Latest / The Vietnamese with Kenneth Nguyen / 461 - How Do You Evolve Beyond Military Success? - Quang Pham

Transcript

461 - How Do You Evolve Beyond Military Success? - Quang Pham · The Vietnamese with Kenneth Nguyen

0:00
[SPEAKER_02]: Welcome to the Vietnamese podcast.
0:02
[SPEAKER_02]: Today I have quang fam is you are a Vietnamese American entrepreneur former Marine Corps helicopter pilot and the CEO of Katrina with their Pudix, a biopharmaceutical company listen on the Nasdaq and your born in Saigon.
0:17
[SPEAKER_02]: You came to America at the age of 10 after the fall of Saigon and you became the first Vietnamese American to earn
0:29
[SPEAKER_02]: during the Gulf War.
0:30
[SPEAKER_02]: And after leaving the military, you've built a successful career in the health care and pharmaceutical industry and found several companies before leading Codrino therapeutics, leading Codrino therapeutics, and you're an author and public speaker, and you're known for sharing your story of resilience, identity and leadership, and your journey from being a refugee to combat
0:58
[SPEAKER_02]: as an inspiring American success story.
1:01
[SPEAKER_02]: So thank you for joining me on the Vietnamese podcast.
1:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, if the great to be here with you, I've heard a lot about your shows and you and got the chance to meet you finally last month at Laly Hayeslipsy vet.
1:13
[SPEAKER_00]: I always wanted to as a simplify to a fellow bit to me, so simplify to a simplify.
1:18
[SPEAKER_02]: So my conversation today, I'm interested in this space that you and I kind of exist in and we overlap all these timeframes and Vietnamese culture and our new American history culture.
1:31
[SPEAKER_02]: And I am going to try to attempt this because you've lived a lot of life and I understand being in the Marines and our time during that period in the 90s, it was very different.
1:46
[SPEAKER_02]: But I think you joined, you were one of the first commissioned officers in the United States Marines.
1:53
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think 87, right?
1:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
1:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Can you help?
1:59
[SPEAKER_00]: There was a, yeah, there was a young Vietnamese American.
2:03
[SPEAKER_00]: I think his father was an American born.
2:08
[SPEAKER_00]: And his last name was not a Vietnamese last name.
2:11
[SPEAKER_00]: So I was the one who was known as the first also commission.
2:16
[SPEAKER_00]: But later, he was commission before me.
2:20
[SPEAKER_00]: But when I got the flight school in 1988, there was a young naval officer that said, hey, well, there was a incident that came through here last year.
2:31
[SPEAKER_00]: He got his wings, but he didn't make it through the fleet.
2:34
[SPEAKER_00]: He didn't get through the, what's called the, the rag band, the replacement air group, where you go and learn how to fly your specific helicopter.
2:42
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think as far as the Marine Corps, yes, I was the first to get through to get my wings.
2:46
[SPEAKER_00]: There were several of us that were near me that came in right after they got winged in later in 1991.
2:59
[SPEAKER_00]: the generation that grew up in the Vietnam War where our fathers were, I would say, majors, lieutenant kernels and kernels in the South Vietnamese military, whether it's the Air Force, the Marines, the Army, the Airborne, or even the Naval.
3:15
[SPEAKER_00]: So we were that those kids that grew up around military bases saw our South Vietnamese fathers go to war, raise the family, and then some of them came out with their families and some of them did not like my father.
3:29
[SPEAKER_02]: Your father ended up being stranded and kept back at the camps for a long time, and you grew up with basically without your father here in America.
3:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, but my father, I think, you know, haven't reconciled those emotions, you know, 20, 25 years ago when I wrote my first book, I said to duty,
3:49
[SPEAKER_00]: He came to United States under the H.O.
3:52
[SPEAKER_00]: program, the humanitarian operation program for, you know, the former G. T. Neeze and I think you're familiar with everything, right?
4:00
[SPEAKER_00]: The first wave, and then the orderly departure program, the boat people, and then the H.O.
4:05
[SPEAKER_00]: for the former prisoners.
4:07
[SPEAKER_00]: So he got here in 1992, 17 years after my mom and my three sisters left.
4:12
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm really on the second C-130 out of it on April 22nd, 1975 because my father had been a Lieutenant Colonel in the South Vietnamese Air Force and one of the standard days in which was a senior pilot in the C-130 when the United States gave the South Vietnamese Air Force to C-130s to replace the C-123s in late 1972.
