To me, it's kind of perverse that a traumatized young refugee of America's most controversial war grows up to build advanced bombs for the same military that decimated her homeland with more tonnage than all of WWII. Except now they're using the bombs on "Islamists" instead of "communists" in a new counter-insurgency war with questionable legitimacy and objectives. While I know that America must keep pressure on violent terrorists, and war is always a nasty affair, I still think her story is sad because she has a gifted mind and could have contributed to human needs in many other ways. She didn't have to get indoctrinated into believing that military service/research is the only way for immigrants to give back and show appreciation.
It's even worse that revisionist George Will thinks that immigrants owe America a "debt" for taking them in. While America's immigration policy in the last 50 years has been one of the most generous in the world, we are far from a "sanctuary country". Heck, Anh Duong wouldn't have had to flee anywhere if America and our corrupt puppet South Vietnamese regime didn't mismanage the war so badly! Actually America might owe Vietnam a debt for war crimes/excessive destruction, and actually Nixon and Kissinger were working on a war reparations proposal before Watergate paralyzed them.
And what about the millions of pro-Western Viets who didn't get out, or died on a rickety boat on high seas? Many suffered in re-education camps or jails just because they helped or were known to associate with Americans. Rescuing loyal friends out of certain hardship or death is the LEAST America could have done; there is no debt. And in some cases, depressed, traumatized refugees couldn't put the war behind them, learn English, and adapt to the new culture. They didn't get along with host families and languished in deplorable conditions because the recession-plagued 1970s America forgot about them. Anh Duong is a great success story, but there were many other failures that George Will doesn't know about and doesn't care to find out.
How about your ancestors George, what great things did they do for America? Does the Will family need to prove that it paid its debts and deserves to be here? And is he as judgmental of white immigrants as more recent, darker-skinned ones? Don't Rudy Giuliani and Tom Cruise have debts too? I know this is George Will we're talking about here, but still it's hard to stomach. He writes lame books, editorials, and tells us how America should be – clearly a patriot addressing a critical social need. I think the millions of mostly law-abiding, good-natured immigrants (some undocumented) out there who live humbly, work VERY hard, and give back to America much more than they take are the true patriots.
I know a country might want to screen immigrants for public safety reasons, and surely it's beneficial to attract workers with the most skills and potential. But America is a great nation because we don't judge "personal merit and contributions" as a criterion for citizenship/residency, especially for refugees. Or if we did, then Paris Hilton and Rush Limbaugh would get deported instead of Maria and Ernesto. Immigrants "paying a debt" to be here? That sounds like indentured servitude to me. Like the predatory human traffickers who smuggle a poor soul to some urban slum and force them to work two years nonstop in a sweat shop to even have a chance at freedom. That is NOT the American way. The green statue in New York is a reminder that ALL seeking a better life are welcomed. Not just the rich and talented, but actually the downtrodden and desperate should get priority.
George F. Will
Anh Duong, Out Of Debt
Such are history's caroms—she was involved in the end of the Vietnam War and the beginning of the War on Terror.
History, said Emerson, is "the biography of a few stout and earnest persons." But history also is a story of unpredictable contingencies and improbable caroms, and of a 4-foot-7, 15-year-old girl's leap from a dangerously bobbing boat to a pitching South Vietnamese ship in the South China Sea. It was April 1975. The Communists were overrunning South Vietnam . At that time, Osama bin Laden was 18. The arc of his life, and Anh Duong's, would intersect. Her leap propelled her to freedom. She grew up to be a 5-foot-1 chemist who, 26 years later, led the development of a bomb efficient at killing America's enemies in Afghanistan's caves. As a result, fewer American soldiers have had to enter those caves to engage Osama's fighters. This is Anh Duong's story.
The U.S. Navy took her and her family to Subic Bay in the Philippines. Next stop was a refugee camp in Pennsylvania. After five months this Buddhist family was adopted by the First Baptist Church in Washington, D.C. Soon Anh was in a suburban Maryland high school, headed for the University of Maryland and, eventually, degrees in chemical engineering, computer science and public administration.
"I wanted to work for the Defense Department," she says, "because I wanted to pay back the guys who protected us all those years." On September 11, 2001, she was working on Navy munitions and explosives—on, she says, "things that go swish and boom." Soon after 9/11 it was apparent that U.S. forces would be fighting in Afghanistan, where the enemy often would be sheltered in the deep recesses of caves, reached after many twists and turns. Sending U.S. forces into those caves would involve a terrible butcher's bill that might be avoided if a new munition could be developed—a new thermobaric (traveling blast and heat) bomb. But delivered by an F-15 to the mouth of a cave, a normal bomb's blast and fragmentation dissipate too quickly to reach deep into the cave and kill those hiding there. The task for her and her team was a challenge of detonation chemistry. They had to "deliver energy more slowly—we want the energy to last longer and travel."
