What Might Caputo’s Story Remind You Of?

From reporter Philip Caputo, who most recently wrote about the carnage at Kent State and who — in Means of Escape, the book I hold in my lap — wrote about his emotional return to Saigon to report its fall to the Vietcong, more than a decade after he’d left Vietnam as a soldier:

[M]y first story had nothing to do with bombardments, battalions, attacks, and repulses but with a far more commonplace horror — a plane crash. A C5-A cargo plane carrying 319 people, 243 of them Vietnamese war orphans, had a pressurization failure minutes after takeoff from Tan Son Nhut. Its rear cargo doors blew open, and it went down in the rice paddies north of the city, killing 199, most of them kids. It was the worst air disaster in American aviation history.

Impossible to look at all those small bodies, burnt and dismembered in the paddy mud, and not go numb. The only thing I felt was a dull anger. The U.S. Defense Attache’s Office, which was organizing the evacuation of the orphans, had more flights planned. The operation had been dubbed a “mission of mercy” and the aircraft were called “mercy planes,” but the real purpose of the flights was to provide a cover for evacuating Americans. Forty-three of DAO’s female employees had been aboard the C5-A that had unmercifully crashed, and half of them had been killed. After touring the crash site, I went to the DAO compound to gather the necessary statistics. It was in “Pentagon East,” the big brick building — it reminded me of an enormous high school–that had been Westmoreland’s headquarters. I got the numbers and then began to ask a few impertinent questions of a woman with the prickly, defensive manner of a midlevel bureaucrat, a GS-10, say. Where were these kids being flown to? To a processing center in the United States, to wait there for American families to adopt them. Why had we waited until now to evacuate them? She looked at me as if I were mad. The Communists were overrunning the country, orphanages had been abandoned. But, Madame, do we suppose the Communists are incapable of caring for orphans? The fact is, aren’t we using these kids as a way of getting our nonessential personnel out of the country without alarming the South Vietnamese? … more below

The woman glared at me. I softened the question. These kids were Vietnamese, so what right did we have to pluck them out of their country and spirit them to ours? Every right in the world, the woman said with her gray eyes boring into mine, and I saw it then — the righteous glimmer of the American missionary off to save the world. One could argue that if we had left well enough alone, one hundred and forty-three children would not have been spewed across a rice paddy — a literal case of better Red than dead — but the habit of rescuing Vietnamese from themselves was too ingrained. The spirit of Graham Greene’s quiet American, Pyle, lived on: a destructive innocence.

I filed a hard-news piece: no anger, no horror, just the straight stuff: SAIGON–At least 199 persons, most of them orphans between eight months and 12 years old, died Friday when…

Profitt had the right take on the mercy mission.

“It’s a goddamned government-sponsored kidnapping..” …