The writer is an FT contributing columnist
Nearly half a century ago, Aryn Lockhart fled Vietnam as part of Operation Babylift, in which she and 2,000 other Vietnamese orphans were airlifted to be adopted in the US just weeks before Saigon fell in the humiliating American military defeat of the Vietnam war.
As America watched images of desperate Afghans fleeing their homeland after another US war, Lockhart, 47, remembered that old trauma. “When I saw the pictures of the refugees all crowded on to US planes, I thought, ‘oh my gosh, that looks exactly like the photos of Operation Babylift’, except that they aren’t all babies,” she tells me by telephone.