The World and Everything in It: April 7, 2025

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning!

Who decides where low-income patients on Medicaid go for healthcare? The patient, or the state?

BURSCH: It’s like when I go to Blue Cross and Blue Shield and I don’t get to pick any doctor that I want. If I want to go to Johns Hopkins, I can’t request a doctor unless they’re on the list

NICK EICHER, HOST: That’s ahead on Legal Docket.

Also today: the Monday Moneybeat, tariffs and tanking markets, following the so-called liberation day. David Bahnsen is standing by.

And the WORLD History Book: fifty years ago this month a military evacuation in Vietnam. 

TRAYNOR: And we just bucket brigade carried kids up the stairs.

REICHARD: It’s Monday, April 7th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

EICHER: And I’m Nick Eicher. Good morning!

REICHARD: Time for news with Kent Covington.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Severe weather » Severe storms are battering parts of the South and Midwest pushing rivers over their banks and into roadways and neighborhoods.

SOUND: [River rushing]

Two normally calm creeks heard there, swelling and merging to form a rushing river in southern Missouri.

Torrential rains have lingered over many states, including Kentucky, Tennessee and Alabama.

And Frank Pereira with the National Weather Service says:

PEREIRA:  Those impacts are actually, are unfortunately gonna continue here for the next several days. As you know, all that water that has fallen continues to fill or flow into the, into the rivers.

From Texas to Ohio on Sunday cities deployed sandbags to protect homes and businesses.

Storms and flooding have killed at least 18 people in recent days.

Trump-Netanyahu meeting » Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in Washington this morning ahead of a meeting with President Trump.

And this time, tariffs may top the agenda when the two leaders sit down in the Oval Office.

The president imposed a 17% tariff on Israeli imports, even though Israel had already canceled all tariffs on U.S. products last week.

NETANYAHU: [Speaking Hebrew]

The prime minister said he’s the first leader to meet with Trump on this issue since the president’s announcement. He added, “I think it shows the personal connection between our countries that is so essential in this time.”

Trump and Netanyahu will also discuss Israel’s war against Hamas and efforts to free hostages in Gaza.

Tariffs » And the prime minister certainly is not the only world leader anxious to talk tariffs with President Trump. More than 50 countries have reached out to the White House to begin trade talks.

Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville said Sunday:

TUBERVILLE:  He's a businessman. We've, he's the first president that's really stood up and say, enough, enough of other countries ripping us off.

And Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick says the president is doing what needs to be done.

LUTNICK:  The president needs to reset global trade. Everybody has a trade surplus and we have a trade deficit. We are paying away our future and our lives.

The White House says that means striking fairer trade deals and rebuilding America’s manufacturing capacity.

But Republican Sen. James Lankford says the president has another purpose, even if he’s not saying so publicly. Lankford said of China:

LANKFORD:  When you look at the inside working of their economy, they're very, very dependent on exports. Uh, if they don't have large quantities of exports, their, their economy doesn't work at all. So this is a direct challenge to them to say, we're gonna try to push more manufacturing in the United States to bring jobs here.

Tariffs criticism » But Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell argues that the tariffs will effectively be a tax increase on American consumers.

CANTWELL:  We're hearing from a big segment of the economy. The consumer spending is a big part of GDP, and they're worried.

Some Republicans have also expressed reservations about the president’s heavy weiling trade tariffs.

GOP Congressman Don Bacon:

BACON:  It's time that Congress restores its authorities here and the Constitution is clear. The House and the Senate, Congress has the power of tariffs and taxes. Mm-hmm. And we gave some of that power to the executive branch. And I think in hindsight, that was a mistake.

He is joining a bipartisan group of lawmakers pushing legislation that would state that Congress must sign off on all new tariffs.

Bondi on wrongly deported migrant » Attorney General Pam Bondi is criticizing a judge’s order to bring a deportedl immigrant back to the United States.

That order came after the government said it mistakenly deported a migrant from El Salvado.

