During March and April, 1975, the routine adoption procedures were completely disrupted due to the escalation of the war. There were circumstances present prior to the final evacuation of our children, which prevented us from obtaining orphanage releases for our children. These obstacles included our inability to return co the North as provinces fell, conditions of war prohibited our travel to the Delta, orphanage directors refused to sign papers for they feared that this act would endanger their lives, and official were reluctant to authenticate documents.

Based upon the basic arbitrariness of assigning identity to infants who had been abandoned at birth, the costly delays in paperwork processed through the Vietnamese government and the worsening wartime conditions, the orphanage release papers seemed of little importance since the infant had already been entrusted to our care and custody for purposes of adoption and emigration.

Both the Vietnamese and U. S. government representatives stated to me that children within our agency's care and custody would be eligible for evacuation.

When we received notification of the pending evacuation to the United States (for the first time on the very day of the first flight), we inquired of the Ministry of Social Welfare as to procedures to be followed. We were instructed to prepare a list of names of our children. Our inquiry as to what to do concerning some of our infants, not yet placed, who had only "nursery names," was answered by the instruction to "choose Vietnamese names." We did this to coincide with the number of un-named infants in our custody. The prepared list was then turned over to the proper Ministry of Social Welfare authorities, where it was approved, signed, and sealed. A copy of this list was then used to prepare arm bands in duplicate, listing the name and our agency identification. The sole purpose of these arm bands was to identify the infants as belonging to our agency, for we had no time for further identification.