Sister Mary Nelle Gage stands before the audience, microphone in hand, gray hair neatly trimmed, everyday clothes stored in her dresser.
On this night she’s in her formal attire: an ao dai, the traditional dress worn by Vietnamese women.
Gage is 82 years old, spry and all business — although she is prone to exclaim “golly gee!” and “isn’t that amazing?” over the most pedestrian-seeming things. It’s April 9 and she’s speaking in the University of Colorado’s Visual Arts Complex theater to an audience of people mostly born in Vietnam.
The crowd has gathered to commemorate the end of the 50th anniversary year of Operation Babylift, the name of the mission directed by President Gerald Ford in 1975 to evacuate around 3,000 babies and children out of South Vietnam as Saigon fell and place them with adoptive families around the world.
Gage says many of the Vietnamese-born in the audience were “born to win.”
“Born to win is you, no matter the circumstances,” she says. “Born to win gave you a bingo card and the little tokens that say ‘I have won.’”
Then she acknowledges their adoptive parents.
“For your loving, generous, inspired parents, who waited, saying send me a daughter, find me a son, we are grateful, are we not?”
And she reminds the crowd of some of the key players who made it happen.
“Why did some of us go to Vietnam and live there in nurseries and try to figure out how to bring you home? Well, the words from Isaiah in the Old Testament have been in our hearts. God says ‘I will not leave you orphaned.’”
The Americans who volunteered at the orphanages when Saigon was shattered did not.
Gage was a volunteer in Vietnam during Operation Babylift, which evacuated children — many frail and malnourished — from multiple orphanages and shepherded them to adoptive families across the United States, Canada, Europe and Australia. She did so through the adoption agency Friends of All Children in Boulder, which created a strong community of Babylift volunteers who remain active nearly two decades after the agency closed in 2008.
Much of Gage’s life since then has been devoted to adoptees.
For years, Gage has led them on Vietnam Motherland Tours, which combine travel, cultural immersion and personal history excavation. She lives in Lakewood and belongs to the Sisters of Loretto Roman Catholic order.
If the they are lucky, like Devaki Murch, they might get to uncover parts of their origin story they haven’t known.
Drawing on paperwork that accompanied them when they arrived in the U.S., Gage will take them to the nurseries that cared for them when they were separated from their parents. Sometimes the nurseries have been shuttered, but the adoptees can still stand near them, to feel their vibe. Then they will visit the provinces they’re from, to see the worlds where they were born.
But that is only part of Gage’s gift, says Murch. “What she can also do is recognize the handwriting in people’s scrapbooks and on their documents.”
The gathering and commemoration in Boulder was Murch’s doing. She called it Invisible Threads and for the month of April, she rented the East Window Gallery in North Boulder to showcase an exhibit she created called “MY NAME IS MIMOSA.” It traced her life as it was shaped “not by family albums or official documents, but by fragments of public record and historical rupture.”
During the grand opening of the exhibit, she watched as Gage sat with a woman who had just started to explore her adoption and origin story. Together they watched original 1975 footage from the nurseries where the woman had lived, a first glance of the early moments of her life.
Contained within were clues to her identity. “It was amazing, because this doesn’t happen to most people in their inquiry, where you get a visual of what your life was like,” Murch said. But that is something she and Gage and others in the Babylift movement are trying to fix.
From April 9 to 12, Murch had a host of events lined up, including a Moth Hour-style storytelling night, talks and readings by Vietnamese authors, a class on writing one’s story and an information session on how DNA tracing can help those who’ve tried but haven’t found their families or want to go deeper.
She had no expectations about how many people would show up. But her Babylift brothers and sisters arrived from 19 states across the country.
They came for the anniversary, community and information, even though some knew that losing and then finding your identity doesn’t always feel like winning.
An orphanage in Vietnam prior to Operation Babylift in 1975. (Courtesy)Devaki Murch: From survivor to mobilizer
Murch didn’t just come to America via Operation Babylift, she survived the crash of the massive Lockheed C-5A Galaxy military transport plane that carried her and 313 other passengers out of Tan Son Nhat Airport in what was Saigon and is now Ho Chi Minh City shortly after 4 p.m. on April 4, 1975.
