Escape From Saigon: How a Vietnam War Orphan Became an American Boy

Escape From Saigon: How a Vietnam War Orphan Became an American Boy, is the story of one of the orphaned children who was airlifted out of Saigon in the final, chaotic days of the Vietnam War.

Today Matt Steiner is an emergency room physician. But once he was a thin little boy living in Saigon, South Vietnam, with his elderly grandmother, who struggled to earn enough money to feed him.

No longer able to provide for him, she asked an American agency, Holt International, to care for him. Holt sought to find adoptive families in the United States for children like Matt. As he waited for a family, Matt struggled with his feelings of abandonment, first by his mother and then by his grandmother. He also worried about the war, which was drawing closer to Saigon.

Finally a family was found for Matt and he anxiously awaited the day he could join them. But in March 1975, South Vietnam began to rapidly fall to North Vietnam. Rumors of mass slaughter by conquering Communist troops put everyone in panic. As Communist troops encircled Saigon, closing off all avenues of escape except by air, Matt wondered if he would ever reach his new family. Like many orphaned and abandoned children, he was mixed blood--half Vietnamese, half American--and was thought to be at special risk should he still be there when the Communists took over, for in him flowed the "blood of the enemy."

Miraculously, the American government decided to help airlift orphans like Matt, and he was able to make it to his new family. For years he rejected his Vietnamese heritage. As a young man he had an opportunity to return to Vietnam, and there he confronted his past in his quest to find forgiveness and peace.

This project is dear to my heart, for I am the adoptive mother of one of the Operation Babylift children. My daughter Alison, who was known as Alice Spring when she was an orphaned infant in South Vietnam, was also rescued by Operation Babylift. Once she was sickly and malnourished. Today she is a college graduate, preschool teacher and a mother.

Warren, Andrea. Escape from Saigon: How a Vietnam War Orphan Became an American Boy. September 2004. 128p. illus. Farrar/Melanie Kroupa, $17 (0-374-32224-4). 959.704.

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