About Devaki Murch
I was nine months old on the first Operation Babylift flight, the C-5A that crashed outside Saigon on April 4, 1975. I did not have a birth announcement. I had a headline.
In June 2024, the last surviving director of the agency that placed me entrusted me with its original records, mine among them. I have spent the years since learning to work with them as trauma-informed archives, and connecting other adoptees with their files. I have found that archives are alive. They hold provenance and weight, and they need to be handled with care. As an adoptee, I realized that resolution is not found in results but in recognition. That is the mirror of return: the moment a document becomes a mirror.
Devaki Murch
Steward of the Operation Babylift Collection
Background
Devaki lives in rural Utah with her partner, Ace Kvale, and their two canines, Seamus O’Doggie and Flynn-Again Underfoot.
- Founder of StoryScope Studio, directing Archives in Love and War
- M.Ed., Educational Psychology and Instructional Design, University of Utah
- Presented at the Society of American Archivists, the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, and Regis University
- Featured in Smithsonian magazine and The Washington Post
Conferences and professional community
- Society of American Archivists, annual meetings 2025 and 2026
- Vietnam Center and Sam Johnson Vietnam Archive, Texas Tech University, conferences 2025 and 2026
- Oral History Association, annual meeting 2026
From the collection
In the work
