Operation New Life

Operation New Life (23 April – 1 November 1975) was the care and processing on Guam of Vietnamese refugees evacuated from Saigon by Operation Frequent Wind in the closing days of the Vietnam War. More than 111,000 of the evacuated 130,000 Vietnamese refugees were transported to Guam where they were housed in tent cities for a few weeks while being processed for resettlement. The great majority of the refugees were resettled in the United States. A few thousand were resettled in other countries or chose to return to Vietnam on the vessel Tuong Tin.

In April 1975, as the North Vietnamese Army (PAVN) advanced on Saigon, the United States carried out a massive and chaotic evacuation of Americans, nationals of allied countries, and Vietnamese who had worked for or been closely associated with the U.S. during the Vietnam War. To deal with the refugees, President Gerald Ford on 18 April 1975 created the Interagency Task Force (IATF) for Indochina, a dozen government agencies with the responsibility to transport, process, receive and resettle Indochinese refugees, nearly all Vietnamese, in the United States. Ford appointed L. Dean Brown of the Department of State to head Operation New Life. Later he was replaced by Julia V. Taft of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW). To finance Operation New Life the Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act was adopted on 23 May 1975. This act allocated funding of $305 million for the State Department and $100 million for HEW.

Nearby countries in Southeast Asia declined to accept the Vietnamese evacuees, fearing that they would have them on their soil permanently. However, Governor Ricardo Bordallo, agreed to grant the Vietnamese temporary asylum on Guam, some 2,500 miles (4,000 km) from Saigon. On April 23, Rear Admiral George Stephen Morrison, commander of U.S. Naval forces on Guam (and the father of singer Jim Morrison), was ordered to "accept, shelter, process and care for refugees as they were removed from South Vietnam."

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