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HALF MOON BAY, Calif. – Lara Price is running unusually late.
Her purse was stolen the night before and she’s been playing catch-up all day. But the fastidious Bay Area blues singer doesn’t have time to dwell on it. Her car’s barely in park when she jumps out and grabs gear from the back.
“I hate being late,” she says breathlessly while quickstepping her stilettos into the seaside restaurant, a guitar in one hand and a speaker in another.
She sets up with her Velvet Plum Band warming up inside Sam’s Chowder House. Soon, her sultry voice fills the room, serenading the early dinner crowd and the setting sun with a rendition of Tracy Chapman’s “Give Me One Reason.”
Before the night is over, Price gives a rare performance of her own song, “If You Love Me,” her throaty voice singing, “I'm like a fire, and I need to burn.”
“I feel like when I'm singing that to maybe a Vietnam vet, I'm hoping that maybe he can let some of these ghosts go,” she said. “I want to help these guys if I can, and women, if I can. And so, maybe if they listen to my music, they can let some things go.”
Lately, veterans have been on the mind of Price – a native daughter of Vietnam – with this week marking the 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon.
In the closing days of the Vietnam War, more than 2,500 Vietnamese children were part of Operation Babylift, a mission ordered by President Gerald Ford that sent infants, toddlers and orphans from the war-torn country to adoptive families in the United States and other Western countries. More than 20 commercial and military flights transported the kids in the final weeks of the war. Price was one of those kids.
Retired Air Force pilot Col. Bud Traynor was assigned to fly the first authorized Babylift flight out of Saigon to Clark Air Base in the Philippines. A young captain at the time, Traynor did not know he would be carrying babies.
Early on April 4, 1975, Traynor received a curious call from his commanders asking how many people he could haul on his massive C-5A Galaxy cargo plane.
After some pressing and more calculating, Traynor told his superiors that he could potentially carry 1,000 onboard – which included using the cargo hold. It’s then he realized this would be no ordinary mission.
“(I) told them we could take 1,000 people in the airplane. And they said, ‘Well, OK, how about if they're kids?’ Well, wait a minute, this is a new game now.”
With no obvious game plan for transporting children, Traynor’s parental instincts kicked in. With a toddler and a newborn at home, he instructed his crew to help secure everything from blankets to diapers for the trip.
His C-5A left Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut Air Base just after 4 p.m. with the barest of necessities and more than 300 people on board, including hundreds of children in both the troop compartment and the cargo hold.
Twelve minutes into the flight, disaster struck at 22,000 feet when the door locks on the rear loading ramp failed. The rear cargo door opened explosively, causing a decompression inside the plane and taking out the flight control cables in the rear of the plane.
With very little control of the monster cargo plane, then pushing close to 300 mph, he and his copilot managed to turn the C-5A around for an emergency landing back at the air base, but the plane quickly descended, slammed into a rice paddy, and broke apart.
“I'd left the gear behind, which broke up the integrity of the cargo department, where most of the kids were,” he said. “Basically, everybody downstairs died. Just a handful of people survived.”
In all, 138 people were killed in that crash, including 78 children.
Over the years, critics have argued that they should have never been loaded onto a giant military plane without proper seating in the cargo hold.
To get an idea of what it must have been like inside the belly of a C-5, America Tonight traveled to Travis Air Force Base, an hour northeast of San Francisco, where Traynor’s 22nd Airlift Squadron is still based.
On the tarmac, Capt. Garrett Martin, a C-5M Super Galaxy pilot, is dwarfed by the sheer size of the military’s largest cargo plane. One ladder takes him to the cargo hold, while another takes him to the flight deck, some 30 feet off the ground.
“Obviously, we're quite large,” said Martin, breaking down the specs of the cargo compartment. “We're roughly, nose to tail, 250 feet; wingtip to wingtip, 223 feet; and ground to tail, 65 feet. We can hold a maximum of roughly 50,000 gallons [of jet fuel].”
When asked about the task of carrying children in the cargo hold, and then losing the back door in flight, Martin, a new father, paused.
“When that [door] came off, they lost two of the four hydraulic systems, which made the airplane almost unflyable,” he said, adding that it was a miracle anyone survived.
