Friends For All Children was an adoption assistance agency that was located in Boulder, Colorado. It operated during the Vietnam War in Operation Babylift in 1975 to bring South Vietnamese children to the United States, during the Fall of Saigon, when the Communist North Vietnamese and their Viet Cong agents invaded South Vietnam. It disbanded in the United States, in 1977, after placement of the final child on their caseload.
It still operates in South East Asia.
The Foundation “Friends For All Children”, otherwise known as FFAC, is a private, non-profit and non-sectarian organisation dedicated to the welfare of Thai children.
Established in 1977, FFAC was initially funded by Friends For All Children of Colorado, USA but now is independently managed by its Thai Executive Committee.
A Vietnam veteran is an individual who performed active military, naval, or air service in the Republic of Vietnam during the Vietnam War.
The Việt Minh was a national independence coalition formed at Pác Bó by Hồ Chí Minh on 19 May 1941. Also known as the Việt Minh Front, it was created by the Indochinese Communist Party as a national united front to achieve the independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
Graham Anderson Martin was an American diplomat. He was the ambassador to Thailand and as U.S. representative to SEATO from 1963 to 1967, ambassador to Italy from 1969 to 1973 and the last United States Ambassador to South Vietnam from 1973 until his evacuation during the Fall of Saigon in 1975.
The Laotian Civil War (1959–1975) was a civil war in Laos which was waged between the Communist Pathet Lao and the Royal Lao Government from 23 May 1959 to 2 December 1975. It is associated with the Cambodian Civil War and the Vietnam War, with both sides receiving heavy external support in a proxy war between the global Cold War superpowers. It is called the Secret War among the American CIA Special Activities Center, and Hmong and Mien veterans of the conflict.
The First Indochina War began in French Indochina from 19 December 1946 to 20 July 1954 between France and Việt Minh, and their respective allies. Việt Minh was led by Võ Nguyên Giáp and Hồ Chí Minh. Most of the fighting took place in Tonkin in Northern Vietnam, although the conflict engulfed the entire country and also extended into the neighboring French Indochina protectorates of Laos and Cambodia.
An Amerasian may refer to a person born in Asia to an Asian mother and a U.S. military father. Other terms used include War babies or G.I. babies. There are also those who may have mothers in the U.S. military or have Amerasian ancestry through their grandparents and so on.
Vietnamese Americans are Americans of Vietnamese ancestry. They make up about half of all overseas Vietnamese and are the fourth-largest Asian American ethnic group after Chinese Americans, Filipino Americans, and Indian Americans. There are about 2.2 million people of Vietnamese descent residing in the U.S.
Kriangsak Chamanan served as prime minister of Thailand from 1977 to 1980. After staging a successful coup, he was asked to become Prime Minister in 1977, he ruled till 1980 and is credited with "steering Thailand to democracy" in a time where internally, communist insurgents are rampant and neighbouring countries have turned to communist rule following the communist takeover of Vietnam: South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. He died on 23 December 2003, aged 86.
The Third Indochina War was a series of interconnected armed conflicts, mainly among the various communist factions over strategic influence in Indochina after Communist victory in South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in 1975. The conflict primarily started due to continued raids and incursions by the Khmer Rouge into Vietnamese territory that they sought to retake. These incursions would result in the Cambodian–Vietnamese War in which the newly unified Vietnam overthrew the Pol Pot regime and the Khmer Rouge, in turn ending the Cambodian genocide. Vietnam had installed a government led by many opponents of Pol Pot, including former Khmer Rouge most notably Hun Sen. This led to Vietnam's occupation of Cambodia for over a decade. The Vietnamese push to completely destroy the Khmer Rouge led to them conducting border raids in Thailand who had provided sanctuary.
