Our meeting included a speaker who came to the meeting as a guest speaker and left as an honorary VHVA member. Van Marosek shared her story of her escape from Viet name in the last few days of the fall of South Viet Nam. At that time, Van was the nine-year-old daughter of a Vietnamese interpreter for MACV (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam). As North Vietnam troops were closing in, her mother, the interpreter, was offered asylum to America for the family. Van noted that in Vietnam, family includes extended family, much unlike here in America. The date was April 27, three days before the fall of South Vietnam. The rush to get on the C-130 on the airport tarmac was intense with the North Vietnamese army approaching. The plane’s crew did not understand the Vietnamese meaning of the Vietnamese word for family and was not allowing here extended family onto the plane. An officer overhearing the plea quickly shouted “We don’t have time to argue about what family means. Let them all on the plane.” Van’s extended family of 19 ran onto the crammed C-130 with no idea where the plane was going to take them but knowing they likely would never return home. Van’s family had lived in a war environment since World War II and left that environment on the second to last flight out. The plane first stopped in the Philippines, and then Wake Island, finally landed on American soil at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas. Due to sponsorship rules for immigrants, her family was split to the four corners of America