BABY LIFT ADOPTEES PLAN RETURN TO VIETNAM.

Byline: Lisa Friedman Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON - All her life, friends asked Tiffany Goodson if she planned to locate her birth mother or learn more about her role in the mass airlifts of infants to America from the overflowing orphanages of Saigon during the Vietnam War.

``I don't care - maybe someday,'' came Goodson's usual reply.

Recently, that changed.

Goodson, 30, who lives in Santa Monica and works as an event planner at the Mann Theaters in Encino, started making inquiries about her childhood. She connected with other Vietnamese men and women who, like her, were among the estimated 3,000 infants flown out of war-torn Vietnam in 1975 in an emergency humanitarian effort that became known as Operation Baby Lift.

Next month, she and 19 other adoptees will return to Vietnam on a trip sponsored by the airline that conducted the first airlift. For Goodson, the journey is both a chance to connect with her roots and to thank those who changed the path of her life.

``I'm just grateful fate brought me where I was,'' she said. ``I'm just really thankful it that (Operation Baby Lift) happened.''

Steven Forsyth, spokesman for the Atlanta-based World Airways, said the airline plans to recreate the route of that April 2, 1975, trip. The commemorative flight leaves Atlanta on June 12 and also will include a number of the pilots and crew members, now long retired, who took part in the airlifts.

For the orphans, Forsyth said, ``It will give them a chance to go back and see their homeland and celebrate what they've become.''

The history of Operation Baby Lift began with Ed Daly, then the president of World Airways. Troubled by the suffering of Vietnamese orphans, Daly was frustrated by the U.S. government, which refused to greenlight a rescue mission.

``He felt terrible that he couldn't get these children out when he had a perfectly good airplane,'' Forsyth said.

He went ahead anyway, leaving Saigon for Oakland with 57 children, mostly babies, on a harrowing flight from a pitch-black runway. Soon after that first unauthorized flight, President Gerald Ford launched the U.S. mission that became Operation Baby Lift.

Reaction to the mission was mixed. Critics debated the pros and cons of adopting children out of their culture.

Shirley Peck-Barnes, author of ``The War Cradle,'' which chronicles the story of Operation Baby Lift and who still keeps in touch with many of the adoptees, said the mission was a moral necessity for the U.S.

``Ninety percent of the people in this country knew we had to do something to save these children,'' Barnes said.

Canh Oxelson, 31, who was adopted and came to the U.S. just before the official start of Operation Baby Lift, and now is the upper school dean at the Harvard-Westlake School in North Hollywood, said he knows firsthand the difficulties of being a Vietnamese kid with Caucasian parents, particularly in Fresno, where he grew up.

But, as the son of a Vietnamese woman and a black U.S. serviceman, Oxelson also noted that ``mixed kids like me would have had a hard time (in Vietnam) as well.''

Children like him, he said, ``were reminders of the war, and not good reminders.''

Oxelson, like Goodson, ignored his history for much of his childhood in favor of a ``normal'' American life. About seven years ago, though, he made a trip to Vietnam with his parents and actually found his orphanage and the very nuns who helped place him.

``I was able to tell them all their hopes and dreams were answered,'' he said.

This trip, Oxelson said, he will share with his girlfriend.

``Every time I'm exposed to Vietnamese culture, I learn a little bit more about myself,'' he said.

Goodson, who was raised in Illinois, said she looks back with appreciation on Operation Baby Lift, calling it ``a desperate measure to save a bunch of lives.''

``People feared the kids would be massacred by Communists,'' she said. ``They saw a need and stepped in.''

Born out of wedlock, Goodson said her birth mother's family insisted on giving her up for adoption. Meanwhile, in the U.S., Pam Lipe and her then-husband were considering a foreign adoption after giving birth to a son.

With the end of the war, Lipe said, adopting a Vietnamese orphan seemed the best route. She said she still remembers sitting with other ``expecting'' mothers in a VIP waiting room at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport.

``We're all in there waiting for our new babies, and we've all got pictures and we're all showing each other the pictures,'' she said. ``I'll never forget that moment of seeing her come down the walkway with the stewardess.''

As a child, Lipe said, Tiffany never tired of hearing the story of her arrival. But as a teen and young adult, Goodson said she felt little urgency to learn about her history.

Even now, as she prepares to return to Vietnam, Goodson said, she has no plans to track down her birth family. Someday, maybe. But for now, she said, she wants to focus on what she considers her real family - the woman who raised her.

She has asked her mother to be her guest on the trip.

Lipe said the trip ``feels like a closure of some sort.'' She said she's ready to help her daughter learn more whenever she's ready.

``If it's meant to be that she should find her family, then she will,'' Lipe said. ``I always have this romantic notion that I meet Tiffany's mother. I'd just regale her with stories about how great her daughter is.''

Lisa Friedman, [phone]

lisa.friedman(at)langnews.com

CAPTION(S):

2 photos

Photo:

(1 -- color) Tiffany Goodson, showing a photo of herself at an adoption agency in Vietnam, is among 20 men and women Operation Baby Lift adoptees returning to Vietnam, their homeland, next month.

Andy Holzman/Staff Photographer

(2 -- color) The child of a Vietnamese woman and a black U.S. serviceman, Canh Oxelson, now the upper school dean at the Harvard-Westlake School, also came to the States on Operation Baby Lift.

David Sprague/Staff Photographer