Operation Babylift Adoptee Finds Twin Brother After 49 Years via DNA Test

Q: After a 50-year separation, what hidden wartime secrets led to these twin siblings being torn apart during Operation Babylift?

The twins appear to have been separated not by a single confirmed plot, but by the wartime chaos, poor record-keeping and possible misidentification surrounding Operation Babylift in the final days of South Vietnam. The woman was flown to Australia in April 1975 as a newborn, with unreliable papers giving her the name Le Thi Ha and a birth date her adoptive parents never believed was real. She had been told her birth parents were probably dead and that she would have died had she remained in Vietnam. Decades later, DNA testing showed that account was false or at least incomplete: she had a living twin brother, Glenn, in Australia. What remains hidden is the exact mechanism of the separation. No evidence in the reporting shows who removed one twin, who kept the other, or whether officials, orphanage staff, intermediaries or emergency evacuators knew they were splitting a pair of twins. Operation Babylift was carried out amid the collapse of Saigon, when many children were moved quickly, some without reliable identity documents, and critics have long argued that not all evacuated children were true orphans. So the wartime “secret” was less a solved conspiracy than a buried truth: she was not an orphaned single infant at all, but one half of a family that survived. The secrecy came from the fog of war, broken paperwork and unaccountable adoption processes that concealed her real identity for nearly 50 years.

1 articles · Updated · The Guardian · Aug 14

A 49-year-old Australian adoptee discovered in July 2024 that a DNA test matched her with a brother named Glenn, then realized from his April birth date that he was her twin.
A TV producer had sent the new test after she sought help tracing her origins; when her daughter logged in to the results, the sibling match ended decades of uncertainty from her 1975 evacuation from Vietnam.
A 2.5-hour flight away in Brisbane, Glenn first spoke with her for 2.5 hours in November, and the twins met in person two months later in an emotional reunion.
The reunion has not produced simple closure: their contact later faded, and she says she is angry no one has taken responsibility for how the twins were separated from their parents during Operation Babylift.
Her story underscores the lasting identity questions for Babylift adoptees, many of whom were evacuated amid the chaotic final days of the Vietnam War with incomplete or inaccurate records.