The fall of Saigon, also known as the Liberation of Saigon or Liberation of the South by the Vietnamese government, and known as Black April by anti-communist overseas Vietnamese was the capture of Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, by the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) and the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam on 30 April 1975. The event marked the end of the Vietnam War and the start of a transition period from the formal reunification of Vietnam into the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
The Cambodian–Vietnamese War, known in Vietnam as the Counter-offensive on the Southwestern border, and by Cambodian nationalists as the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, was an armed conflict between Democratic Kampuchea, controlled by the Khmer Rouge, and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The war began with repeated attacks by the Liberation Army of Kampuchea on the southwestern border of Vietnam, particularly the Ba Chuc massacre which resulted in the deaths of over 3,000 Vietnamese civilians. On 25 December 1978, Vietnam launched a full-scale invasion of Kampuchea, and subsequently occupied the country and removed the government of the Communist Party of Kampuchea from power.
Operation Babylift was the name given to the mass evacuation of children from South Vietnam to the United States and other western countries at the end of the Vietnam War, on April 3–26, 1975. By the final American flight out of South Vietnam, over 3,300 infants and children had been airlifted, although the actual number has been variously reported. Along with Operation New Life, over 110,000 refugees were evacuated from South Vietnam at the end of the Vietnam War. Thousands of children were airlifted from Vietnam and adopted by families around the world.
This article details the history of Laos from 1945 to the present.
U-Tapao Royal Thai Navy Airfield is a military airfield of the Royal Thai Navy (RTN) approximately 140 kilometres (87 mi) southeast of Bangkok in the Ban Chang District of Rayong Province near Sattahip on the Gulf of Thailand. It is serves as the home of the RTN First Air Wing.
The American Homecoming Act or Amerasian Homecoming Act, was an Act of Congress giving preferential immigration status to children in Vietnam born of U.S. fathers. The American Homecoming Act was written in 1987, passed in 1988, and implemented in 1989. The act increased Vietnamese Amerasian immigration to the U.S. because it allowed applicants to establish a mixed race identity by appearance alone. Additionally, the American Homecoming Act allowed the Amerasian children and their immediate relatives to receive refugee benefits. About 23,000 Amerasians and 67,000 of their relatives entered the United States under this act. While the American Homecoming Act was the most successful program in moving Vietnamese Amerasian children to the United States, the act was not the first attempt by the U.S. government. Additionally the act experienced flaws and controversies over the refugees it did and did not include since the act only allowed Vietnamese Amerasian children, as opposed to other South East Asian nations in which the United States also had forces in the war.
The 405th Air Expeditionary Wing is a provisional United States Air Force unit assigned to Air Combat Command. It may be activated or inactivated at any time.
After the 1978 Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia and subsequent collapse of Democratic Kampuchea in 1979, the anti-Hanoi Khmer Rouge fled to the border regions of Thailand, and, with assistance from China, Pol Pot's troops managed to regroup and reorganize in forested and mountainous zones on the Thai-Cambodian border. During the 1980s and early 1990s Khmer Rouge forces operated from inside refugee camps in Thailand, in an attempt to de-stabilize the pro-Hanoi People's Republic of Kampuchea's government, which Thailand refused to recognise. Thailand and Vietnam faced off across the Thai-Cambodian border with frequent Vietnamese incursions and shellings into Thai territory throughout the 1980s in pursuit of Cambodian guerrillas who kept attacking Vietnamese occupation forces.
North Vietnam, officially the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, was a socialist country supported by the Soviet Union (USSR) and the People's Republic of China (PRC) in Southeast Asia that existed from 1945 to 1976 and the country was recognized in 1954. Both the North Vietnamese and South Vietnamese states ceased to exist when they unified as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
Vietnamese boat people, also known simply as boat people, refers to the refugees who fled Vietnam by boat and ship following the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. This migration and humanitarian crisis was at its highest in 1978 and 1979, but continued into the early 1990s. The term is also often used generically to refer to the Vietnamese people who left their country in a mass exodus between 1975 and 1995. This article uses the term "boat people" to apply only to those who fled Vietnam by sea.