4:32
[SPEAKER_00]: So we, he knew things were going to, we say, the ship hit the fan.
4:37
[SPEAKER_00]: So he got us out and we're very fortunate and grateful that happened.
4:41
[SPEAKER_00]: I think he was always, you know, had in mind that he was a pilot.
4:46
[SPEAKER_00]: He could have flown anything really at tons and you know, I think besides the helicopters, he always thought he could get out one of the last planes.
4:54
[SPEAKER_00]: I think, at the end, when the, the airfield was shell by the North Vietnamese pilot on April 28th, that option was no longer viable.
5:06
[SPEAKER_00]: So they shifted everything to the option
5:10
[SPEAKER_00]: By that time, he tried to go to the embassy to get on one of the Marine helicopters and there were just too many people.
5:16
[SPEAKER_00]: So he was rounded up after a month after the fall of Saigon.
5:20
[SPEAKER_00]: When the communists at big broadcasts, like all officers and all foreign military enlisted, come out, come out, the wars over.
5:30
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, let's move forward and they were all rounded up for what they called reeducation but it was a really prison camp.
5:37
[SPEAKER_00]: So he was there until March of 76 in the south and they moved everybody to the north on the rural areas of north of Hennoy.
5:45
[SPEAKER_00]: They were called prison camps and it was released in the 1987.
5:50
[SPEAKER_00]: As I was coming in to the United States and we're going to act of duty.
5:53
[SPEAKER_00]: He was released after 12 years of it.
5:55
[SPEAKER_00]: to get out of five years of waiting and you know paperwork and so forth for him to come in 1992.
6:01
[SPEAKER_02]: You know the the spectrum of Vietnamese people all around the world, you know political and and sort of intellectual all stripes
6:13
[SPEAKER_02]: Continue to blow me away the variety of Vietnamese people, whether you're from America or you're from Paris or Vietnamese people, all over the world are very different.
6:24
[SPEAKER_02]: Have you kind of thought about sort of where you land on the spectrum and how it's changed throughout the last 50 years of your life?
6:34
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, thanks for telling everybody how old I am, can't you?
6:37
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I mean, I just turned 50.
6:43
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's just like the old day, right?
6:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, you know, as the ladies how old they are, you know, ask older gentlemen how old they are.
6:49
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is just a mess.
6:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, man.
6:51
[SPEAKER_00]: And we get, you know, I, I go through phases of my life.
6:56
[SPEAKER_00]: And I always think about, you know, what have you done lately, right?
7:00
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the, you know, the, the question to get asked about politicians, out actors, musicians, what was your last hit?
7:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, what was your last movie?
7:14
[SPEAKER_00]: And I just didn't want to be, you know, a person that always gets hung up on his career what he did 30, 40, 50 years ago, it's just like a whole politician or a whole soldier.
7:26
[SPEAKER_00]: I wanted to move on.
7:28
[SPEAKER_00]: So when I left the service in 1995, I wanted, I did not want to do something related to defense contracting, for an example.
7:36
[SPEAKER_00]: I got a call from the CIA and I just had no interest in doing that.
7:39
[SPEAKER_00]: I wanted to do something just completely different.
7:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, and when I decide the right of book, I wanted the right of book that had the perspective and answer the questions that I had and not another.
7:53
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, you know, Vietnamese American success story or a blame book, right?
7:59
[SPEAKER_00]: The United States left us behind.
8:01
[SPEAKER_00]: He screwed us over, cut and run.
8:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, all of those have been written.
8:05
[SPEAKER_00]: I wanted to answer a couple of personal questions, right?
8:08
[SPEAKER_00]: So I decided to set out the right of sense of duty, which was published, you know, 20, over 20 years ago.
8:14
[SPEAKER_00]: And then my latest book early this year was something that had nothing to do with.
8:18
[SPEAKER_00]: a military, or I did pick a few things that I learned from the military that I took to the business world.
8:23
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think that's, you know, I'm like a evolving person of growth is what I desire.
8:31
[SPEAKER_00]: We learn new things.
8:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Don't rely on the past.
8:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Pick the best of what you learn and apply to something else.
8:37
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, what they call it, uh, not a one trick.
8:41
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, you have a growth mindset.
