Latest news with #Murch
Yahoo
30-04-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Plane crash survivor looks back on harrowing evacuation from Vietnam during Operation Babylift 50 years ago
DENVER (KDVR) — Hope turned into heartbreak 50 years ago this month, when a cargo plane loaded with Vietnamese orphans bound for America crashed in a rice field. Devaki Murch was on that plane. Now she's sharing her survival story – and the story of Operation Babylift – in a traveling exhibit. 'It's a collective story of all of us,' Murch told FOX31 during a reception for the exhibit, which opened in February at Regis University in Denver. Colorado nun remembers Operation Babylift 50 years after evacuation of Vietnamese orphans from war zone It details the bold and historic effort to get Murch and thousands of other orphaned Vietnamese children out of that country during the final days of the Vietnam War, the heartbreaking plane crash that killed dozens of those children, and the new life in a new land awaiting those who did make it out. Few know the story better than Devaki. She lived it. 'I survived a plane crash,' Murch said. Just a nine-month-old baby, she was on board the first cargo flight out of Vietnam. It was an Air Force C-5 that malfunctioned and crashed a few miles outside of Saigon, killing 138 people, including 78 children. Murch likely survived because of where she was seated. Older children seated in the cargo area at the bottom of the plane perished when the belly of the plane hit the ground and skidded for a quarter mile in a rice paddy near the airport. But the young babies, like Murch, were strapped into the upper portion of the cabin and made it out alive. Most of the adoptees' records were destroyed in the crash. Murch had no details about her birth or her birth parents. 'I don't have a hospital bracelet. I don't have a little lock of hair when I came home. What I have are front-page New York Times articles and I have survival manifests. That's my baby records,' Murch said. While sifting through some boxes kept by a Colorado agency that helped facilitate the adoptions, one file folder caught Murch by surprise. 'I opened it up and I went, Mommy! And it was my mother's handwriting,' Murch said. Operation Babylift crash survivor still searching for answers 50 years later They were letters she was seeing for the very first time, detailing the efforts her adoptive parents went through to make her their own. 'It tracked the entire story before I became my parents' child, before I existed in their arms, in that folder. And there are these letters from my mother who wanted a baby,' Murch said. Now she plans to take her exhibition on the road, showing very personal artifacts around the country so everyone can learn the story of Operation Babylift. 'When you're dealing with humans, you're dealing with sensitive emotions, you're dealing with history, you're dealing with history, is you really, really need to do it properly,' Murch said. You can learn more about the orphans and volunteers involved in Operation Babylift in a special report. 'The Vietnam War: Flight to a New Future,' airing Sunday, May 4 at 9 p.m. ET on News Nation. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.


Yomiuri Shimbun
28-04-2025
- General
- Yomiuri Shimbun
The Children of the Vietnam War's ‘Operation Babylift' Have Turned 50. A Look at the Lives They Built.