BONDI:  ICE has testified, members of ICE, that he is an MS13 gang member, and the defense, his lawyers have argued, well, he should be here because he was studying to be an electrician.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia entered the U.S. illegally in 2011 and asked for asylum citing concerns of becoming a victim of gang violence in El Salvador. His request was denied. Nevertheless, an immigration judge granted him protection from deportation five years ago.

TikTok reprieve »  President Trump tossed another lifeline to TikTok over the weekend. He pushed the deadline back once more for its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell the social app.

The company will get another 75 days to find a buyer outside of China to avoid a total ban in the United States.

That comes after President Trump told reporters last week:

TRUMP: We’re very close to a deal with a very good group of people.

That deal would have transferred TikTok’s US operations to American ownership. But the Chinese government slammed the brakes on that agreement after President Trump’s tariffs announcement.

If a deal does not come together, TikTok, under a law passed last year, would be banned over national security concerns.

I'm Kent Covington.

Straight ahead: Legal Docket, a case about Planned Parenthood funding. Plus, it was a rocky week on Wall Street… David Bahnsen is standing by to talk about it during the Monday Moneybeat.

This is The World and Everything in It.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s The World and Everything in It for this 7th day of April, 2025. We’re so glad you’ve joined us today.  Good morning! I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Time now for Legal Docket. 

For a case that was not fundamentally about abortion there was an awful lot of talk about it.

MCMASTER: If the people of South Carolina had thought for a moment that our tax money… 

South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster, whose executive order touched off the case:

MCMASTER: Would've been spent to support abortions in our state, I don't think that law would've ever passed

 CHOIMORROW: [Chanting] We won’t go back !

REICHARD: Outside the Supreme Court, pro-lifers gathered on one side, pro-abortion activists on the other. A singing of the Star Spangled Banner amid chants of “we won’t go back.”

CHOIMORROW: That’s right, everyone, we’re not going back …

Activist Sung-Yeon Choimorrow is a teaching elder in the Presbyterian Church USA. She explained her faith is not at odds with Planned Parenthood, but rather harmonious with it.

CHOIMORROW: I stand here today because of my faith, because of how I was raised, educated at, of all places, Wheaton College, Illinois, because my faith is not about controlling people.

Abortionist Taylor Walker told her story of being raised in a pro-life environment in the south, but said Planned Parenthood, her words, "gave her her life back" when she found herself pregnant.

WALKER: The day after my abortion I decided to fight like [expletive] to protect abortion and so that none of my patients would have to navigate the type of violent, sexist, racist, [expletive] that I did when trying to access essential health care.

For Dr. Walker and the Planned Parenthood supporters outside the court, and for the pro-life side, the issue is taxpayer funding.

WALKER: And now these [expletives] have the audacity to cut Medicaid and Title X funding and stage yet another attack on Planned Parenthood …

The pro-lifers say denying taxpayer dollars is hardly an attack. Gabriella McIntyre is a member of the legal team defending South Carolina’s aid cutoff.

MCINTYRE: The American people should not be forced to fund an activist organization that already receives billions of dollars in direct public funding. So Planned Parenthood does not need Medicaid funding.

As is often the case, the emotions around the dispute overtake the rather technical legal question.

In this case it’s whether the Medicaid Act confers a private right upon a Medicaid beneficiary, meaning the government guaranteeing a patient the right to choose whatever provider she wants.

EICHER: First, a word about the Medicaid program. It’s run jointly by the federal government and the states … to cover healthcare for the more than 72 million Americans of low income.

States have the flexibility to run their own Medicaid programs, but they still have to comply with federal law.

That includes a requirement that the states let patients receive services from “any qualified provider.”

REICHARD: That three-word phrase —“any qualified provider”—is the issue: Does that phrase mean those receiving Medicaid have the right to sue when a state denies access to the provider of their choice? Even when it’s Planned Parenthood, America’s biggest single abortion provider.

EICHER: Back in 2018, Governor McMaster of South Carolina issued that executive order, banning abortion providers from the state Medicaid program. Planned Parenthood has two affiliates in the state that were affected.

REICHARD: In response, a Medicaid patient named Julie Edwards joined with Planned Parenthood to sue South Carolina. They argue the state took away her rights as well as broke federal law.