8:48
[SPEAKER_02]: We in our diaspora community, again, there's all kinds of people, but a lot of us are stuck in the past and it's so difficult to move them out of the new, you know, we have to think in a different way because the world is changing.
9:05
[SPEAKER_00]: The world changing very fast not only with technology, but the young generation, they always say, well, they're never going to rise up and did what the
9:15
[SPEAKER_00]: In the global economy today, the younger generation have a great opportunity and many have done to change the world the way we learn, the way we improve science, the use to be CEOs had to be
9:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Caucasians 30 years plus an industry with an MBA.
9:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Now you have CEOs that are in their mid 20s doing videos, doing digital, doing AI.
9:40
[SPEAKER_00]: They're in their 20s and early 30s that have companies that are worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
9:45
[SPEAKER_00]: So the whole paradigm in business at least have changed.
9:48
[SPEAKER_00]: I think there are still very conservative industries that require 10-year-long resume elected defense industry.
9:55
[SPEAKER_00]: For example, the automotive industry.
9:57
[SPEAKER_00]: But do you talk about
9:59
[SPEAKER_00]: What have you done lately and what are you going to do for the company and the customers today in the near future, not 30 years from now and that 20 years ago.
10:08
[SPEAKER_00]: And so you don't have this.
10:11
[SPEAKER_00]: This reliance on the past as much and I think going back to the Vietnam diaspora and the community.
10:18
[SPEAKER_00]: I think 25 or 30 years ago I was in the meeting with some American vets that had surged Vietnam and they were talking about building the wall.
10:25
[SPEAKER_00]: And some of them said, hey, we came in.
10:26
[SPEAKER_00]: We did it in the late 70s and 80s.
10:28
[SPEAKER_00]: And we got the ball built and dedicated.
10:30
[SPEAKER_00]: We moved on with our lives.
10:32
[SPEAKER_00]: But many of us were professional veterans.
10:34
[SPEAKER_00]: And it stuck with me.
10:36
[SPEAKER_00]: What they ban with these veterans are still
10:39
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what they hang their head on.
10:40
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what they're known for.
10:41
[SPEAKER_00]: And it just over and over.
10:43
[SPEAKER_00]: And this one specific veteran became a very famous person.
10:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Tell me, I said, I'm not a professional veteran.
10:49
[SPEAKER_00]: I came in and do the mission of getting the wall up.
10:51
[SPEAKER_00]: And I am off the committee.
10:52
[SPEAKER_00]: I moved on.
10:53
[SPEAKER_00]: And in the way, I never wanted to be a professional refugee.
10:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Because,
10:57
[SPEAKER_00]: all of us are more than that.
10:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, we're Americans, we're fathers, we're brothers, we're grandparents, we're, you know, we're contributing citizens.
11:05
[SPEAKER_00]: So, but I think, you know, I do have respect for people who work formally in the Asian-American studies or Vietnamese Americans.
11:13
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's what they, but I also challenged them.
11:16
[SPEAKER_00]: I wouldn't like to see new thinking and new literature and not just
11:23
[SPEAKER_00]: we were brave, we fought, and the Americans do this over, right?
11:27
[SPEAKER_00]: That's one school, right?
11:29
[SPEAKER_00]: The other school is hack band.
11:31
[SPEAKER_00]: We should never been there, you know?
11:32
[SPEAKER_00]: The United States would pull of colonialness, right?
11:36
[SPEAKER_00]: They should have never intervened, but then I think, well, they never intervened.
11:39
[SPEAKER_00]: None of us would be in America today.
11:41
[SPEAKER_00]: So you can't have it, you can't have it both ways.
11:44
[SPEAKER_00]: And then there's the re-vigitive.
11:46
[SPEAKER_00]: The revisionists would say, you know, we had the war one several times.
11:51
[SPEAKER_00]: We should have landed 500,000 Americans right from the start, or we should have, you know, if Nixon didn't leave office, we would have came back and bomb the bomb back to the stone age, right?
12:04
[SPEAKER_00]: The 1972 Christmas bombing, or, you know,
12:08
[SPEAKER_00]: General Curse Lame of Warwar 2 in the late 60s hit that we should have bombed back and in the Pentagon paper so you have the revision as they wake at a one But I think in one of my essays in my book I say well, what did what is winning the the war of Vietnam?
12:22
[SPEAKER_00]: What did that what a myth like and I think for you and I
12:25
[SPEAKER_00]: it would have been a life of war.