Devaki Murch Devaki Murch, who was one of the babies who survived the tragic crash of the first Operation Babylift flight out of Saigon on April 4, 1975, found her adoption records in a basement in Colorado and is now trying to connect dozens of people who survived the accident and went on to be adopted in the United States with the records of their past. They are turning 50 now, the babies laid out on airplane seats, six to a row, held and fed by strangers who took turns caring for them as they took artillery fire and fled the bombs and booms of Saigon. They were part of Operation Babylift, an effort led by the American military to rescue babies from Vietnamese orphanages ahead of the fall of Saigon 50 years ago this month. 'This is the least we can do, and we will do much, much more,' President Gerald Ford said on April 3, 1975. The operation came after 10 grueling years of U.S. involvement in the 20-year-long Vietnam War, a conflict that took millions of Vietnamese lives, more than 58,000 American lives and divided the country. As the North Vietnamese closed in on Saigon in April 1975, American civilians were evacuated en masse. The first Operation Babylift flight was catastrophic: The C-5A carrying more than 300 people crashed into a rice paddy 27 minutes after takeoff, killing 78 babies and about 50 adults, including 35 American military personnel. The babies who survived didn't remember it. And as children growing up in American homes, often as the only Asian American kids in their Wonder Bread hometowns, forgetting the crash or the airlift or the reason they were adopted was a matter of survival. 'My family was just amazing and wonderful,' said Devaki Murch, who was one of the 175 people who survived. 'I never felt like I was missing something or there was never a yearning to learn more.' But with age comes introspection. 'The majority of us are about 50 years old now,' Murch said. 'And a lot of us have lived enough life to go back and maybe learn a little more and make those connections.' She found these connections in the basement of the Colorado office of the adoption agency that worked in Vietnam, Friends for All Children. 'As I brought box after box up from the basement, it wasn't just adoptee files; there were about 25 boxes of those. There were lists, C-5 crash survivor and deceased lists,' Murch said. 'These remaining files are not just the records; they are a part of my personal history and the history of many others.' For the first time, she found her infant name and hard-copy evidence of her babyhood: 'MIMOSA: female, Vietnam.' She found the adoption application in her mother's handwriting, health updates and grammar school pictures the agency kept. 'It was my life that I had never before witnessed,' she said, explaining why she's now embarking on a massive project to find her fellow survivors and give them their backstories. The evacuations continued for hundreds of other babies after the crash. Nuns and nurses who had cared for the children loaded them onto planes while under artillery fire. When he heard there was an 11-day delay between flights, American businessman Robert Macauley mortgaged his home to charter a Boeing 747 from Pan Am to fill the gap. Between 2,500 and 3,000 children were delivered safely to the West, but some had enduring scars. Carol Mason was terrified by loud noises, especially the thunderstorms that rattled the summer skies of her new home in Delaware County, Pennsylvania. 'I would hide under furniture. I mean, it was really crazy,' said Mason, who was 5 months old when she was airlifted out of Vietnam. 'And the doctor said that maybe I heard the bombs and all of that as a small baby.' Mason was not on the plane that crashed. She was on the second Operation Babylift flight. This month, she's organizing a reunion of the other adoptees she's found. She wants to build a community, helping adoptees connect with each other and their biological families, if that's what they want. 'I found that for many adoptees, this is their first reunion after 50 years,' she said. 'They've not started their journey, they haven't taken DNA, they haven't done anything.' DNA makes it easier for the adoptees to find their backstories. One group bicycled through the Mekong Delta this month distributing DNA testing kits in villages, hoping to make a connection. 'I know nothing of my family history – not my parents' names, whether they're still alive or not, whether I have biological siblings or extended family, or how I got to the orphanage,' Jane MyHan Joy explained on her GoFundMe campaign to help raise money for Viet Nam Family Search, an organization helping reunite families. 'I don't even know if my birth certificate truly belongs to me or was fabricated to help get me out of the country during the chaos and brutality of the war.' Murch has no desire to find her biological family this way. But she is sharing her findings to help others like Joy. 