(NEXSTAR) – Some might recognize LeAnn Thieman from a 50-year-old photo of the longtime nurse crowded into the back of a van in Vietnam, surrounded by 22 orphans spread across the car seats and floorboards. It was part of a desperate mission to get babies out of that country before the end of the Vietnam War.
Thieman spent five days in Vietnam, but her tale of tragedy and heroism still serves as a reminder of the harrowing effort to give these children a new chance at life. It was part of what then-President Gerald Ford called Operation Babylift, a mission to get 3,000 orphans out of Saigon as North Vietnamese forces advanced on the capital.
“We had to get the babies to the airport, and we had about 100 at that time,” Thieman says, recalling the day of the image. “As the photo shows, it fits 22 babies, who knew?”
Thieman volunteered to work with an adoption agency in 1975 to help care for hundreds of adoptees and transport them to new lives in America.
“When I had agreed to go, bombing was 100 miles outside of Saigon. But the day before I left, there was bombing within one mile of the Saigon city limits, and that’s when I got scared,” she said.
Thieman was supposed to be on the first C-5 cargo plane out as part of the operation, but she got bumped.
“I stood on the runway and watched as the first planeload of orphans – the one I had begged to be on – crashed after takeoff, killing half of the 300 babies and volunteers onboard. And when that plane crashed so did I,” she recalled.
Even as investigators sifted through that wreckage, volunteers like LeAnn continued their work, evacuating more children. So many that they had to place the smallest children in cardboard boxes.
“There were nine of us to take care of 100 babies,” she remembered.
As her mission wound down, her life would change yet again. She was told she would be assigned a child to adopt, or she could go in the next room and choose her son.
“The good news is I didn’t have to, because he picked me,” LeAnn remembers. “And I walked into that room of 100 babies, and that little booger took one look at me, and he got down on his hands and knees, and he crawled – right across the room – into my arms, my heart and our family. We had a son.”
Thieman co-authored the 2002 book “This Must Be My Brother,” which goes even deeper into the final desperate hours of evacuating babies from Vietnam.