12:27
[SPEAKER_00]: We would have been into the South Vietnamese military, get fighting and fighting.
12:31
[SPEAKER_00]: And if we didn't make it, it would still go on just like, you know, the war did for so many years.
12:37
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that's how I always rationalize well, if winning a Vietnam look like this, I surely didn't want another generation of them to
12:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Refugee, I truly respect my past and my elders.
12:59
[SPEAKER_00]: But let's, let's, if you're gonna talk about that part of our history and our people, let's have an open mind and just make sure you be careful what you look, he wished for, you know, what if he had won the war?
13:10
[SPEAKER_00]: What, what light would have looked like for all of us?
13:14
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, what a breadth of fresh air to hear this, you know?
13:20
[SPEAKER_02]: are saying things that are very concrete, a lot of young people think about these things and they want the change in the atmosphere of our parents to really think about
13:35
[SPEAKER_02]: not forgetting this, but just can we move on a little?
13:39
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, can we figure out a new way of thinking?
13:42
[SPEAKER_02]: And you know, we are in the community where sometimes we see uniform men in their 80s and walking down parades and, you know, the meadows that they wear are
13:56
[SPEAKER_02]: question of all right and you know I often think about like the majority of these protests and the majority of these people it's a small number of people that are like banging the loudest on the drums and it's actually holding whole generations of young men and women
14:14
[SPEAKER_02]: Back from really connecting with the motherland, connecting with the roots, it just turns people off.
14:20
[SPEAKER_02]: And to hear you talk like this, you know, as a former military person in the U.S. and understanding of your dad and my dad's sort of like their unique positions, it's just so breathtaking to hear it.
14:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think once again, you know, when I wrote a sense of duty, I was turning 40.
14:38
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of the questions I had in the opening of the book,
14:43
[SPEAKER_00]: the opening chapter book is.
14:44
[SPEAKER_00]: My, my dad was about my age, right, around age 40 in 1975.
14:50
[SPEAKER_00]: He had to make a decision like most Vietnamese military officers are enlisted, right?
14:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Your country is falling apart.
14:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Your president has left Saigon, okay?
15:02
[SPEAKER_00]: The United States is that coming back with B-52s.
15:04
[SPEAKER_00]: So you have a couple of decisions.
15:06
[SPEAKER_00]: You still stand your post and fight to death.
15:10
[SPEAKER_00]: do you come back to the city, to your house, and I think you want to take care of your family?
15:15
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think the last question is, do you leave with your family before the official end of the war?
15:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Or not?
15:22
[SPEAKER_00]: And there are consequences.
15:25
[SPEAKER_00]: My dad didn't want to leave the past.
15:29
[SPEAKER_00]: He had no regrets.
15:30
[SPEAKER_00]: He had no judgment, and neither do I.
15:33
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think what you're asking is, when you see these people in the community, we're in the fatigues and we're in the metals and I spent a lot of time learning the South Vietnamese declaration system when I wrote a sense of duty.
15:49
[SPEAKER_00]: I knew what the American equivalent of those metals were, but you know, I'm not in the position then or now to have a question about stolen valor.
15:58
[SPEAKER_00]: I know it's a serious offense in the U.S. military, but then you have to have a kind heart and say, well, these men.
16:05
[SPEAKER_00]: They don't have a DD-2-14 or an honorable discharge that says what they did to Salville, at least per day.
16:11
[SPEAKER_00]: I think you know what they're doing or they can make up what they want.
16:14
[SPEAKER_00]: If they're reminiscing, if they're regretting, if they want to celebrate, you know, I think now, I look at it differently now, if it's April 30th, you know, 2000, it was a little sensitive.
16:27
[SPEAKER_00]: It was 25 years after the war.
16:29
[SPEAKER_00]: I got calls to margin these.
16:32
[SPEAKER_00]: for raids, where my uniform, and I, you know, respectfully decline in the mid-90s, that was a pilot at El Toro, and I was at Joe's aid at the commanding General of the Third Marine Aircraft Wing, and this was raw.
16:46
[SPEAKER_00]: It was still, it's only 20 years after the Vietnam War ended, so the generals and the kernels were of American Vietnam bats, and
16:54
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, over half an hour at the office, they would tell me why the war didn't turn out the way they did.
