Clad only in her bathing suit, Mylene Tran Huynh fled from Vietnam in 1976 when she was nine years old with her family in a crowded, open boat that brought them, exhausted, to the Philippines. There the Red Cross and an American church got the family to the US.
Today, she is a doctor and a lieutenant colonel in the US Air Force.
Quang Pham's father, Hoa, managed to get his wife, three young daughters, and 10-year-old son Quang on an airplane out of Saigon just before it was captured by the North Vietnamese in 1975.
Ten years later, Pham joined the Marine Corps and flew helicopters in Somalia and in Desert Storm against Iraq in 1991.
Trinh Warner's mother and stepfather, H. Ross Warner, left Vietnam in 1974 intending to send for Trinh and four siblings staying with their grandmother. As Saigon was about to fall, the five children were taken to the US Embassy where several thousand Vietnamese were trying to claw their way aboard departing US helicopters.
Reunited
They found their stepfather's friend, a big American named Jim, who told the marine guards the five children were his and his wife's. They were plucked off the embassy roof and later the children were reunited with their parents in San Francisco.
Today, Trinh Warner is a lawyer and a captain in the US Air Force on duty in Baghdad.
After their harrowing escapes from Vietnam, many Vietnamese Americans are serving throughout the US armed forces today as a way, Lieutenant Colonel Huynh said, of giving back to America for having provided them safe haven.
Pham, now a business executive in California, agreed, saying he went into Marine Officer Candidate School "to pay back my citizenship to our country."
In Hawaii alone, Lieutenant Colonel Lynda Vu is chief of medical staff at Hickam Air Force Base. Major Tuan Ton, an army infantryman, is a staff officer at the Pacific Command working on Southeast Asian issues. Another army major, Hung Nguyen, is a medical officer.
Warner has actually served three times, enlisting after high school because, she says, "I was not ready to go to college." She left active duty to go into a reserve program and was called back during Desert Storm. After graduating from Fresno State in California, she earned a law degree at the Howard University School of Law in Washington. When Muslim terrorists mounted the assaults on New York and Washington that killed nearly 3,000 people on Sept. 11, 2001, she volunteered to return to the air force as a lawyer.
Just how many Vietnamese Americans are in the service is unclear. Neither the Pentagon nor various Vietnamese American civic organizations seemed to know. The US Census Bureau says there were 1.2 million Vietnamese in the US in 2000, up from 10,000 in 1970. Most are concentrated south of Los Angeles, in San Jose in northern California, and in Houston, Texas.
After the end of the war in Vietnam, the first wave of South Vietnamese escaped from their new communist rulers around 1975. A second wave, many fleeing in small boats, began in 1979 and continued into the 1980s, in some months numbering 50,000 refugees. An estimated one-third of them perished at sea.
Duty
Some of the Vietnamese Americans in the service have followed in their fathers' footsteps. Pham's father had been a pilot in the South Vietnamese Air Force. In his book, A Sense of Duty, Pham wrote of his father: "I wanted to relieve him of a loser's guilt, a husband's regret, a father's remorse. Most of all, I wanted him to know that he stood for respectability -- for duty, honor, and country."
Huynh's father was a doctor and a paratrooper in the South Vietnamese Army who passed the medical exam in Virginia to resume his practice. She graduated from the University of Virginia's medical school where she met and married her husband, Thanh Quoc Hyunh, a graduate of Virginia Polytechnic Institute who also fled Vietnam in a boat. They have three sons.
In recent years, Huynh has been back to Vietnam twice on international medical missions and once on a personal visit with her parents. While it was good to keep in touch with her roots, she said she was saddened by Vietnam's poverty, particularly of the children.
"We have so much here in the US," she said. "When I see the children in Vietnam, I think how lucky we are. Those could have been my children."
Richard Halloran is a writer based in Hawaii.
President William Lai (賴清德) recently attended an event in Taipei marking the end of World War II in Europe, emphasizing in his speech: “Using force to invade another country is an unjust act and will ultimately fail.” In just a few words, he captured the core values of the postwar international order and reminded us again: History is not just for reflection, but serves as a warning for the present. From a broad historical perspective, his statement carries weight. For centuries, international relations operated under the law of the jungle — where the strong dominated and the weak were constrained. That
The Executive Yuan recently revised a page of its Web site on ethnic groups in Taiwan, replacing the term “Han” (漢族) with “the rest of the population.” The page, which was updated on March 24, describes the composition of Taiwan’s registered households as indigenous (2.5 percent), foreign origin (1.2 percent) and the rest of the population (96.2 percent). The change was picked up by a social media user and amplified by local media, sparking heated discussion over the weekend. The pan-blue and pro-China camp called it a politically motivated desinicization attempt to obscure the Han Chinese ethnicity of most Taiwanese.
On Wednesday last week, the Rossiyskaya Gazeta published an article by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) asserting the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) territorial claim over Taiwan effective 1945, predicated upon instruments such as the 1943 Cairo Declaration and the 1945 Potsdam Proclamation. The article further contended that this de jure and de facto status was subsequently reaffirmed by UN General Assembly Resolution 2758 of 1971. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs promptly issued a statement categorically repudiating these assertions. In addition to the reasons put forward by the ministry, I believe that China’s assertions are open to questions in international
The Legislative Yuan passed an amendment on Friday last week to add four national holidays and make Workers’ Day a national holiday for all sectors — a move referred to as “four plus one.” The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), who used their combined legislative majority to push the bill through its third reading, claim the holidays were chosen based on their inherent significance and social relevance. However, in passing the amendment, they have stuck to the traditional mindset of taking a holiday just for the sake of it, failing to make good use of
RSS