#david devin

I don't think anyone here really knows my background.  I did do a meme a while's back that let people know that I was thisclose to being one of the orphans who could've perished on that fateful Operation Babylift out of Saigon during an exodus of its children in April 1975.  My mother had made a bracelet for me that had her and my father's surnames on it in case we would ever be reunited, but at the last minute, she changed her mind and decided not to give me up to the U.S. in her absence.  We'll never know the outcome of what could've been and I'm so grateful that we never have to know.

Here's a little background.  My mother and father, both Vietnamese, met while in New Zealand on a college scholarship.  He went all the way and received a Ph.D in engineering; my mother got her B.A. in economics. They got married in Auckland and when they got back to Saigon, my mother got a job working at the American Embassy in the financial sector for a man named David Devin.  My father worked on ways to get ammunition to the South Vietnamese army via Korean boats along the Mekong.  Basically, he was in the most danger following the fall of Saigon; he would've been imprisoned (along with me, my mother, and my grandmother) for conspiring against the communists.

So of course, it was a major issue in getting us out of the country when it was clear that the U.S. had lost.  We had two plans.  Plan A was my mother's connection to David Devin.  It was a well-known fact that any employee of the embassy could list "family" members on his inventory and thus, get them out of the country.  My mother knew that he would be getting his Chinese-born/Vietnamese girlfriend out; she remembered as much.  But he also decided to list my mother (even though she was only a few years younger than he was) as his 'daughter,' along with my 50-something grandmother (again, as his 'daughter') and my father and me as her dependents.  As an aside: another reason to love the U.S. of A is that they didn't even blink as to the age discrepancy, never mind the ethnicity differences.

In interest of telling the whole story, the Plan B was that my father's contact with a Korean national would allow us passage on his boat (since all of the Koreans were being expatriated back to their homeland) and we would end up living in Korea as refugees.  I can't even begin to imagine how different my life would've been in South Korea, so thank goodness Mr. Devin got our papers in order and shuffled us all into the embassy car.

There were more than a dozen checkpoints along the way, but because it was a car with diplomatic plates, the VietCong weren't allowed to check the passengers in the vehicle.  My dad was safe.  And according to my mom, I wasn't helping much.  Apparently I was wailing like a banshee the whole time; I missed my beloved nanny, who we had to leave behind, sadly to say.

But the anxiety never waned past that.  Because at some point, Mr. Devin had to drop us off at a bus that would take us to the cargo plane for Guam; my mom and the family just weren't allowed to go further than that in a diplomat's car.  This meant more checkpoints.  My father was forced to hide in a compartment in the floor of the bus, in stifling heat.  And my mother and grandmother were so afraid that he would be found out, pulled out and shot.  Because they were taking people out of buses and executing them outside.

We made it to the cargo plane and to Guam.  And because of Mr. Devin, we were safe and we never had to wait the mandatory year in Camp Pendleton to be sponsored by a church family to enter the U.S.  He had vouched for us and we could start our lives immediately.  He settled somewhere in Washington state and that was all my mom remembered, other than the fact that he had once contacted her about a real estate proposition but she didn't have the money at the time.  His goal was to buy an apartment building and house refugees there.

So I did a search of David Devin.  The first thing that I found was that he had, indeed, married his Chinese/Vietnamese sweetheart.  Sadly, she lost her battle with breast cancer in 2002 according to the obituary.  But it gave me more clues.  I found him for my mom to contact and I think he's gone back to Vietnam as a missionary.  I really hope to meet him one day and thank him.

 It chokes me up more than a little to know about him and what he did for us.  If I never get to speak to you, Mr. Devin, I send up good wishes and love.  I could not be where I am without you.