She was put in the troop compartment at the top of the plane with dozens of other babies, while dozens of older kids fidgeted in the cargo hold below. A staff of volunteers and nurses accompanied the 250 total young children on board.
Shortly after takeoff, the locks on the rear cargo door of the C-5 failed, and the aft pressure door, part of the loading ramp, and the cargo door, blew off, severely damaging the flight controls in the tail, according to the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency. The pilots attempted an emergency landing, but the plane crashed in a marsh two miles short of the runway. The impact crushed the cargo deck. The Defense Intelligence Agency said 175 people survived and 138 were killed, including 78 young children.
“You could look out and you could see the smoke coming. … We set up a morgue over at the Seventh Day Adventist hospital and brought bodies over there. It was a shattering, shattering experience,” recalled MG Homer Smith, a former U.S. defense attaché in Saigon, in a piece he wrote on the Defense Intelligence Agency’s website.
The nursery picture and information Devaki Murch’s adoptive mother, Sunday Murch, received when they were matched through the Boulder adoption agency Friends for All Children. Devaki survived a C-5A military plane crash that killed hundreds, and was later flown to San Francisco, where Sunday picked her up. (Courtesy)Murch survived, and her life after the crash was also lucky. She landed in the arms of a loving, financially stable family on the island of Kauai in Hawaii, with parents who were strict but let their whip-smart daughter follow her own path, including a circuitous one into and out of college. After some starts and stops along the road to adulthood, she landed in the outdoor industry, where she spent 35 years working in marketing and trade show production.
Her industry friends are a who’s who of outdoor athletes, brand presidents, guides, environmental activists and influencers, including Shannon Walton, who says Murch has a “very, very complicated, very very fast-moving mind” that she didn’t allow to dwell too deeply on “being adopted and of a different color than your parents” for much of her life.
Murch characterizes her early relationship with her past like this: “The plane crash and being from Vietnam never was a part of my identity. I was a local kid from Kauai. I just happened to have a great topic for school reports that was my personal history.”
But she started to question her identity in the early 2000s, when “all this stuff” relating to it “started falling into my lap.”
She already knew her first name wasn’t Devaki and her last name wasn’t Murch.
She also knew her original name wasn’t Mimosa — the one she was given at the orphanage. Her adoption paperwork stated her name was Nguyen My Thi Phoung. But in 2005, while on a Motherland tour, Gage showed her an email Gage had received from Rosemary Taylor, the director of Friends for all Children. It said the name on Murch’s adoption papers was not hers. Her name was Tran Ngoc An.
Devaki Murch explains part of the exhibit she created detailing Operation Babylift at the East Wall Gallery in North Boulder. Murch was on a C-5A military cargo plane leaving Vietnam when it crashed, leaving hundreds, including many children, dead. She is helping other adults like her who were adopted into American families as babies during the Vietnam War discover their origin stories. (Tracy Ross, Special to The Colorado Sun)But it wasn’t until she connected with author Linda Boris in 2024, and Boris gave her a copy of a manifest listing her as a survivor on the ill-fated C-5A, that that part of her history became visceral. That spring she was given stewardship of the remaining archives from Friends For All Children, which included intake logs, legal papers, photographs and correspondence. It was then that she began to understand her own story.
The experience was so powerful it was only a matter of time before she began finding herself being a resource for others whose histories were scattered across continents and systems.
Gage had 33 boxes filled with the last remaining archives from Friends For All Children stored in her basement, and Murch began the painstaking process of archiving what she calls the “invisible threads,” connecting the adoptees, caregivers, veterans, volunteers and families who lived through the war “and the layered realities of adoption, identity and belonging.”
Your dad could have been on that plane
During the Babylift event, Murch had many opportunities to share information she’d collected with survivors.
And on the opening night of the exhibit, she had an unexpected visitor.
He entered the small space tucked between businesses in the North Boulder arts district, and scanned his surroundings.
He saw maps on the wall with strings connecting points in Vietnam to points on other continents; a clothes line sagging under the weight of baby diapers symbolizing the constant care of kids; black-and-white photos of orphanages with more babies than cribs, so the babies wiggled and cooed in wooden boxes; and an encyclopedia of newspaper clippings that filled in for the memories of people who couldn’t remember being picked up and shuttled to new lives.
Soon, Murch noticed him looking at a stack of manilla folders on a table.
