The War Orphans

When Lee Sanne Buchanan met her newly adopted Vietnamese baby boy at the Denver airport in 1968, she joined one of the most exclusive parents' groups in the U.S. Though tens of thousands of South Vietnamese children became orphans that year, fewer than a dozen found homes in the U.S. Moved by the plight of those left behind, Buchanan resurrected a dormant aid organization to provide food and care for the orphans as well as to oil the adoption machinery.

Today Buchanan's organization, now known as Friends for All Children, operates in 23 states and is one of five U.S. agencies processing adoptions from South Viet Nam.* Their job is immense. There are an estimated 800,000 orphans in South Viet Nam; more than 20,000 are crammed into understaffed, under-equipped orphanages that are often breeding grounds for deadly respiratory and intestinal diseases. Moreover, because of social taboos against mixed-blood offspring, many of the children who are half-American have been abandoned by their Vietnamese mothers now that the G.I.s have all gone home.

Largely because of Saigon's formidable adoption laws, fewer than 1,300 Vietnamese children have been allowed to come to the U.S. since 1965 (compared to some 32,000 Korean children since the end of that war). Would-be parents have waited as long as three years for a child. "With all the red tape, it's a discouraging process," says Patrick Tisdale of Columbus, Ga., father of five adopted South Vietnamese girls. A widowed physician with five sons, Tisdale met his second wife Betty in 1967 while he was an Army doctor in Viet Nam and she was bringing supplies to an orphanage at An Loc. Their oldest girls Lien, 7, and Xuan, 8, are in second grade in Columbus and doing well in school, though they still have some trouble with English. Because schools in South Viet Nam are so overcrowded and understaffed that they are forced to hold triple sessions starting at 7 a.m., "the kids are crazy about going to school here," says Pat Tisdale. "It's the biggest thing in the world to them."

Hoarding Food. Like many Vietnamese children, Kim-Oanh, the second adopted child of Lee Sanne Buchanan, arrived in Denver at the age of five suffering from malnutrition; at meals she would hold her plate to her face while she wolfed down her food. Other Vietnamese newcomers hoarded food in bureau drawers. The adopted son of Randy and Debbie Boroughs of Wayne, Pa., is very conscious of every bite. "Once he dropped a grain of rice on the floor," recalls his mother, "then quickly got down from the chair, picked it up and put it in his mouth." Yet, to this day, she adds, "he never eats all his food without offering some of it to others."

Most orphans arrive in the U.S. starving for affection as well. When she first came to the Smylie household in Massapequa, N.Y., Lieu, now nine, "wouldn't say anything and she would clean your room for a penny," says her new brother Richard. As she began to talk more, she began to test her new parents' love by offering to return to the orphanage. "You are not nice, you don't like me, and I want to go back to Sister Angela," Lieu would tell her mother. Says Ellen Smylie: "She just wanted our assurance that she would be our little girl."

In many of South Viet Nam's young refugees, day-to-day contact with war has bred an obsession with death. Some children worriedly interpret wrinkles and white hair on visitors or grandparents as a sure sign that their end is imminent. After returning from a trip to South Viet Nam, Lee Sanne Buchanan fell seriously ill with hepatitis, and Kim-Oanh shrank back from her. "I don't like you any more because you are going to die," she said.

Faced with a declining number of American babies available for adoption, more and more U.S. families are trying to adopt Vietnamese children despite the problems. The Holt adoption program alone receives 200 requests each week. Though the Saigon government still considers most of its abandoned children unadoptable (because a parent may still be alive), a few restrictions are being eased. The adoption waiting period has been reduced to five months or less, and an unofficial policy of keeping boys over seven within the country has been relaxed as well. Orphanage limitations against adoptions by parents of a particular faith have also been relaxed. All this is expected to result in the arrival of about 700 Vietnamese children in the U.S. this year, the largest number to date.

* The others: Migration and Refugee Services--U.S. Catholic Conference, Holt International Children's Fund, Travelers Aid-International Social Service of America, World Vision International.

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