What Led Me to You

I am a social worker and psychologist who has breakfasted on notions about the unconscious for fifty years, but I had never before experienced, as in this sudden materialization of my late parents, such a clear example of my unconscious not just  determining but dictating the steps I would take to work with Afghan women.

In Vietnam in 1975, two dramatic, bone-shaking blows occurred in my parents’ lives. My parents began living in Vietnam in 1973 when I was a sophomore in college in  Minnesota. My father had been posted to Saigon as part of the US mission to drive  out the North Vietnamese forces threatening to overtake the South Vietnamese government we were supporting in the name of democracy. His job, along with two  other CIA officials, was to create and oversee a “black ops” radio station designed to  spread propaganda that would disillusion the North Vietnamese with respect to their communist leaders and convert them and the Viet Cong guerillas to democracy.  My physical therapist mother, designated a US Embassy “trailing spouse,” spent her days providing health care to napalm victims and others wounded by the war and coordinating the social-service efforts of the embassy wives.

Each of my parents, from their own stations in this war-tortured place, was trying to  do good per their shared, deeply held belief in equality, the basic goodness of humanity, and the right of every person on the globe to freedom and a chance to  create a unique, good life for themselves. My father had attempted to achieve this throughout his career via his job as a clandestine CIA operative aimed at helping the peoples  of repressive regimes toward democracy per the American creed as a superpower of  the era. My mother worked to aid the many displaced, traumatized, and impoverished Vietnamese. The idea that all human beings were fundamentally the same and deserving of the  same chances was, to her, simply a given. This made her fierce.

Both my parents were busy and determined, trying to  work toward the good in their very different realms. And then, as 1974 turned into  1975, the American project in South Vietnam began to collapse. We’d spent nearly twenty years trying to firmly establish a democratic regime in the country, but that grand scheme was failing. The ambassador was insistently denying this, but  all the embassy staff knew the truth. The explosions aimed at the capital from the  surrounding countryside were louder and more frequent each day, and the intelligence corroborated what was now inevitable. As winter progressed, in spite of  the ambassador’s cheery reports, plans were fashioned by other embassy staff for the  evacuation of the Americans from the country. The plans were thin, however,  for the thousands of Vietnamese people who worked for and with the Americans.    When my father and his colleagues learned the nature of the plans being made—or  rather not being made—they made a carefully calculated choice. My father  and the team moved the entire radio station staff and their families—a total of 1,300  people—to Phú Quốc Island, cleaving to a cover story to please the ambassador  but secretly preparing, under cover in another way, for the worst.

My mother, meanwhile, left in Saigon, felt panicked, like all those in the southern  capital, by the sense of imminent disaster. She immersed herself in an effort to get the  orphans fathered and abandoned by American servicemen—cleared for adoption  by Americans—out of the country before Saigon fell. She, like my father, wanted to stand by these people to whom the US had made promises, with whom she had forged a connection, whose faces and hearts she knew, and whom she had come to  love.

On my end, at Carleton College in Minnesota, I was somewhat aware that things were thickening in Vietnam, but I wasn’t up on the latest news, or, in fact, the crisis at hand.

Then came the phone call.

I heard my mother’s faraway voice through the static.

“Oh sweetie, don’t worry. He’s okay,” she said. I didn’t know what she was referring  to. “We’ll be okay. Don’t worry. I’m in Taipei. He’s still there but he’ll be okay,  sweetie.” Her voice was all mixed up, the sentences rushed together. I could feel her anxiety like a hundred birds  zooming in my stomach.

I was able to make out that things were really bad in Saigon. She had been evacuated, along with the few other embassy wives, to Taipei, and was in intermittent communication with  my father.

My father, she told me, was still on Phú Quốc Island with his staff. He was going to  be okay. She kept repeating this. “He’s figuring it out. He’ll get out, he’ll get them all out. He’ll find a way.” Clearly, she was worried sick. “I love you,” my  mother said over and over.

Then, almost in passing, mixed in with her words about my father, she mentioned  some sort of orphan flight she’d helped load three and a half weeks earlier. “It was awful,” she said. “The babies were shrieking.” This message traversed the faraway  oceans and continents into my ears, but I didn’t really register it, since she quickly  returned to trying to convey what she knew about my father. Only later would I hear  of her own trauma that wrote itself indelibly, along with the terror about my father’s safety,  into my mother’s nerves:

As the American exodus was nearing, my mother and the other American women involved in the embassy’s social service efforts were not going to let the world  end for the orphans. This was part of our responsibility as Americans, both to  the Vietnamese women whom our soldiers had used and to the children they had fathered and left behind. “Operation Baby Lift” went into full gear. The first flight of the  operation was scheduled for April 4th.

My mother and the other embassy wives, twelve American caretakers who had volunteered to look after the children during the flight, and scores of babies  and children, assembled at Tan Son Nhut Air Base. My mother went out to the tarmac to help get the children settled into the C-5A Galaxy, the cargo plane widely used  by the US Air Force.