17:00
[SPEAKER_00]: The restrict should that were given to the U.S. Marines in Vietnam.
17:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Did I win on the weekend?
17:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Go play tennis with my dad and found Valley.
17:12
[SPEAKER_00]: With all the Arvid and Vietnamese veterans, and they would tell me,
17:17
[SPEAKER_00]: They would ask me questions like, how do you like, you know, flying with the Marine?
17:21
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, they give you a lot of good food that can initiate their clothes, like, unlike they gave us.
17:27
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, you know, 30 years ago, I lived in the duality of being both in the American officer, dealing with the aftermath of Vietnam, and the whole US military thinking about the lessons of Vietnam.
17:41
[SPEAKER_00]: And then you had the South Vietnamese,
17:44
[SPEAKER_00]: And with the net, you had generals and vice presidents who came out in 75, and you had kernels and majors who came out in the 90s.
17:52
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, sex society was upside down.
17:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Who you were in 75 didn't matter anymore in the mid-90s.
18:00
[SPEAKER_00]: You came out 17 years after your peers at their family.
18:04
[SPEAKER_00]: But once again, there's no grudge, there's no judging.
18:07
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like you said earlier, just a misrepresentation of the community that
18:12
[SPEAKER_00]: is full of people like those.
18:14
[SPEAKER_00]: I think they're very small.
18:16
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's the years go by, whether it's Black April morning or a commemorative.
18:21
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think this last spring, you see less than less.
18:25
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think, up to my position as these men are like in their late 70s to 90s.
18:30
[SPEAKER_00]: If they want to wear their old uniform, that's the word they're old uniform.
18:35
[SPEAKER_00]: But it was more sensitive,
18:36
[SPEAKER_00]: I think in the 90s and the 2000s, especially what they asked me to do certain things that I've shared with you before.
18:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Like Captain Fum, can you fly a sense now with the sound Vietnamese flag over a little side gone?
18:50
[SPEAKER_00]: I said, no, I can't do that.
18:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Can you come to a meeting this weekend about a secretive operation from Thailand that go into Ho Chi Minh City and I said, no,
19:00
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't want to get thrown in the brick.
19:02
[SPEAKER_00]: I can't do those things.
19:03
[SPEAKER_00]: So there were some people in the community who had these grandiose takeover plans that would make great novels And there are people who actually did that, you know, I think an arvin vet did Hi Jack of Plane, you know, and Jumped out with leaflets and he was probably put it to jail for a couple of years But I think less and less of that now and like I say, I'm not
19:28
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm 60, one now, okay.
19:31
[SPEAKER_00]: If those may want to do and wear that uniform, it gives them pride or regrets go away, let them.
19:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Because I don't think they have to kind of pull or the outsider, don't see the community in just in one single April 30th, less than anymore.
19:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Because we're all over the country now.
19:50
[SPEAKER_00]: We're all over the world, and my question about the little psychone areas, what was it going to look like as the younger generation go off the university, where they come back and live in an Irvine, your new Port Beech, or where they actually move back to Westminster at Garth Grove?
20:04
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, I'm no longer there, but I've always had that question, you know, years ago.
20:09
[SPEAKER_00]: But it seemed like the area is still thriving.
20:11
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, you and I are, are, are,
20:14
[SPEAKER_02]: really strong American Patriots.
20:17
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I will say that.
20:18
[SPEAKER_02]: I can say that about myself.
20:20
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm assuming that you feel the same way, right?
20:23
[SPEAKER_02]: 100% the flag the United States flag the red white and blue for me moves me when I hear the the anthem It you know at a stadium and I'm not a baseball game or football game.
20:36
[SPEAKER_02]: I get moved.
20:37
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, there's no doubt about it And when I see marine dress blues It it rocks me to my core and reminds me of you know why I I joined now the question is
20:50
[SPEAKER_02]: And are we sort of in this weird kind of like universe where we look at these two flags?
20:59
[SPEAKER_02]: We see the the the the the striped flags of the of the old south and then we see this yellow star flag.
21:06
[SPEAKER_02]: How do you feel when you kind of like cross this threshold of flags in like does it do anything to you?
21:14
[SPEAKER_02]: Does it stir you up in in in some weird way do you think about it at all?
21:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, as you say, when I hear it to national anthem and the U.S. flag at the Rose Bowl, I feel much more patriotic than I do when I listen to them, do it at the Coliseum.
