The Survivor
It’s April, 1975 – the final days of a bloody theater of war. The place is South Vietnam. A group of refugees are in need of a miracle and before this war ends, God will provide one. We think this story will stay with you. Click / tap above to watch or go to YouTube.
- Speaker, Slides, and Video Editing: Ron Hall
- Spanish Interpreter: Susi Vasquez
- Sound: Garrett Hestla
- Video: Plaza Mariachi Tech Team (Jack Sachen, Jake Petrillo)
- Host: Diane Janbakhsh and Music City Worship
- Venue: Plaza Mariachi Music City
It was my first time out in 20 years – please don’t judge my lack of eye contact – I was juggling an interpreter, a clicker for running my own slides, my notes on one iPad, a mirror of the main screen on my other iPad and the stage display with the clock and messages on the floor. I barely had a chance to look up and engage.
Q&A YouTube playlist
My Mystery
See Also:
Children of An Lac – Betty Tisdale – Angel of Saigon – 1980 CBS Telefilm starring Shirley Jones (“The Partridge Family”) and Ina Balin (starring as herself)
Dateline: Tom Brokaw and Keith Morrison Report on Betty Tisdale – Interview with Betty Tisdale
Music City Worship – Weekly Outreach at Plaza Mariachi. All Year Around Tuesday Nights except for the yearly seasonal break from 12/17/24-1/14/25 (Returning 1/21/25 for the new year). Plaza Mariachi is located at 3955 Nolensville Pk, Nashville, TN. Music City Worship is a 501c(3) organization.
Hello, I just saw your “My Mystery” video. I am sorry to say I have no information about the orphanage the children were from, other than the children were snatched up and hurried to the airlift with only the clothes they wore. No one had time to gather much from the orphanages. Transportation was chaotic and it was all they could do to grab the children and run. It was that desperate. Pure Chaos.
The news came on all the stations in the (San Francisco) Bay Area that volunteers were needed immediately. We were told where to go. I was one of hundreds of people who came in and volunteered to take care of the children when they were airlifted to the States. I can tell you what I remember from that time. Many of the small children/infants were thin, malnourished, and sickly, but many others were fat and healthy – Definitely NOT orphans. We knew that their parents had pushed them onto the airlift in a desperate attempt to save their babies since they, themselves could not flee. I know those parents if still alive, will always be looking for their kids. Each child had 24-hour personal care. We worked on shifts.
I volunteered at Oak Knoll Naval Hospital in the Oakland, Ca hills (it was decommissioned and demolished years ago but the Navy may have records of the children somewhere.) Moffet Airfield in the South Bay was one of the places the children were airlifted to. Also San Diego, Los Angeles, Hawaii, and the Seattle area Naval Hospitals. The kids were brought to the Naval hospitals at first because many were sickly and those hospitals bases could take care of the hundreds of kids.
It was a scramble to find places big enough to house the kids and to gather enough people to care for the children when they came in. The kids had no paperwork, because of the way they had to drop everything and run. And we were not told who was going to adopt them after they were processed.
Oak Knoll Naval Hospital had a huge auditorium where all the kids were brought. It was wall-to-wall floor mats and blankets for the kids with walking paths between them. There was a hospital room in the back for the sickest babies. Bottle & food prep areas, diapers, clothes, etc.
We were assigned to care for one child each. I’ve always wondered where the child I cared for went and what happened to him. His name was Nguyen Trang Vinh. We were told that he was about 1 year and 4 months. He was very small, undersized for his age, chronically malnourished, and listless, He did not want to eat much at all. So I just held him in my lap while he slept. He was an orphan. Other kids were more active. Many cried because they were so afraid of everything that had happened to them.
There was a large percentage of kids who were obviously not orphans. The true orphans were undernourished. sickly and very thin.
I hope you find your birth family some day and I am glad to see you well. 😀
Continuation of above. I was just watching your survivor video. I didn’t realize only 219 children made it out! I thought there were more! Were they only brought to Oak Knoll and Moffet Field then? Oak Knoll easily housed more than 100 kids.
So operation babylift was 2547, I was part of a subset of 219 children Betty Tisdale got out. 602 went to other countries leaving 1,945 in the US so it still wasn’t that many.