When she and the others had finally gotten the babies and toddlers all strapped  in, then stepped off the plane, hope rose within her. These children, at least, would have nice homes and loving families, unlike so many of the children on  the streets.

Then, twelve minutes later, it happened: the huge Air Force plane  crashed into a rice paddy off the end of the runway.

Utterly shattered, my mother and others met the children, living, injured, and unconscious, as they were brought back to the terminal. 138 people died, 78 of  them children.

My mother was, ever after, changed.

This is how my father’s story ended:

Not long after their arrival on Phú Quốc Island, he heard on Vietnamese radio—not from headquarters—that Ambassador Martin had finally agreed to a US evacuation. When he finally got through to the embassy on April 30th, he was hurriedly told, “Get out any way you can.” As suspected, there was no plan for the evacuation—either for the Americans or the Vietnamese. My father and the others were left stranded in Vietnam when the Sea Knight helicopters took off from the embassy roof. An image of the finality of the US presence in Vietnam broadcast around the world.

My father was not completely shocked at the turn of events, but was still stunned by  those stark words, “Get out any way you can!” He had thought the embassy would  eventually pull its act together, and refuse to abandon its loyal Vietnam  employees—or its American ones—but instead, the message they’d received was essentially “We are abandoning you.” My father was going to do nothing of the sort to the people we  had employed and exploited and who had led us and aided us throughout the war. He  was not going to leave them to suffer retribution, imprisonment, or worse. As he  wrote in his memoir, “We had a moral obligation to deliver our Vietnamese employees and their families to safety and give them a chance to rebuild their lives.”

Madly scrambling and determined to find an answer, my father contacted ships passing through the Gulf of Thailand. Eventually he gained the consent of the captain of the American Challenger to take everyone with him on  board. In the dark of night as the freighter ship moved eastward through the Pacific, the  1,300 souls crammed together, slept on deck, and ate giant pots of food cooked  by the sailors. Everyone survived the five-day journey to Guam, including two babies who were born on board. The Vietnamese employees and their families were housed on the South Pacific island until they were resettled safely in the US.

Those words, “Get out any way you can,” and their chilling unspoken implication, “We are  abandoning you,” thrust into my father’s warm, pulsing body like an icy lance and forever stayed in his bones.

Both of my parents were trying to help the people our country’s actions had  threatened or harmed. The truth, one of the many ironies of the world, is that sometimes you try to help and you fail; other  times you mess up and succeed. My father  triumphed. My mother’s compassionate actions met arbitrary, devastating tragedy. All we can, and perhaps must, do is try.

August 2021: US Air Force Planes

In April 1975, the CH-46 Sea Knight helicopters took off from the embassy  rooftop while desperate Vietnamese people roared up the embassy stairwell, trying to board and escape to safety. In 2021, the American Air Force’s C-17 Globemaster III  transport aircraft departed from Kabul airport while desperate Afghans raced  alongside the ascending planes, likewise hoping to climb aboard and stow away. The  deal Americans offered in both cases was: “We will help you and use you, aid and abet  you for a while, and then we will abandon you.”

With the departure of those American planes from Bagram Air Base, we were essentially saying to the people of Afghanistan, and particularly to the Afghan girls  and women, what Saigon station had said to my father’s team and the South  Vietnamese population. And that is what the lives of Afghan women and girls  became: lives ruled by an order from fleeing Americans to “get out any way you can.” A similar message echoed from the world as a whole: “Get out of the country, or out from under the Taliban’s guns, oppression, the denial of all your human rights, any  way you can.” And: “If luck isn’t with you, or you don’t have a lot of money, or you  aren’t well connected, we will seldom help you. Your lot is to live under the tyranny  and cope with and thwart it—and get out from under it—any way you can.” If you can.

While utterly unthought at the time, looking back, I believe my parents’ experiences in Vietnam  were at play in my unconscious when I jumped, without a moment’s hesitation, into the world of the Afghan young women. And the political outrage I felt on  beholding the images of US aircraft leaving Bagram airport soon turned, as I got to  know the young women in my groups, into dismay and to a total commitment to doing whatever small thing I could to ease their minds and hearts, and defy the  world’s dictates. We had asked the Vietnamese, and were now asking the Afghan young women, to be braver than we were. To be the true Americans—the ones cleaving to the ideals of the Declaration of Independence. They were and are the ones holding the red, white, and  blue. The curdling tearful dismay and anger inside me were a resurrection of my parents’ own dismay at American actions in Vietnam, and of their determination, each in their own way, to do what they could to defy,  challenge, and rectify the situation.

My parents, roaring inside me, showed me that when you are dismayed by something  offensive, and unconscionable in the world, you pounce into action. You do not pause to sit and muse or cogitate. You know.  You feel. You hurl yourself in. When told to “get out any way you can,” you get your trapped kindred human beings out of their predicament, by overt or covert means. You get out—to help—any way you can.  

 

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A version of this essay will be appearing in the Summer 2026 issue of The American Scholar.