The Origin Story of the Operation Babylift Collection

How an Accidental Archivist Became the Keeper of Her Own History

In June 2024, Devaki Murch, an Operation Babylift adoptee, C-5A Galaxy crash survivor, and event producer, received an unexpected opportunity: to serve as the steward of the original Operation Babylift archives from the Friends For All Children adoption agency. Sister Mary Nelle didn't choose Devaki because she was a trained archivist. She chose her because Devaki would do things differently.

Devaki became what she calls an "accidental archivist"—the keeper of her own community's story.

2024: Understanding What She Held

Before anything else, Devaki needed to understand what was actually in those boxes. She spent months on meticulous processing - cataloging contents, assessing condition, identifying what existed and what it meant. Flight manifests. Correspondence. Photographs of children whose names she didn't yet know. Records of a massive humanitarian operation carried out in chaos.

Simultaneously, she researched potential repositories—Regis University, the Library of Congress, and Texas Tech University. She also began reaching out to the Operation Babylift community itself, quietly building connections with adoptees, caregivers, and veterans. Listening to what they hoped the collection might hold, archives that they held personally and understanding what potentially could be in the FFAC collection.

When archives are created through systems of separation, they must be returned through relationships of care. Even before she had language for this principle, Devaki was practicing it.

2025: Processing and Building

While most archivists might rush to the dramatic adoption files, Devaki spent 2025 immersed in transportation records and office files. Flight logistics. Inter-agency communications. Supply chains. The operational machinery behind the evacuations.

This wasn't the typical choice, but Devaki understood something crucial: to honor the human stories, she first needed to understand the systems that created them. This deep, unglamorous work laid the groundwork for everything to come.

In 2025, Torrey House Press became a fiscal sponsor for StoryScope Studio, providing the organizational infrastructure to sustain the work. Texas Tech University's Vietnam Center & Archive is the leading choice as the permanent repository. The collection will have a home. The work had organizational capacity. What Devaki is calling "Love Ethic Archival Practice" is grounded in care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect, and knowledge, and has a structure to sustain it.

2026: The Year of Connection

With two years of foundational work complete, 2026 marks a profound shift: direct connection with adoptees.

This is when Devaki will reach out personally to share parts of their history from the records. Not mass mailing people, but individual, relationship-based connections. Adoptees and families will receive the documents, evidence of their journeys from Viet Nam. For many of them, it is their first time seeing their records. The team will also be conducting oral history interviews. This process is not standard research extractive interviews; it is also community documentation, where adoptees' voices become part of the archive itself.

2026 represents the proof of concept for Love Ethic Archival Practice. Each file delivered, each oral history documented, each connection made will refine and validate the methodology. This year of intensive adoptee outreach, hopefully supported by the Notre Dame Love Ethic Social Innovation Fellowship, will test and hone the framework through practice, demonstrating that relationship-centered archival work is not only possible but more effective and healing than extractive approaches.

The work extends to caregivers who've always wondered what happened to the children they once loved, and veterans whose experiences with the children were rays of light in dark times. It will also include learning from the veterans who served in the war, both American veterans and Vietnamese veterans. Key milestones include the "Invisible Threads" exhibition launch; a presentation at the Texas Tech Vietnam Conference in Hanoi, where Vietnamese perspectives will be central to scholarship on their own history; and the publication of "Invisible Threads: Stories Connected by Operation Babylift".

2027 and Beyond: Sustainability

With methodology proven and refined, 2027 focuses on deepening connections and scaling sustainably, establishing a regional circuit to introduce adoptees to the Operation Babylift story, and expanding partnerships with Vietnamese diaspora organizations.

We are here while the voices that hold this history are still here to share them.

This is not just preserving the past. This is changing how the future approaches contested histories, traumatized communities, and the power of archives to separate or to repair.

The Operation Babylift Collection: A Mission of StoryScope Studio

Operation Babylift Collection

Love as archival practice