“The exhibit is a record of what was happening,” she said, walking up and standing beside him. “The folders contain collections of individual records. They’re public, so anyone can see them. But the crazy thing is they’ve never been available to people before.”
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SUBSCRIBEThe young man said his dad was 9 when the planes filled with children started flying out of Vietnam. He left on a different one than Devaki.
“So a really radical and scary thought is that had he not left on another plane he could have been in the cargo hold of the C-5A plane,” she told the young man.
He looked at her like he might not have pieced that together.
“So there’s all those things we think about, those alternative lives,” she continued. “I mean, all the volunteers who put the babies on planes had for paperwork was a stack of parents and a stack of babies. There was no, ‘Oh, Devaki seems like she’s going to be a great kid that’s going to grow up in Hawaii,’ or ‘Kim’s wonderful, she’s going to go to Pensacola, Florida.’ It was just stapling paper together.”
Then she opened a folder on the top of the stack they stood over and a miracle appeared. It held the adoption paperwork of the young man’s dad — so serendipitous it seemed staged. But the young man called his father who lives in Las Vegas, and he flew to Boulder over the weekend. Gage showed the father his file and shared his history. He saw a picture of himself he’d never seen.
When things like that happen, Murch knows she did the right thing by changing the course of her life from outdoor sports marketing to preserving and protecting this history in a comprehensive archive that will one day be housed in an accessible public repository.
She knows it’s right that she spends thousands of her own dollars organizing events like the one in April.
And she knows she’s on track each time she and Gage hear from a person longing to piece together their story, and the two find elements of it among the boxes. They hand deliver it so Gage can present it “in a way that she’s really introducing you to your past,” Murch said.
“It’s so big and so major that we try to do personal deliveries every time. I divided the U.S. into sales rep territories and the ideal thing would be to get three to six adoptees their paperwork during two visits a year.”
But some adoptees haven’t been sure about how much they’re ready to know.
Steve George with several of the original volunteers who helped evacuate babies from Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, during the Vietnam War. George grew up in an adoptive family in Laramie, Wyoming. He says it took years to embrace his history but that now he feels a sense of belonging with his fellow Vietnamese-American adoptees. (Jeremy Hubbard, Special to The Colorado Sun)From avoidance …
No one is obligated to learn anything about their childhood.
And it took Steve George many years before he did.
He was one of five presenters during the story-sharing event at the CU Arts Complex on the second night of the event. He stood before a nearly packed house of adoptees, adoptive parents, a former pilot who’d flown babies out of Vietnam and several septuagenarians who’d volunteered for Friends for All Children.
George left Saigon on a different flight than Murch. After landing at the Presidio, a former U.S. Army post on the northern tip of the San Francisco Peninsula, he was whisked away to a family in Wyoming.
Like many Babylift survivors, his childhood was lonely. He was different, so he didn’t have friends. He wasn’t alone: In the 1970s and ’80s racism against Vietnamese children in the U.S. was rampant. It manifested in physical intimidation, harassment and xenophobia. And like their parents, kids faced slurs and violence.
As a result of his struggles, George had built a protective barrier around himself by the time he became interested in visiting Vietnam and learning about his adoption in his late 20s.
The first time he went it was without expectations. He just wanted to see how he’d feel, and boy, did he have emotions. The thing was, he didn’t understand them.
“Even now, I think I’m still trying to figure it out,” he told The Colorado Sun, “because just being in certain presentations (during the weekend) made me teary-eyed, and I’m like, I don’t even know what’s bringing it about except for different levels of different traumas.”
A similar feeling accompanied him at the start of his Vietnam visit, where he was nervous “because I was like, what am I walking into? Like, meeting all of these adoptees that I never really knew existed even though they’d been doing this for a decade or 15 years in terms of identity and belonging.”
Kim Delevett felt shame as a child wearing the color yellow.
Kim Delevett, shown here at the University of Colorado Visual Arts Center in Boulder on April 11. Growing up, Delevett hated the color yellow because of its association with Asian people. Later in life, she embraced it. At a storytelling event, she told her fellow adoptees, “we need to own yellow. We are Vietnamese Americans. We are who we are and we need to tell our stories.” (Jeremy Hubbard, Special to The Colorado Sun)She was adopted into a family from Pensacola, Florida, and her mother loved dressing her in the color associated with Asian peoples. For her kindergarten school picture she had to wear a yellow turtleneck and shirt with little conical Asian hats and Asian characters on it.