Lower courts agreed, and Governor McMaster’s order was blocked.

EICHER: So South Carolina appealed.

Petitioner Eunice Medina is the state official responsible for running South Carolina’s Medicaid program. Her lawyer John Bursch argued the words of the law matter. Bursch pointed to a prior case that held that the only way private rights are established is with clear rights-creating language:

BURSCH: Congress did not use clear rights-creating language in the "any qualified provider" provision. That lack should be dispositive.

“Clear rights,” meaning when Congress writes a law, it must explicitly grant the right to sue. And Bursch pointed to a 2002 Supreme Court ruling that said courts ought not infer a right to sue without that intent clearly, explicitly stated.

On the other side arguing for Planned Parenthood and the Medicaid patient, lawyer Nicole Saharsky said Congress was clear enough:

SAHARSKY: As this case comes to the Court, it is established that South Carolina violated the statute by denying Julie Edwards her choice of a qualified and willing provider. The only question is whether she can do something about it,…..these people aren’t getting rich. You know, they’re just trying to get healthcare here.

REICHARD: After all, Saharsky pointed out, South Carolina admitted Planned Parenthood is medically qualified. It just doesn’t like Planned Parenthood because it does abortions—and that’s merely an ideological preference. But that, she said, is what the phrase “any qualified provider” was meant to prevent.

Justice Neil Gorsuch floated the idea that Congress could respect patient choice without also including the right to sue:

GORSUCH: Congress could hypothetically say an individual should be entitled to these benefits but not want to create a right of enforcement …I mean, that’s imaginable, isn’t it?

SAHARSKY: Congress could write statutes in a lot of different ways….

EICHER: But here, she argued, Congress wrote it in a way to prioritize patient choice.

She hammered on the theme that just like people with private insurance, Medicaid patients also have a say in who treats them.

But Bursch for South Carolina countered:

BURSCH: It's like when I go to Blue Cross and Blue Shield and I don't get to pick any doctor that I want. If I want to go to Johns Hopkins, I can't request a doctor unless they're on the list.

Bursch stuck to the main argument that Medicaid isn’t a civil rights law. It’s a contract between the federal government and the states. And that contract gives no right to patients to sue.

REICHARD: It does give the federal government the right to withhold its funds from the state. That’s the proper remedy here, Bursch says.

BURSCH: And the fact that the 12 of us can have such a robust conversation about whether this statute is mandatory or not, whether it's rights-creating or not, demonstrates that the rights-creating language is ambiguous, not clear and explicit. And if there is any ambiguity in this context, the state has to win because it's not being put on notice of when it might be sued. At the end of the day, putting states on clear notice requires explicit rights-creating language, as this Court has said. At the end of the day, putting states on clear notice requires explicit rights-creating language, as this Court has said.

Justice Clarence Thomas asked Bursch to clarify what he means by the word “right.”

THOMAS:Do you think “right” is absolutely necessary in order to determine whether or not a right has been created?

BURSCH: I think, if Congress wants to be clear, "right" is the best word, but we would take its functional equivalent. So, for example, "entitlement" or "privilege," other words that are functionally equivalent to ‘right” or of course the traditional “no person shall” like the Fifth Amendment. But this court made clear in Talevski that this is a high bar. It’s atypical.

Talevski … that’s a case that came up a lot. It’s a 2023 decision in which the court said a resident of a nursing home could sue under a different federal law.

Planned Parenthood used that ruling to bolster its argument, but Bursch distinguished that case: the language in the relevant law there was clear about the ability to sue.

EICHER: The division on the bench was obvious. Justice Sonia Sotomayor challenged Bursch for South Carolina on his insistence on certain words:

SOTOMAYOR: You’re not quite calling it a magic word, but you’re coming very close….It seems a little bit odd to think that a problem that motivated Congress to pass this provision was that states were limiting the choices people had. …. It seems hard to understand that states didn't understand that they had to give provider --individuals the right to choose a provider.

BURSCH: Justice Sotomayor, certainly, a state would understand it has to provide a benefit, but absent clear rights-creating language, it wouldn't know that it had to honor a right.

