Veterans Reunite with 'Precious Cargo' 50 Years After the Fall of Saigon [View all]

One woman's quest to say ‘thank you’ led to the colonel who ran her refugee camp and the aircraft maintainer who may have loaded her onto a C-130 and life in America

Fifty years ago, two-year-old Phan Kim Phuong was handed up into a military aircraft, her future a near-complete blank save one truth: She would not grow up in Vietnam. Saigon was falling to the North Vietnamese, people were scrambling to get out, and unbeknownst to the little girl, her family, her future, and her country were all about to be irrevocably altered.

“Her country” was about to become the United States, and Phuong was about to become Kim McNulty, an American girl growing up in an adoptive family in Pensacola, Florida, completely severed from her mother, community, and heritage.

More than 3,000 children were evacuated from Vietnam in those final days, arriving in a country deeply divided from its involvement in the war. And yet many of them were welcomed by a host of Americans who wanted to help refugee families. Military members, church communities, and local residents provided shelter, meals, music—whatever they could to smooth the transition of lost, traumatized souls into citizens.

Now, half a century after the fall of Saigon, some of them are reconnecting.

Kim—now Kim Delevett—is one of the people reaching out to find others who share a piece of her history. Along the way she’s found the Air Force officer who ran the refugee camp she lived in, an aircraft maintainer whose hands may very well have been the ones that loaded her onto that C-130 plane, and others whose experiences have in some way overlapped with her own.


https://thewarhorse.org/vietnam-refugee-finds-veterans-helped-her-leave-saigon/