Her current mission derives from the peculiar nature of the war against terrorists, in which the first difficult question is, she says, "Who am I aiming the weapon at?" This has become, in Iraq, a matter of high-stakes forensics using a huge biometric database. Whose fingerprints are those on that fragment of an improvised explosive device? She is devising portable labs to answer such questions in Iraq.
Anh is hardly a thermobaric person, a weaponized woman. The Washington Post reports that while she was working on the new bomb, her children, then 5 to 11, were not allowed to play with toy guns or read Harry Potter books, which the parents deemed too violent. Their parents even excised the fight scenes from their Disney "Pocahontas" video. The trajectory of Anh's life, which has taken her from one of America's wars to another, might eventually involve another generation of her family. The oldest of her four children, a 17-year-old daughter, is considering a career in—this apple did not fall far from the tree—homeland security or international affairs.
This autumn, Anh was among a select few federal workers honored with Service to America Medals by the Partnership for Public Service, which recognizes especially meritorious achievements. In front of a large audience at a black-tie dinner she strode to the microphone and, speaking without notes, began: "Thirty-two years ago I came to this land as a refugee of war with a pair of empty hands and a bag full of broken dreams." Describing America as "this paradise," she said:
"This land is a paradise not because of its beauty or richness but because of its people, the compassionate, generous Americans who took my family and me in, 32 years ago, and healed our souls, who restore my faith in humanity, and who inspire me to public service. There's a special group of people that I'm especially indebted to and I would like to dedicate this medal to them. They are the 58,000 Americans whose names are on the wall of the Vietnam War Memorial and the 260,000 South Vietnamese soldiers who died in that war in order for people like me to earn a second chance to freedom. May God bless all of those who are willing to die for freedom—especially those who are willing to die for the freedom of others. Thank you."
And thank you, Anh Duong. Consider your debt paid in full, with interest.
© 2007 Newsweek, Inc.
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Newsweek.com user comments (I'm sure you can guess which one was mine):
I am a child of South Vietnamese refugees and I have also heard of Anh Duong's story. While I am very happy that she was able to escape the horrible war and make a good life for herself and her family in America, I draw different conclusions from her story than Mr. Will. What debt does she or other refugees owe America? How dare he. What do we really owe America, the country that promised South Vietnam protection and victory, then abandoned the fight a decade later after destroying the countryside and finding themselves unable to defeat under-equipped insurgents? In fact, America owes a debt to immigrants, for all their billions of dollars in taxes, economic contributions, and research discoveries. America really needs to learn a thing or two about paying back debts. Another example is Iraq, where we have accepted fewer refugees (who in many cases risked their lives to help us) than even tiny Sweden.
I do mourn for the US and ARVN soldiers who died trying to defend the freedom of others, but history is never so black-and-white. More South Vietnamese died from American hands than the Viet Cong's. American planes dropped more tonnage on South Vietnamese soil than the Communist North, leaving some areas as virtual moonscapes and uninhabitable for decades. Most Viets are Buddhist, and that faith stringently rejects violence. I know immigrants and descendants of immigrants should be grateful to their generous hosts, but I can think of other nonviolent ways to give back, instead of designing deadlier bombs for a new counterinsurgency war that will kill strangers half a world away (and some of the victims are always innocent bystanders).
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Thank you, Anh Duong, for expressing the feelings of millions of South Vietnamese people and for your achievements. I, like you, was a young refugee to America. You are truly heroic, may you continue to live the life that your freedom has brought you.
However, it saddens me to constantly hear the American media and public refer to the Viet Nam War as an American War when 260,000 South Vietnamese soldiers and millions of South Vietnamese people died for South Viet Nam and when we, former South Vietnamese people, lost our country. It was a civil war and the wrong side won.
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Amazing story. There are thousands more just like this that are untold. Let this be a lesson to all Americans that while we are citizens either by birth or naturalization, we all are indebted to people like Anh and those names on the Vietnam Memorial. Rather than worrying about what the national identity of this nation should look like (white, black, hispanic, christian, muslim, buddhist, english, spanish etc...) let's do something productive and ensure that we leave something behind that might mean something to those who died so others could live.
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Imagine it we wouldn't of warp her mind with 10 years of war, maybe she would of cured cancer.
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