About Archives in Love and War

In 1975, over 3,300 Vietnamese children were airlifted to the United States during the final days of the war as a part of a larger generation of displaced Vietnamese youth, including many Amerasian children born of mixed Vietnamese and American heritage, who would eventually make their way to the United States through evacuation, adoption, and refugee resettlement.

How the project started: The records of many of the adoptees journeys, including flight manifests, medical files, and personal adoption documents were found in boxes held by Friends For All Children, the Boulder, CO based adoption agency that coordinated their placement. In 2024, those boxes were entrusted by Sr Mary Nelle Gage to Devaki Murch, an Operation Babylift adoptee and survivor of the April 4th C-5A crash, with one directive: connect as many adoptees as possible.

Archives in Love and War returns those records to the individuals they belong to. Through trauma-informed archival practices, personal file deliveries, oral history interviews, and community gatherings, we consider this return the highest form of preservation.

For many Operation Babylift adoptees and for others displaced by war this is only the start of reconstructing our individual pasts and our shared story. The implications of citizenship, adoptions and first family connections are asking us all to come forward and make connections and create change. These projects make that happen.

Your Gift Returns a Legacy

By donating to Archives in Love and War, you aren’t just funding a project; you are facilitating a homecoming to the place that it all started, and a personal homecoming within each refugee. We create projects, films, organizations and stories to honor the legacy of those who made our lives possible, the caregivers, the veterans and our families and our children who inherited our history.

How Your Donation Makes an Impact:

• Funding the detailed, trauma-informed processing of sensitive adoption and medical files.

• Covering the costs of personal file deliveries and community gatherings that foster healing and connection.

• Supporting oral history interviews to capture the lived experiences of adoptees, refugees, Amerasian families, and caregivers before these stories are lost to time.

• Transforming paper records into a living, searchable legacy for a community that has spent decades searching for answers.

This endeavor isn’t just about archiving the past. It’s about honoring the present.

Join us in the highest form of preservation: returning a person’s history to their own hands.

Archives in Love and War

Reconnecting the people, the stories and the archives.

Team Members