Operation Babylift: A Boynton Vietnamese woman's remarkable story of love, loss and leaving

Yahoo

27-04-2025

Fifty years ago this month, a plane carrying about 300 people out of war-torn Vietnam crashed just after takeoff, killing nearly half of its passengers, most of whom were Vietnamese children.
Mia Oddo was supposed to be on that flight.
'I was missing paperwork,' said Oddo, a 50-year-old who now lives in Boynton Beach. 'That saved my life.'
Oddo, an infant at the time, wound up on the second flight of what came to be known as Operation Babylift. It was a U.S. government effort to rapidly evacuate thousands of Vietnamese orphans from South Vietnam as the Vietnam War neared its end.
The war in Vietnam had been going on for 19 years and anti-war sentiment was growing, when in early April 1975, President Ford announced that money from a $2 million special foreign aid children's fund would be used to fly the displaced South Vietnamese children to the United States and other Western countries. But the first of the mission's flights out of Saigon crashed 12 minutes after takeoff due to a catastrophic failure of the aircraft's rear cargo door.
The door's locks failed, and it opened, along with a section of the plane's loading ramp, and separated mid-flight, causing explosive decompression. Of the roughly 300 passengers onboard, more than 130 died, including 78 children.
'I've always wondered from an early age, 'Why was my life saved?'' Oddo said. 'Why was I one of the babies that wasn't on that first plane?'
The American family who wanted to adopt her thought she was on that flight. Her mother, Christy, was a realtor and had her own clothing store at the local mall in Boca Raton. Her father, Edward, worked as an attorney, except during a period when he and Christy ran a bed-and-breakfast.
They'd been waiting two years to adopt her and were distraught when they heard the news of the crash, Oddo said. Her father called all over Washington and Vietnam until an American official told him that, because her paperwork was incomplete, she hadn't boarded that flight. Instead, she'd be on the next flight to the United States.
'I was 4 months old,' Oddo said. 'But I weighed 6 pounds. I had malnutrition.'
Upon landing, Oddo had pneumonia in both lungs and couldn't properly breathe. She spent her first week with her parents in the hospital under the care of five doctors.
Oddo grew up in Boca Raton with a melting pot of a family. Her mother was German and her father Italian. She grew up with an older sister and two brothers also from Vietnam who were adopted 15 years after she was. Her parents, now retired, live in Palm Coast, about 30 miles north of Daytona Beach. Her siblings live there too.
Her birth name is Thi My Quy. To keep part of it, her parents made 'Thi' her middle name.
Though she was raised as an American, Oddo knew from a young age that she'd been adopted from Vietnam.
'I was 6 years old when I understood what it meant to be adopted and that I was different,' she said. 'But my parents and my family never treated me that way.'
Growing up in South Florida was difficult. She was the only Asian student at her school for most of her childhood. She'd get bullied for her looks, Oddo said. Still, she counted the adoption as a blessing.
'It didn't feel like I was abandoned,' Oddo said. 'It felt like I was chosen. However, as I got older, I wanted to learn more about my nationality.'
Were her birth parents still alive? Did she have any living relatives? She didn't know, but they were valid questions. Operation Babylift had its share of detractors — some headlines asked, 'Babylift or babysnatch?' and 'The Orphans: Saved or Lost?' according to news accounts of the times. The children's paperwork and identification, even their status as orphans, were questioned — and the subject of a failed lawsuit.
For many, like Oddo, tracking lost family seemed impossible. Her birth certificate offered little information.
'All it says is 'Nationality, Vietnamese, parents, unknown,' and that I was somehow able to be adopted out of the country.''
The advent of relative tracking by DNA changed all that. And was waiting for Oddo five years ago when she tried to seek her roots. She took an ancestry test that linked her to some cousins, and then she met one of them on a cruise about three years later.
'There were 500 people in our group,' Oddo said. 'I was sitting down, and this pretty lady comes and sits next to me, and we just start talking. Naturally, everyone has a story, so we start sharing stories.'
It turns out that she, too, was Vietnamese, and that her mother had been on the same flight to America as Oddo. The woman had also just taken an ancestry test and was awaiting her results. She told Oddo she'd call her in about two weeks, when they came in.
'We were just joking,' Oddo said. 'Two weeks later, she calls me, and we're related. She is my cousin.'
Oddo was able to meet some of her cousin's family members at a Thanksgiving afterward, but no one directly related to her. So, the search continued.
'I've always wondered, 'Did I have a brother or sister, and we got separated?'' Oddo said. 'It would be pretty amazing if I did have a sibling.'
This year, she set up a fundraising page — givebutter.com/helpmiagohome. Her hope is to return to Vietnam for the first time since she left and try to answer these questions.
'There is a chance my birth parents or siblings have spent decades wondering what happened to me — just as I have wondered about them,' she said. 'I dream of looking into their eyes, hearing their voices, and understanding the story of how I came to be on that plane.'
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She'd want to visit local orphanages to deliver supplies, too, she said. And learn about her culture, its food and Vietnam's mountainsides.
'Fifty years later,' she said, 'I still search for pieces of my identity, for roots that were severed too soon."
Oddo, a lifelong Floridian, has found what she called her life's purpose in healing. She's been self-employed as a medical esthetician for the past 19 years and runs her own spa, Mia's Spa, out of her home in Boynton Beach.
She is one of the more than 3,300 babies who ended up being airlifted out of Vietnam on military cargo planes before the fall of Saigon.
'If I wasn't adopted, I'd be dead,' Oddo said. 'I was really one of the lucky ones.'
Jasmine Fernández is a journalist covering Delray Beach and Boca Raton for The Palm Beach Post. You can reach her at [e-mail] and follow her on X (formerly Twitter) at @jasminefernandz. Help support our work. Subscribe today.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Operation Babylift: A Boynton Vietnamese woman's remarkable story