He wanted to go, and he was worried about the war, but he was not going to have a chance to say goodbye to Ba, and that was very hard. April 4, his last day in Saigon, was so hot and humid that the children did not go to the roof. Instead, they did their studies inside. The staff kept them there for another reason as well: the airport was being shelled and they could see fires when they looked in that direction from the roof. As Long worked on his studies that day and thought about his grandmother, he was unaware of a tragedy unfolding nearby. Rosemary Taylor and her organization, Friends For All Children, had accepted the government’s offer of the first evacuation flight. Like Holt, FFAC had been searching for a way to get the children in its care out of the country. Many of these children had serious medical conditions, and the FFAC staff was determined to evacuate as many of them as possible. The military plane would be a start. In the sweltering heat of April 4, the FFAC staff put 230 orphans and fifty adult escorts onto a C-5A cargo plane supplied by the American government.