'For some of us at this age, you've reached your own successes, you have this confidence in who you are and now you can actually truly acknowledge, instead of denying, those groups, this history you're part of,' she said. Murch brought some of the files to Washington. They're now part of a collection in the Library of Congress. Aryn Lockhart also survived the crash. She found the medical crew director who also survived that flight, Lt. Regina Aune. The two formed a bond and wrote a book together, 'Operation Babylift: Mission Accomplished, a Memoir of Hope and Healing.' Lockhart calls her 'Mom.' They visited the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington several times to honor the crash victims. It's a common journey for survivors of the crash. On a visit in 2017, Lockhart posted a photo of herself on social media showing her hand resting near the name of one of only eight women on the memorial: Mary T. Klinker, who was a 27-year-old Air Force captain and nurse when she died in the crash. Klinker and Aune were in the cargo area of the C-5A Galaxy when the flight took off from Tan Son Nhut Airport. Someone started getting sick and Aune ran upstairs to get medication. That saved her life, because when the plane crashed minutes later, nearly everyone in the cargo area, including Klinker, were instantly killed. One of Lockhart's former classmates saw that photo of Klinker's name at the memorial wall. She reached out to her old friend to tell her she's dating one of Klinker's nephews, Chuck Klinker. So Lockhart, Aune and the Klinkers all connected and later dedicated a memorial to the nurse in her hometown of Lafayette, Indiana. These journeys of discovery are fraught for the Operation Babylift generation. Some were among an estimated 100,000 children fathered by American troops and left in orphanages. Some were given up by parents who couldn't care for them. Others were orphaned by war. There have long been allegations that many were snatched from impoverished families to feed the adoption market. Though they looked like thousands of Vietnamese children who immigrated to the United States in the late 1970s, their experience growing up in America was different. The refugees who came with their families after 1975 – many by boat – grew up with Vietnamese language and culture. They usually kept their Vietnamese names, constantly pronouncing 'Nguyen' and 'Phuc' for their new neighbors. But most of the Operation Babylift kids adopted by White American families started their new lives as Carol or Kevin or Susan. 'I didn't want to find my biological family or learn much about Vietnam; I just had no interest,' Mason said. She remembers the first time she ever had Asian food, when one of her friend's parents proudly served 'your favorite food' to her. It was chicken lo mein. 'I'd never had anything like it before,' Mason said. And it was Chinese.' When she was 25, her mom was flipping through a magazine when a photo stopped her cold. It was a flight attendant on one of the Operation Babylift flights with an infant in her arms. 'And my mom just said 'Oh, my goodness! My baby's in a magazine!'' Mason said. And that was the first time Mason became interested in learning more about her story. The timing was uncanny because her mother was killed by cancer a year later. 'It was almost like she knew that doing this, learning about Vietnam, would open up a whole other world for me. It would give me more people to connect with when she would be gone,' Mason said. 'Like she was leaving me a gift.' Since then, Mason found that flight attendant who held her, and they became friends. She began connecting with other Operation Babylift kids, forming a tight network of people who related to their unique upbringings. They went on vacations together and bonded with each others' families. About 10 years ago, Mason bought a DNA testing kit. 'And I let it sit in my cabinets for three years before I actually spit in the tube, because I was, like, 'I was okay. I was happy. I didn't need to find something else.' ' She got a hit and found two relatives in California – an uncle and a cousin. She visited them two months ago. 'That was amazing to actually be able to look at someone and say, oh my goodness, we resemble each other,' she said. As they were marveling at that moment, her uncle asked, 'Have you ever returned to Vietnam?' Mason said. 'And I told him 'No. It's something I've always thought of doing.' ' She had been putting her energy into helping other adoptees find their families and connect. As far as she was concerned, she had no one to go visit. She couldn't imagine where to go or who to see. 'So my biological uncle said, 'Well, we're planning on going at the end of next year, why don't you come with us?,' ' she said. She said yes. 'I'm looking forward to going back with them, with my family,' she said. 'While they show me the country that I came from.'


Telegraph
26-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The man who changed the way you see (and hear) Hollywood