Justice Elena Kagan aligned with Justice Sotomayor:

KAGAN: I don’t even know how to say this line without saying “right.” “Has a right to choose their doctor.” That's what this provision is. It's impossible to even say the thing without using the word "right." Has a benefit to choose their doctor? The state has to ensure that individuals have a benefit to choose their doctor? The state has to ensure that individuals have a right to choose their doctor. That’s what this provision is.

Bursch disputed that. He said Justice Kagan places too much weight on the phrase “may obtain.” He said that phrase simply does not create a clear right to sue.

REICHARD: Justice Amy Coney Barrett got practical:

BARRETT: If I want to go see Dr Jones and that’s the provider of my choice and the state has disqualified Dr. Jones … there’s no mechanism, am I right, for the beneficiary to say: ‘Well, you’re depriving me of my ability’ – we won’t call it right, we won’t use the loaded word – ‘but my ability to see the provider of my choice.’ And nobody’s disputing that Dr. Jones can provide the service in a competent way that I want to have.

BURSCH: Well, in a sense, what -- what all that means is that the beneficiary doesn't have the ability to whip out a magic wand and then just hit on the head the doctor that they want and then they must be qualified under Medicaid. This is getting a little bit more into the question of what's qualified. But that's not the right.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh seemed frustrated:

KAVANAUGH: We're here, obviously, because of the confusion in the lower courts, which has been -- we're on kind of a 45-year odyssey.

BURSCH: Yes.

KAVANAUGH: And it's not the fault of any one judge, but, collectively, this Court has failed to give guidance, obviously, that lower courts can follow, that states, providers, and beneficiaries can follow. So one of my goals coming out of this will be to provide that clarity.

….maybe putting together some list of terms that do create rights would work?

KAVANAUGH: So don't you think it would be better to actually tell us the words that are rights-creating rather than having something like "or its functional equivalent," which could be another decade of litigation?

BURSCH: Yeah, that's certainly possible because you'd have to keep that to a pretty small class. I wouldn't be able to really do any better than Justice Alito's partial concurrence in Talevski, where he describes it as explicit rights-creating language. And the list I would give you is "rights," "entitlement," "privilege," and "immunities."

KAVANAUGH: And that’s it?

BURSCH: You could define it as that universe.

A win for Planned Parenthood will keep its two facilities in South Carolina open for Medicaid business. If South Carolina wins, it’ll encourage other states to also bar Planned Parenthood from its Medicaid programs.

The states of Missouri, Mississippi, Texas, and Arkansas already do. Each of those states has also been sued with varying outcomes. This case out of South Carolina is the one that reached the Supreme Court.

EICHER: Finally, two opinions to report from last week.

First, Medical Marijuana v Horn. Douglas Horn was fired from his job after testing positive for the active ingredient in marijuana, THC. He says he didn’t intend to take it … and that he’d consumed a CBD product he thought contained no THC. So he sued the manufacturer for misleading him. He sued under a federal law that’s aimed at fighting organized crime—the RICO Act … It stands for racketeer-influenced and corrupt organizations act.

The question is whether a person can sue under RICO for losses that arise from a personal injury. By 5-to-4 the court said, yes, Horn can sue—because he claimed a loss of “business or property,” the language RICO uses.

REICHARD: And a unanimous opinion in FDA v Wages and White Lion Investments. This dealt with flavored e-cigarettes. Vape manufacturers challenged the FDA’s decision to deny them approval to sell vapes that appeal to kids, with fruit or candy flavors.

The justices say the FDA acted within its authority, sending part of the case back for further review.

And that’s this week’s Legal Docket!

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: The Monday Moneybeat.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Time now to talk business, markets, and the economy with financial analyst and adviser David Bahnsen. David heads up the wealth management firm The Bahnsen Group. He is here now. Good morning to you, David, and glad you’re here.

DAVID BAHNSEN: Well, thanks for having me Nick.

EICHER: So, last Thursday the White House declared “Liberation Day,” announcing a sweeping new tariff plan. But the market didn’t exactly join the party. Instead, we saw a steep sell-off. How do you read it?