It was a miracle for Price, a Babylift adoptee, who was told she was on that plane. Like most Babylift adoptees, Price was airlifted out of Saigon with very few records and almost no information about her birth family.
“I grew up with this belief that I came over on this plane that crashed, and I was a survivor, and that I was one of the lucky babies who made it out of that horrific accident on April 4th,” she says. “Three years ago, I found out that I wasn't on the plane.”
Loretta Olmstead
Lara Price's adoptive mother
The news, which Price discovered after speaking with a volunteer at the orphanage where she was placed, left her in disbelief. She had already visited the site of the crash during a trip to Vietnam, imagining what it must have been like for herself and the other people on the plane.
“Not that you want to be part of a plane crash. That sounds really odd, but I did want that to be part of my history because that is what I grew up believing,” she said. “That's one of the things I did know. And then when you find out, guess what? That is not part of your history at all. It was traumatic.”
The crash was also traumatic for Lara’s adoptive mother, Loretta Olmstead, who spent two years trying to adopt a baby from Vietnam.
“I remember I had to write a letter to the president of Vietnam, asking permission to adopt a citizen from their country and all that,” Olmstead said. “And then, when the crash happened, it was like, ‘Oh, I'm not going to get a child now.’ I mean, all those babies died. And I hadn't been matched up yet.”
Devastated, Olmstead believed her chances of adopting from Vietnam were over. But two weeks later, she received a call that her baby was waiting in a Denver hospital.
Olmstead and her husband jumped at the chance to get her, despite growing criticism from those who felt the operation was a public relations stunt orchestrated by the White House.
But there was also a real fear over the children's future. Despite the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, the North Vietnamese Army continued its push toward Saigon. People who ran orphanages there refused to allow any of their children to be taken by the communists.
“I know that in the confusion of war, some things may have happened that made people uncomfortable,” Olmstead said. “But in the long run, it was wonderful to have had those children come here. It was saving those kids that we just didn't know what their future would've been like.”
Olmstead wanted to ensure a bright future for the newest member of her family, a 6-month-old baby girl nicknamed “Princess” by her caregivers. She wanted to give her daughter the life she deserved.
But Price has sometimes struggled with that new life and coming to terms with her ethnicity. Over the years, Price says she’s become more comfortable in her skin and embraced her Vietnamese heritage. She recently ventured back to her homeland – a journey that she said was bittersweet.
“The first week, I was a wreck. It was laughing and crying, laughing and crying. [The] landing was tearful, because I looked down and the first thing on my mind was, ‘My mother could be down there somewhere,’” she said. “And then, you're walking in Ho Chi Minh through a sea of people and you're just wondering, ‘Am I related to any of these people?’”
It’s a journey of discovery she’s determined to continue. It’s also one that brought her and her mother to the Presidio Officer’s Club in San Francisco for an exhibition commemorating the 40th anniversary of Operation Babylift.
The exhibit pays tribute to the adoptees and their parents, as well as the medical staff and volunteers. In addition to news clips and documents that accompanied the infants, there also are interviews from the past year with adoptees, including Price.
While taking in the exhibit, Price and her mother met Sister Mary Nelle Gage, a nun who had worked at the orphanage where Price spent the first six months of her life.
Price also reunited with Lonny Weissman, a Vietnam veteran she met through social media. Weissman volunteered to help care for the more than 1,500 babies who passed through the Presidio, the former U.S. Army base, on their way to adoptive families.
“As it became more and more apparent that South Vietnam was going to fall to the North, it became much more urgent to get the kids out,” Weissman recalled. “So we started seeing infants – and I mean, literally, kids who were weeks old up to months old. We got kids that came malnourished, dehydrated, really not in really good shape.”
Assisting the children after they arrived had a lasting impact on Weissman.
“As a Vietnam veteran and somebody who served in their country during the conflict. I felt that this piece here was a huge payback,” Weissman said. “That bringing these kids here basically paid honor to the 50,000 plus names that are on that [Vietnam War Memorial] wall and the sacrifices that they made to ensure that we had the ability to do what we did.”
It’s an effort Price is paying forward. Her past inspires her work as a blues singer. Back at Sam’s Chowder House, Price’s lyrics reflect a life lived as a Babylift adoptee.
“I'm like a fire and I need to burn," she sang. “If you love me, let me go.”
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