To describe Walter Murch as the Yoda of editing wouldn't do the man physical justice. Tall, bearded, professorial, the 81-year-old triple-Oscar-winner has more of a wizardly stature. Murch's sagacity in the field, though? Well, pretty much unmatched, it is. Not only the picture editor on such classics as Julia, Ghost and The English Patient, Murch was also the first person ever to be credited as 'sound designer' (on Apocalypse Now), having already mixed Coppola's first two Godfather films and The Conversation. There are few veterans of either discipline who have ever treated their craft more intellectually, or been more generous about passing on their discernment. Murch, who prefers to edit standing up, returns to his elevated desk every few years for a project now, but devotes more of his time to lectures and masterclasses. (He's an honorary associate of the London Film School, and lives in Primrose Hill with his wife, Aggie.) Previous books include his 1992 long essay In the Blink of an Eye, and, in his spare time, a translation of selected works by the Italian writer Curzio Malaparte, which he released as The Bird That Swallowed its Cage (2012). His new book, Suddenly Something Clicked, is a dip-in-and-out compendium, an evident passion project, the fruit of a life's work in cinema. There are 30 chapters, mostly adapted from lectures he's prepared in the past. All cleave to editing and sound as his main areas of expertise. (A second, longer volume on filmmaking's essentials will focus on the script, the casting and the vision of the director.) Murch goes off on a few technical tangents mainly addressed to film students; 'I am going to avoid keystroke-specific details about different non-linear editing systems' is intended as reassurance. And while his flights of erudition are wide-ranging – a Copernicus analogy, a tribute to the nymph Echo – they can dazzle and befuddle at once. Luckily, the man is a outright genius at what he does, with rare and deep first-hand knowledge of the whole production process. He co-wrote THX-1138 (1971) with George Lucas, and was temporarily fired by Disney while making the audaciously dark Return to Oz (1985), his sole directing job. What happened there was an executive reshuffle, which cast doubt on his vision, and it took phone calls from Lucas and Coppola to restore faith. We learn most from Murch when he digs into the nitty-gritty of particular problems he had to solve. For instance, when Coppola was yanked away from finishing photography on The Conversation (1974), because Paramount had him under the cosh to start The Godfather, Part II, Murch inherited a massive jumble of raw footage and a script that hadn't been completely filmed. There were holes. There wasn't really an ending. His salvage job on that classic of paranoid surveillance, deservedly famous, gets back-to-back chapters, and even film buffs who know the details are treated to a fascinating blow-by-blow account, complete with QR codes to Vimeo links of animated graphics (these are eccentric to see on the page, but strangely charming). Murch reshaped that whole film using sound, trimming subplots, and moving scenes into a revealingly different order. He never even met Gene Hackman, but he was responsible for piecing together arguably the late actor's greatest performance. The same ingenuity marked his work on Anthony Minghella's The English Patient (1996) and his painstaking restoration of Orson Welles's Touch of Evil (1958), when he was hired in 1998 to address all the complaints the late Welles had fired off, in a 58-page typed memo to Universal, when they re-edited it without his approval. Murch used all the available sources – a magnetic master of the audio, and a 15-minute-longer cut found in the 1970s – to refurbish the film in line with Welles's intentions. All of these adventures are charted, and make the book an enthralling treasury for anyone who cares about the nuts and bolts of filmmaking. There's a chapter, too, on dealing with Harvey Weinstein, back when he was nicknamed 'Harvey Scissorhands' for his infamous meddling on final cuts (before the considerably greater infamy to come). Murch had helped to restore 'semi-cordial relations' between the bullying producer and Minghella when they couldn't agree on the right way to end The Talented Mr Ripley (1999). For surviving Harvey's post-production tyranny on Cold Mountain (2003), the author gives less credit to himself and more to his beloved border terrier, Hana. The dog pounced into Weinstein's lap in the edit suite. 'Within five minutes his personality transformed, as if he had been slipped a dose of ketamine. All the changes that we had made to the film were now 'wonderful' and we were 'geniuses'.' A dumbfounded Minghella proposed an executive position for Hana at his production company. He was barely joking. It was Murch who wedded Wagner's 'The Ride of the Valkyries' to the helicopter raid in Apocalypse Now. When he did so, no one had bothered to check whether the rights to use George Solti's great 1965 recording had actually been obtained. This sent Murch scurrying off to purchase 19 other stereo versions of the piece from Tower Records, to find the closest approach to Solti's rubato. Nothing else worked quite so well. Thankfully, Coppola was able to seek permission from Solti directly. One issue remained: this was so late in post-production that there wasn't time to source the magnetic masters for a state-of-the-art mix. 'What you hear in the film,' Murch explains, 'is a tape transfer from the LP disk, spread in re-recording to six channels of sound as if it were coming from those military speaker-horns that you see sticking out of the side of the helicopters. But perhaps this contingency lends a certain serendipitous truth to the scene, since Colonel Kilgore himself, now revealed to be a connoisseur of music, would doubtless have also copied his tape directly, as we did, from Solti's Decca disk.' Other figures in cinema history have expanded the parameters of how we see or hear it. No one but Murch has welded sight and sound with such intuition for both.