thieu regime, the adoptive American parents of these children have felt dogged by hostility. The Catholic Relief Services and the American Friends Service Committee--groups that might have been involved in the airlift in Vietnam--refused to have any part in it. The revolutionary government in South Vietnam, various antiwar groups in the United States and "Doonesbury" joined the list of those who condemn the adoption of war orphans and question the motives of their American families. These parents were accused...
...child from another culture. After the home-study, it may take a year or longer before the parents are matched with a child and the adoption process is completed. Many of the people involved in the adoption of foreign children fee, that in the furor over the orphan airlift, many critics completely overlooked the amount of time, thinking and preparation that goes into adoption, and focused instead on the would-be parents who rushed to adoption agencies at the time. "There was a lot of emotionalism prompted by the Vietnam crisis," Darby acknowledges. "Most of the agencies accepted...
During the preceding eight days, U.S. planes had evacuated almost 40,000 American and South Vietnamese refugees from Tan Son Nhut airbase near Saigon. But by last week, the airlift was growing increasingly dangerous. Artillery shells and rockets closed Tan Son Nhut airport Monday morning. Next day a U.S. C-130 transport was hit by a rocket on the runway and burst into flames as the crew escaped. A short tune later, two U.S. Marine corporals guarding the U.S. defense attache's compound at Tan Son Nhut were killed by Communist artillery...
Plainly, evacuation by commercial flights, by military airplanes or by sea was no longer feasible. The security advisers discussed whether conditions might permit a resumption of the military airlift. If not, they would have to go to a fourth option, the riskiest of all: evacuation in Marine helicopters. Scarcely two hours after the meeting ended with no decision, Ford learned that two C-130s attempting to land at Tan Son Nhut had been waved off; the airport was blocked by thousands of panicky South Vietnamese. By then all of Ford's advisers, including Martin, agreed that...
...word dependents was defined more and more loosely as the airlift progressed?partly because, as one American businessman put it, the Vietnamese extended family is "like a chain letter," stretching to include a virtually endless stream of cousins, nephews, grandmothers and in-laws. One American departed from Tan Son Nhut with 39 "dependents." A U.S. businessman recognized a couple of prostitutes he had seen at the Palace Hotel bar in Saigon and discovered that they were leaving under a new "no-marriage clause"?which meant, in effect, that in the crisis, a departing American can take his girl friend...