BAHNSEN: Well, calling it a sell-off is a very nice way to put it. It was a very violent sell off. You’re looking at the worst day in markets in five years and the combined impact throughout the week was really, really bad.

So we’re in a place here where the markets are responding to two things that took place on so-called Liberation Day, and they’re the worst of all worlds.

One is the news itself being worse than expected, as bad as it could be in terms of what was announced around the tariffs. But then the double whammy of uncertainty that is ongoing.

Bad news that is certain becomes a little bit easier to digest than bad news that is not. In this case the cost to the American economy that was announced is also combined with several different uncertainties: dates when certain things are supposed to be implemented, doors left open for carve outs and waivers, and then what most troubled me as a constitutionalist, that the full modification authority lies with the President. Vice President Vance said on Thursday that all of this is done on President Trump’s gut.

I would add, by the way, Secretary Bessent said: We need to wait and see what happens.

All of those types of things indicate uncertainty. So, you have uncertainty combined with bad news, and that is not something markets liked at all.

EICHER: Some might still hold out hope that there’s a strategic method behind all this—that in a few months we’ll look back and say, “Ah, now I see what he was doing.” So, from where you sit, it’s that a possibility, or are you already clear on what’s gone wrong?

BAHNSEN: I think that why he’s doing it isn’t quite so complicated, in my opinion.

I think that he has a certain belief that we are getting “ripped off” whenever anybody is selling more things to us than they are buying from us. He believes the tariffs are going to make things fair—what they call reciprocity, reciprocal tariffs that level the playing field. Had they said, whatever you’re tariffing us, we’re gonna tariff you, it would have been a tiny fraction of what we ended up with, for the simple reason that there really aren’t that many big inequities.

But instead what they did is they divided the total trade deficit that a country has with us, by their level of exports to us and set that at the level of tariff.

So you ended up with countries like Switzerland that have almost no tariffs on us that are now going to be tariffed higher than the rest of the European Union. Vietnam is one of the worst countries in his chart, and even though it has barely any tariffs on us, it’s because of the trade deficit. Both Switzerland and Vietnam sell us a ton of stuff and don’t buy a lot from us—for very obvious reasons. It was almost sort of humorous, but that’s never really been historically framed, Nick, as somebody ripping us off, but there’s just a lot of advisors giving advice that, you know, we’ve seen before.

For example, President Biden was given the advice that if he passed a huge bill that gave a bunch of Americans more money, that it would be appreciated and that it wouldn’t affect deficits and wouldn’t affect prices. He got bad advice. When Bush Senior was told, you can raise taxes, the American people know it’s for the best, even though you said, read my lips, he got bad advice.

I could go on and on—from wage and price controls of President Nixon to that really ineffective stimulus that President Obama passed in the beginning of his presidency. Both Republican and Democrat presidents get bad advice, and this is just very bad advice that President Trump is getting.

The big question markets have and the big question for the economy is what an offamp will be and when it will come. At this point is I’m not sure that it will matter to avoid a recession.

I think it’s very possible that it’s too late. I got over a hundred phone calls last week from clients and non-clients. Not a single one brought up the stock market or their portfolios. All of them were about the impact on their businesses. At least eighty percent of these people, if not more, were Trump voters, but in some cases, they don’t know if they’re going to make it through the summer.

Others saying, you know, they’re going to be laying people off. I mean, this is a real big impact to small business, Nick.

EICHER: We did get a better-than-expected jobs report—200,000 jobs-plus added in March—but the unemployment rate ticked up a bit too. Still, that kind of labor market strength seems like good news, even though backward-looking.

BAHNSEN: Yeah, the unemployment number went up to 4.2%, but the jobs for March were at 220,000—a little bit better than the 140,000 that had been expected. So again, when that happens, it’s a labor participation force issue. It’s the math.

So not really big news of a job report with a full-blown global trade war breaking out. China announced 34% reciprocal tariffs on America. Those things tend to trump the jobs report, no pun intended. But also, as you said, the jobs report is backward looking. So, it’ll be much more interesting to see where jobs are in another month and in another month after that.

