That night he watched explosions around the outskirts of Saigon from the hotel rooftop. They looked like fireworks, until he realised people were dying underneath them.

The next morning, Smith examined a group of 70 infants, before accompanying them on one of two Hercules flights from Saigon to Bangkok, before they were taken to Melbourne on a QANTAS plane.

Many of the babies were very unwell. Dr Smith recalls a two year old boy on the verge of death. “He was grey,” Smith says. “He was flat as a tack.”

Image via Wally Smith

Suffering from gastroenteritis, he had been healthy the day before. Smith tried to get a drip into his veins, but they collapsed. Eventually he tried the top of the boy’s foot, and it worked.

The boy’s health began to pick up. He was still alive when the Hercules left Saigon. He was still alive when the plane arrived at Bangkok. But from there, Smith doesn’t know. He doesn’t know whether he made it to Melbourne, or where he may be today.

“I would dearly love to know whether that kid survived,” Smith laments. “I never will, but I would dearly love to know.”

Even once the babies were placed in cardboard boxes acting as makeshift seats in the Hercules, not all survived the perilous journey to Thailand. Doctor Wally Smith still remembers what one young boy was wearing. “He was dressed in a blue cotton baby suit, from head to toe.” The baby was dressed in preparation for Melbourne’s colder weather. But it was still very warm inside the aircraft.

The Hercules left the airport and did a ‘battle climb’ over the airport in order to avoid surface-to-air missiles. As Smith struggled to hold on, he saw a pediatrician huddled on the floor, giving CPR to a baby.

“It was the little kid in the blue suit,” Smith says. “And he was dead.”

These fleeting, chaotic moments will stay with Smith for the rest of his life. His words falter and shake delicately as he describes what happened, but his details are exact. It was nearly 40 years ago, but he recalls it as if it happened last week. “He wasn’t one of the sick ones, he was okay.”

The conditions within the cardboard boxes were much warmer than the rest of the cargo hold, causing the baby to fatally over-heat. It had been Smith’s decision to use the cardboard boxes, but there was no other option. Iconic photographs show that the American flights also used boxes. “It wasn’t just us,” Smith muses. “I felt a little better I suppose.”

Cath Turner was in one of those cardboard boxes 40 years ago. She survived. Turner was on the first plane to Sydney and she was taken in by family in Armidale, a country town of about 20,000 people in New South Wales. She’s now a journalist living in Sydney, and until recently worked for Al Jazeera. Her family made an active effort to ensure Operation Babylift was a constant presence in her childhood.

“It was always part of my upbringing that I was different, and I had another mother somewhere else,” she says. “It was never a secret, we never pretended it was anything it wasn’t.”

Growing up with three older sisters, Turner felt like a normal child until she encountered racism in high school, placing her Vietnam heritage at the forefront. “That’s when I started really feeling the effects of being different,” she details. “A lot of my childhood memories are caught up in the unpleasantness and nastiness, the bullying. It’s what tended to derail me sometimes.”

Via Al Jazeera

After years of bullying, Turner wanted nothing to do with Vietnamese culture. “I just rejected it. I didn’t think it was interesting, or a part of me,” she says.

“I was at an age when I was trying to be the same as everyone else, and I certainly didn’t want to invest in something that set me apart from everyone else.”

Landon Carnie had a different experience with Vietnamese culture throughout his childhood, seeing it as “fun and interesting”. “I started to realise that I’m not that special anymore,” he says. “You meet all these people and realise you’re not alone, there are other people like you in the same situation.”

It took Carnie and Turner a long time to return to their birth country. They were both in their 20s when they did, but had vastly differing experiences. Carnie discovered a culture that he immediately connected with. He gleefully describes travelling across Saigon, befriending a rickshaw driver and riding around from dawn until dusk, discovering local restaurants and sites along the way.

He would later return for good.

When Turner came to Vietnam, she found nothing she could connect with. “I just didn’t feel accepted by Vietnamese culture,” she confesses. “It felt very foreign and I wanted to get out.” She was 27 years old, and visited Saigon with her best friend in an attempt to find her birth mother, but she just “pounded the pavement for two weeks”, with little luck.

“We had the wrong leads, we were asking the wrong questions, we had the wrong people,” Turner laments. “I didn’t cope very well. It was really exhausting, annoying and frustrating.”

Buoyed by his first return to Vietnam, Carnie found it hard to adjust to his nine to five job in America. He left his job and travelled to Melbourne to study, before becoming a lecturer at RMIT’s Saigon campus.

He’s still there today. “I’ve been here for more than ten years now, it was supposed to be a year or two,” he says, laughing.

Turner went back with her adoptive parents in 2003. It was a holiday, not another search mission, an opportunity for Turner to show her family just how different her life could’ve been. But their translator took an interest in her story, and began to piece tidbits of information together.

The trip became much more than a holiday.

The moment is captured in a documentary Turner made for Al Jazeera. “I’ve been waiting 30 years for this moment,” she whispers. She’s sitting in a small room, waiting for her birth mother to appear from a nearby door. After waiting more than half an hour, an old Vietnamese lady walks into the room. She slowly inspects Turner’s face, then nods.

Cath Turner had found her birth mother.

A translator was required, but the innately human connection between a mother and her child was obvious. The most important piece in the puzzle of her childhood had been found.