Campbell was torn from his South Vietnamese birth family at the age of one. As the Vietnam War was coming to an end in 1975, the baby was swept up in a mercy mission, separated from his parents and mistakenly evacuated from his country. At the time, Canada had opened its doors to the flood of Vietnamese refugees fleeing the country, and Campbell ended up being adopted by a Canadian family.
More than three decades later, through a series of what he regards as divine circumstances, he was reunited with his father and brothers.
“I believe in faith and really do believe that God has His hand on me, this story and everything that is happening,” Campbell says now. He cites as his theme the Bible verse from Jeremiah 29:11: “For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord — plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.”
His story began as his parents, both of whom were in the service of the U.S. army fighting on behalf of South Vietnam, were forced by the circumstances of war to place their newborn son for safekeeping in the temporary care of an orphanage run by Catholic nuns in Saigon, the capital.
As communist forces gained the upper hand and the fall of Saigon became imminent, amid the chaos and confusion Campbell was bundled up by a U.S. soldier and placed on a flight of 57 children as part of a rescue called Operation Babylift, a series of missions mandated by U.S. President Gerald Ford to evacuate orphans out of Vietnam. The Catholic Relief Service was one of the organizations involved in co-ordinating the airlift.
Campbell, just shy of his second birthday, had a tag pinned to his chest: “Orphan 32.”
In Saigon as the war ended, his hysterical parents were told only that their son had been sent “to America” in the evacuation. In fact, Campbell wound up in Toronto as part of the Canadian government’s relief efforts and was quickly adopted by a pastor’s family in Cambridge, Ont.
“I felt very accepted by the Cambridge community … my start in Canada was very positive,” he says of his early years in the new country. “That helped create a solid foundation for me growing up in Canada.”
The Campbells later moved to the Maritimes, where Campbell graduated from high school in Woodstock, N.B. For post-secondary education, he moved back to Ontario, attending Redeemer University College in Ancaster, Ont., and graduated in 1996. Married with four children, today he works in public relations, fundraising and marketing.
After speaking in Sarnia, Ont., on behalf of the Christian Reformed World Missions organization one evening, he was approached by a family who told him they knew of someone else who had been on the same flight as Campbell. And so he met Trent Kilner. They began to meet regularly, trade stories and pictures and wonder whether it might be possible to meet others who had been on their flight.
“We thought: ‘Why don’t we give (the media) a follow-up story?’ … It went across the nation and immediately we started getting responses to it ... In a matter of two weeks, we had about 24 of the orphans.”
That led to a large-scale reunion in Oakville, Ont., involving some 250 people who were connected in some way with the flight — the orphans, their children and spouses, aid workers, doctors, nurses, pilots.
“It was amazing, just an amazing event. We were just so thrilled that we could pull these people together and hear their stories,” he says.
The international interest in the story inevitably led to coverage in Vietnamese media and, soon after, Campbell received an e-mail from a man saying he was looking for his brother who had gone missing in 1975.
“This was blowing my mind,” Campbell said, but it would take DNA testing of him and his father to determine for sure whether there was indeed a family connection. The results came back 99.999 per cent positive.
Campbell didn’t speak Vietnamese, so when he spoke by telephone for the first time to the man he discovered to be his father he needed an interpreter. He was told how he had been taken from the orphanage and what had happened to his parents after the war. He also learned that his mother passed away in 2000. But what his father most wanted to tell him was that he had not been abandoned. The child had been swept up in war and taken through a grave error. At the end of the conversation, Campbell, with the help of the interpreter, told his father in Vietnamese, “I love you, daddy.”
It took two years for Campbell to raise the funds to fly himself, his wife and children to Vietnam for an emotional reunion with his birth father and brothers.
Though not a Catholic, Campbell remains grateful for the role Catholic organizations and people have had in his care and that of the other evacuees through the years.
“The Catholic Church definitely played a significant role in the care and adoption of these children in Canada,” he said. “We are very grateful for the caregiving and organizational role they had in our coming to Canada.”
Asked by many to put his story down on paper, Campbell authored the book Orphan 32, published last December. It is available through the web site www.orphan32.com. He remains on the search for 10 more orphans.
“I’m touring Canada-wide, speaking and sharing this story … hopefully inspiring and bringing hope to others that life is amazing,” he says. “Amazing things can happen. Things you might think impossible can be made possible … Expect the impossible, it can be done.”
(Gosgnach is a freelance writer in Hamilton, Ont.)