EICHER: Looking ahead, what signs will you be watching to get a clearer picture of where the economy’s headed? Are there specific indicators—or conversations—that will give you the best read?

BAHNSEN: The next thing that I’m going to see and hear is anecdotal, things like, you know, Nintendo just announced they’re going to delay release of their next game console because of the impact of tariffs. A massive multi-hundred-million-dollar shoe company telling me last week that they think they’ll go out of business because there’s no capacity to make the footwear here in America—and these tariffs are over 100% of their margin.
Those things are going to be anecdotal, but then you’ll see the data backward looking with the actual measurement of Institute of Supply Management (ISM) manufacturing, industrial production, of capital expenditures in the GDP number. That comes throughout the second quarter and into the third quarter. So, there’s two areas—the anecdotal that foreshadows what comes and then there’s the actual data that validates it over the months ahead.

EICHER: David Bahnsen, founder, managing partner, and chief investment officer of The Bahnsen Group. David writes at WORLD Opinions and at dividendcafe.com, and I will urge a close read of this week’s Dividend Café to dive into the details. But I’ll say, even when the news isn’t great, I do always appreciate your calling the balls and strikes each week. Thanks very much!

BAHNSEN: Thanks so much, Nick.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Monday, April 7th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Up next, the WORLD History Book.

Fifty years ago, the US and other nations began frantically evacuating Vietnamese who fought and worked alongside them in the decades-long war.

EICHER: As North Vietnamese and Communist soldiers moved rapidly south, families began pouring into Saigon seeking safety from the advancing forces. It became obvious that nowhere would be safe for anyone who supported the West. And one group was particularly vulnerable.

But an American operation to evacuate got off to a disastrous start.

WORLD’s Todd Vician has the story of Operation BabyLift.

TODD VICIAN: U.S. combat troops left Vietnam in 1973. Two years later, communist forces advance on Saigon. Orphanages are teeming with children—and growing. Parents can’t care for their children after years of war and famine and many are already dead. Audio here from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

REPORTER: Various voluntary organizations were at full stretch caring for thousands of babies and young children who had been orphaned or abandoned by fleeing parents. Australian, American, and European bodies all offered to fly them to new homes.

Despite the impending collapse in Vietnam, international adoptions remain painfully slow, even for children with an American father. That changes overnight.

GERALD FORD: I have directed that money from a $2 million special foreign aid Children's Fund be made available to fly 2,000 South Vietnamese orphans to the United States as soon as possible.

President Gerald Ford announces Operation BabyLift on April 3rd. U.S. Air Force leaders first learn about this mission as they watch the president on TV.

FORD: I have directed that C-5A aircraft and other aircraft especially equipped to care for these orphans during the flight, be sent to Saigon. I expect these flights to begin within the next 36 to 48 hours.

Air Force planners quickly begin to notify crews on alert in the Philippines. Captain Bud Traynor is eating when he’s summoned to the command post, still unaware of the president’s announcement.

BUD TRAYNOR: “So what we want to know is, how many people can you carry out?” Well, we got 73 seats upstairs. That's how many people we can carry. “No, no, no. How many can you really take?” they said.

About three hours after that first phone call, two flight crews and two teams of nurses and medics are airborne. It is the first aeromedical evacuation mission for the hulking military cargo aircraft.

After landing in Saigon, the crew unloads artillery destined for the South Vietnamese army. Then nuns and caregivers from orphanages exit waiting buses with bars on their windows. Most carry a child in each arm.

TRAYNOR: We put a Pan Am stairs up against the back of the airplane, and we just bucket brigade carried kids up the stairs all the way up into the cargo compartment, and then up the stairs.

Nurses quickly assess the condition of each child. wishing they could comfort the sobbing Vietnamese women handing children to strangers. 150 children are soon sitting or lying two to a seat in the passenger compartment six stories above the ground. About the same number of children sit on blankets on the plane’s metal floor, with cargo straps tightened over their legs. American families fleeing the country volunteer to escort the children home. Along with the flight and medical crews, nearly 400 people are onboard. Sergeant Greg Gmerek is a medical technician alerted for the flight.