She remembered dreading that day “because I had already been teased for being a gook, for being a chink, for being anything other than white,” she told the audience.
“But I don’t have to say anything, because you know my background. You know what I struggled with. You know that I didn’t ever know my story. You know the feeling of being … other…”
… to acceptance
At 53, Delevett is still working through some of those feelings that shaped her. But last year, someone asked her to be in a pageant representing Vietnam.
“I laughed out loud, and was like, heck, no, why would I do such a thing? But as I thought about what was coming to my life and why it was being presented, I (remembered) it was the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon and losing our country. So I figured, well, you know, there is a reason for this.” And she did it. At the storytelling event during the Invisible Threads gathering, she told her fellow adoptees, “we need to own yellow. We are Vietnamese Americans. We are who we are and we need to tell our stories.”
George’s feelings began to change during his trip to Vietnam. And toward the end, he wanted to visit a memorial to the plane that crashed with Murch aboard.
He contacted the Motherland Tours and was connected to a woman who said she’d be happy to take him. The memorial was just a small piece of the plane sticking out of a huge rice field, he told the audience at the storytelling event, “but I just couldn’t believe that it was here after all these years. Remember, I’m 28 at the time and it was mesmerizing to think of all that happened.”
The big reason he wanted to go was to pay respects to one of his caretakers who had died onboard and who he’d always thought might have been “the one connection that may have known just a little something about my story, because I really know nothing,” he said.
Kim Delevett enters the East Window Gallery in Boulder, which shows a photo of Devaki Murch when she was a baby. Murch’s exhibit “My Name is Mimosa” ran at East Window through the month of April. (Jeremy Hubbard, Special to The Colorado Sun)After the visit, as he was exchanging contact information with the group, he told them the nickname given he was given at the orphanage was “Gyorg” (hard G’s) and that he’d been placed with the George family.
At that moment something clicked for a member of the group. She said “George … George …” and started speaking quickly in Vietnamese to her translator. It turned out she knew him because her sister-in-law had accidentally burned him on his stomach when he was a baby at his orphanage. Indeed, he has a scar, “and here’s this lady basically saying she knows me.”
Let it linger
George’s experience is what Murch hopes will happen.
But she wants us to consider another part of this story.
She says there are times when she excavates information that’s so intense she has to sit with it and hold it and do nothing else for a long, long time.
She explained this to the son of the man who would have died had he been aboard the C-5A in 1975.
In her file there’s a log showing when her adoption started, with her mom calling Friends of All Children. There’s also a Boulder Daily Camera article from about the organization from 1971. The folder holds several other critical documents. “But then, all of a sudden, you get these elements of stories that turn them into a multidimensional thing.”
It might be a crew manifest like the one she found on Facebook long after she’d seen a paper copy, with the names of everyone who died.
“And you think, (someone) is looking at this” and they are the son or daughter, or friend, or sibling of that person.
“So my goal for this project is for these archives not to just be (about the babies) but about all of the people whose job was to take us as orphans and bring us to our new families and in doing so made their own family orphans.” It’s also about a generation raised in the United States but with roots in Vietnam. And it’s about Murch’s story, which is still unfolding.
Devaki Murch, right, in Vietnam in 2005, with sisters who cared for her when she was a baby living in an orphanage before being evacuated on a military transport plane in 1975. Murch was adopted into a family in Hawaii during Operation Babylift, an effort led by President Gerald Ford to evacuate thousands of young children to the U.S. and other countries during the fall of Saigon. She said it wasn’t until she printed this picture that she realized she was Vietnamese. “The plane crash and being from Vietnam never was a part of my identity. I was a local kid from Kauai. I just happened to have a great topic for school reports that was my personal history.” (Courtesy)When she returned to Vietnam in 2005, she brought the records assigned to her when she was adopted.
But during a visit with Gage, Gage said, “these records — they’re not yours.”
They had Murch’s date of birth listed as June 24, 1974. But through her connections, Gage knew Murch was really born Dec. 28, 1973.
Intent on following her threads to their end, Murch is heading back to Vietnam again.
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