Angels of An Phong

They say that abandonment is a wound that never heals. I say only that an abandoned child never forgets.” – Mario Balotelli

By DAVE BERRY

An Phong Orphanage in Vung Tau, South Vietnam, was a desperate place. Cold, damp and dirty, it was a last chance for babies born of mixed heritage. Many of the children in that lonely human warehouse were Vietnamese fathered by black, white and brown Americans, Koreans, Thais, Aussies… you get the picture. A child on the street in wartime Vietnam had little chance. A mixed-race child on the street had no chance.

The facility, run by overworked Catholic nuns, had few creature comforts. There was shelter and food, but little human contact… and children died at an alarming rate. The toll on their caregivers was also high.

It was late 1971 in the waning days of the Vietnam War, and our visit was the first of two to An Phong, which means “Winds of Peace.” There were only three of us on that first trip, and all we could do was hug the little ones, hoist the older boys onto our shoulders for a ride around the shattered courtyard and write the story of their plight.

I was in that seaside city to do a different story, but we found the orphanage and added it to our agenda. I took photos, a fellow Army journalist and I shared the writing and we sent the story out through the usual channels. It wasn’t something the Stars and Stripes normally picks up, and who knows if any civilian papers used it.

But one little paper in Kansas did, and it changed lives. Mom sent the article to the Russell Daily News, which ran it on the front page. While I was mildly distressed she sent my high school class photo to the paper instead of my Army head shot, I was still glad it ran.

I knew my little sister Cindy and a group of Russell High girls wrote and sent packages to servicemen overseas. They called themselves SWAK (Sealed With A Kiss), and I had received a couple of their “care packages” containing candy melted from the heat, cookies crushed from the long trip but still tasty, decks of cards, a football, newspapers, even packets of Kool Aid or orange Fizzies to make the water taste better. Whatever they sent, we shared it all and enjoyed it a lot.

I wrote Cindy about the orphanage, but I couldn’t tell her about the filth, the damp hallways, the smoke-filled kitchen, the stifling atmosphere in the nursery with wall-to-wall cribs, babies sleeping on metal springs and two women changing diapers around the clock.

The nuns tried, but they were overwhelmed. Sister Marie, one of the six sisters, had died from overwork the month before. American soldiers visited, delivered supplies, provided drinking water and helped with medical aid. Sailors from the USNS Corpus Christi Bay, a helicopter repair ship, had delivered 15 boxes of clothing. But there was never enough. An Australian unit was hurriedly building a new, more comfortable facility. Some of the older children had already been moved out. But the younger ones were just surviving day to day.

I asked SWAK to send its next “care package” to the orphans rather than to us. “All the kids want is a little love,” I wrote. “We don’t need a thing.” I had no idea what that suggestion would yield. In a few weeks, two large boxes arrived crammed with things for little kids – toys, soap, shampoo, toothbrushes, washcloths, candy, jewelry and dolls. It was amazing.  

We finagled a second trip, requisitioned a Jeep, and showed up at the orphanage with our boxes of goodies. The nuns tore into the packages and passed out the contents to the chattering mob of kids. I think everyone got something. We got a lot of hugs around the knees that day and saw smiles replace the despair. At least for one day.

My thoughts go back often to that orphanage. One photo I treasure is of three little boys sitting idly on the concrete steps. I worried about those little guys and grieved that the odds weren’t good for any of them. Another, of one of the older girls holding a toddler with his foot sticking through his sandal, haunted me. I called them my “Angels of An Phong” and kept them on my office wall as long as I had an office.

I hope she made it. I hope they all made it. But because they were not fully Vietnamese, I had my doubts they were enjoying beautiful lives in Ho Chi Minh City. I daydreamed about the three little boys, hoping they survived to adulthood.

But I had pretty much given up on ever really knowing… until I received the email from Mary Steers in Australia. Mary’s husband Rodger had been a chaplain in the Royal Australian Air Force, serving in Vietnam while I was there. She had spotted my photos on my website and her husband recognized a few of the kids.

We corresponded. I sent her my original story from 1971 and linked her to a few more photos. She told of her husband’s efforts to relocate the orphans to a better place in a nearby village. She talked about “Father Qui and the Vagabond Boys” rescued from the streets of Saigon. She said her husband was abducted and held by machete-wielding Vietnamese women upset about the new orphanage moving into their village of Bai Dau. She told me the names of the nuns and where one or two might be today.  

The story of the orphans of Vietnam was personal to Mary. Her husband was still impacted by the experience, and her cousin Margaret Moses, who had worked with children in Saigon, flying them to France and America. She was one of the 124 killed in the crash of an American C-5A cargo plane during “Operation Babylift” in April 1975. The dead included 78 children from orphanages like the one I had visited.

Another 175 children survived the crash and went on to new homes in the United States, and thousands more left Vietnam on other flights. Mary believes most of the orphans I fell in love with at An Phong made it to a better life… some to France, some to America, others to Belgium and Australia. I want to believe that too.

I plan to start up the conversation with Mary again. Maybe I can locate Sister Catherine in France. She was French/Vietnamese but spoke English better than the others. I might even send a message through the Vietnamese-language website of the “new” An Phong Orphanage. There’s even an Operation Babylift Facebook page.

My Angels of An Phong would be in their forties or fifties now. Maybe the 13-year-old who got her first doll from the SWAK package remembers me taking her picture. I didn’t ask her name, but Rodger says it might have been Lin. Maybe the boy who rode on my shoulders and didn’t want to come down remembers the crazy Americans who brought the football.

I’m an optimist. In this age of the Internet, all it takes is a simple search for “An Phong Orphans” and the photos on my personal webpage pop to the top. Someday one of my “Angels of An Phong” will do as Mary did… type in a simple search and see themselves in my photos.

I hope they call to talk. I just want to know that they made it.

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Footnote: Those of you who grew up listening to Paul Harvey on the radio will remember this : “And now, the rest of the story.” I wanted so much for those kids I fell in love with more than 50 years ago to survive and thrive, and my dream was that eventually one would see my writing online, reach out and tell me they were okay. Well, two years ago in 2023, one did.

A woman named Saran called from New Orleans to tell me she was “doing just fine.” When I had visited the orphanage in late 1971, she had been a tiny baby in a room full of metal cribs and crying children. The nuns called her Baby Trang Nguyen. At the age of four, just before the fall of Saigon, she left Vietnam aboard one of the planes that made up Operation Babylift.

Saran and I talked by phone for a long while, then picked up the conversation online, became Facebook friends… and promised to stay in touch. She had found her birth father, a man who never knew she existed, then lost him to Agent Orange. She survived Hurricane Katina and moved to the East Coast, where she worked for a time with Queen Latifa. Back to New Orleans, she has become a successful filmmaker and recently debuted a well-received stage play. Yes, “Baby Trang,” you are doing fine. I am so proud of the woman you’ve become. Thank you for finding me. I will always be your friend.

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Dave Berry is the retired editor of the Tyler Morning Telegraph, where this column originally ran in January 2016. He served as a U.S. Army journalist in Vietnam in 1971-72.