GREG GMEREK: “They seemed to all be had a cold or something. So I was going around trying to wipe their noses and calm them down and do whatever I could to make it okay.”

The takeoff for Clark Air Base in the Philippines is uneventful. But 12 minutes into the flight and 23,000 feet over the South China Sea, there’s a loud bang as the aircraft’s rear cargo ramp is torn from the plane. Fog fills the air inside the plane as air rushes out and there aren’t enough oxygen masks for everyone onboard. Sergeant Phil Wise is stationed in the cargo compartment.

PHIL WISE: I looked back, I saw the rear cargo doors and ramp rip off the aircraft like it was really never attached…. I remember hearing screaming and yelling. I remember seeing bodies sucked out.

The blast severs some hydraulic lines and flight-control wires. Traynor, the aircraft commander, and his copilot force the plane to descend, turn it around, and head for Saigon. The rest of the crew tend to children, secure what they can, and prepare for a crash landing.

CBS REPORTER: The huge plane crashed into a field about five miles from the end of the runway, near a small village in Jaden province. There were pieces of wreckage scattered across a half a mile of rice paddy. A fire was slowly burning itself out near the engines, smashed bodies, or parts of them were uncovered by Vietnamese Air Force crews and American officials who rushed to the scene. It was like a combat operation.

The giant airplane’s first impact with the ground is similar to a rough landing one might experience in the back of an airliner. Still traveling at about 500 feet per minute, it bounces before crashing and comes to rest in several pieces.

TRAYNOR: I'm looking out my window, I can see that there's dirt and everything coming up. So I said goodbye to my wife twice, and because I thought that was it. And suddenly I came to a stop. It was quiet. I was alive, and somebody yelled, ‘fire’.

176 people onboard survive, but more than 120 children die. All but three of the fatalities occur in the plane’s lower cargo area. Forty of the 62 volunteer escorts and a Catholic nun who had selected many of the children for adoption are also killed, along with eleven of the flight crew members.

Air Force officials initially suspect a bomb hidden on the aircraft during the frenzied loading. But they later find the locks on the rear cargo door were improperly installed during maintenance stateside. The locks gave way under the immense pressure at altitude.

The Air Force temporarily grounds the C-5 and resumes the airlift with other airplanes. Several airlines also volunteer to fly orphans out of Vietnam.

Gmerek suffers broken ribs, a collapsed lung, and other injuries in the crash, but is still able to hold babies’ heads out of the water—preventing them from drowning in the rice paddy.

GMEREK: I had a lot of guilt about surviving when somebody didn’t. I think what really helped me a lot was I had gone back to Vietnam and I met some of the orphans that did survive. I met two and I had the picture where they were on that plane specifically. I thought to myself, they could have been one of the ones sitting right in front of me that I put a mask on or did whatever for, really did put a lot of closure for me to it and so it’s better now.

Despite the tragic start, the operation goes on for 33 days, evacuating more than 3,000 children to waiting families and new lives.

That’s this week’s WORLD History Book. I’m Todd Vician.

Audio courtesy of The Ford Presidential Library and Museum, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, and iMichigan Productions’ Veteran Narratives Project.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Tomorrow: cleanup continues in Myanmar after last week’s earthquake. We’ll get an update on some of the challenges in bringing aid and relief. And, as the war rages on in Ukraine, an adoptive family fights to bring its children home. That and more tomorrow.

I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

The World and Everything in It comes to you from WORLD Radio. WORLD’s mission is Biblically objective journalism that informs, educates, and inspires.

The Bible records the Apostle Paul saying to the people in Antioch: “And though [those in Jerusalem and their rulers] found in [Jesus] no guilt worthy of death, they asked Pilate to have him executed. And when they had carried out all that was written of him, they took him down from the tree and laid him in a tomb. But God raised him from the dead, and for many days he appeared to those who had come up with him from Galilee to Jerusalem, who are now his witnesses to the people.” —Acts 13:28-31

Go now in grace and peace.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.