21:31
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think the only thing about your album on a U.S. scene, why do you have to go there?
21:36
[SPEAKER_00]: They have, because you have the same color as the brick one.
21:40
[SPEAKER_00]: They're like scarling and gold, right?
21:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Otherwise, I hated that mustard yellow.
21:44
[SPEAKER_00]: of U.S. State.
21:45
[SPEAKER_00]: You went to the 80s until you sell it.
21:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, so that's all right.
21:49
[SPEAKER_00]: New and gold.
21:50
[SPEAKER_00]: We're now.
21:51
[SPEAKER_00]: No, no, okay.
21:51
[SPEAKER_00]: That work.
21:51
[SPEAKER_00]: We're all.
21:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
21:53
[SPEAKER_00]: So, I think, you know, I think up the the former flag of the Republic of Vietnam or South Vietnam, the y'all flag with the rest right is, you know, it's something that always.
22:09
[SPEAKER_00]: really grateful that the South Vietnamese Air Force, Vietnamese Air Force veterans, when my father passed away in 2000 came and we had a full service from a peak funeral home in Westminster.
22:20
[SPEAKER_00]: And they followed the flag and gave it to me like the tradition you see in the US military gave it a full salute.
22:26
[SPEAKER_00]: I had that flag right in my home.
22:30
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, a lot of nostalgia is a kid because I was old enough to realize what was going on that there was a war.
22:39
[SPEAKER_00]: the people in Saigon and South Vietnam.
22:41
[SPEAKER_00]: And the enemy was the Viet Cong.
22:44
[SPEAKER_00]: What I do share in my first book years ago was that when I was going up, we really didn't see what a Viet Cong look like as either a body or a news or some guy with the, you know, Connego Had or Black Pajama.
22:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, sometime in 73 or 74, my father was on duty.
23:01
[SPEAKER_00]: And he, he was the base duty officer that day.
23:05
[SPEAKER_00]: And I remember he came on his head,
23:07
[SPEAKER_00]: You want to know what a vehicle looks like.
23:10
[SPEAKER_00]: You want to come with me to the brig.
23:12
[SPEAKER_00]: We caught a couple on the perimeter of the base.
23:15
[SPEAKER_00]: So I said, sure.
23:16
[SPEAKER_00]: So now I'm a seven eight year old kid.
23:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Jumped the back of his lembrata scooter.
23:21
[SPEAKER_00]: We go down to the brig.
23:23
[SPEAKER_00]: They pull out this vehicle.
23:25
[SPEAKER_00]: And he looked like a kid, slightly older than me, maybe 12, 13.
23:29
[SPEAKER_00]: So for the first time in my life, and I could say, I put that in the book, and I shared this in the interview, so until I was seven or eight, I saw this kid, I said, well, a vehicle, he doesn't look that much older than me.
23:40
[SPEAKER_00]: And so when I see the flag, I see a lot of good memories growing up, listen to the anthem, how proud I'd father was.
23:51
[SPEAKER_00]: When I see the flag in the little side gone back then, I just saw a thriving community, but it was during the protest.
23:58
[SPEAKER_00]: And in 1999, I think a video store owner flew the flag and a picture of Ho Chi Minh in his store.
24:07
[SPEAKER_00]: That really was the first time that the community was really fired up, fired up, big time.
24:14
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think Tony Lamb owned a restaurant there.
24:20
[SPEAKER_00]: It was protest that he got the first elected.
24:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, you had them on your show.
24:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I remember going to this restaurant, and there were threats of violence and people making accusation of being communist.
24:33
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I think the community has changed.
24:36
[SPEAKER_00]: I do get emotional when I hear the anthem.
24:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Like I said, I don't live around the little side going to California much.
24:42
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't get as much exposure, but there's still a lot of nostalgia, a lot of respect for,
24:48
[SPEAKER_00]: all the people that died believe in in the flag and the cause of South Vietnam.
24:54
[SPEAKER_00]: But once again, it's been 50 years and for those people 60, 70 years since the late 50s.
25:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay?
25:01
[SPEAKER_00]: But I do have a lot of respect for my parents generation of your parents, the people who live in the cause of South Vietnam, what they fought for.
25:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Once again, I never want to get hung up because there's
25:18
[SPEAKER_00]: that we teach, and they can read about it, but I don't want to go back and not only do not want to refight in history or on the battlefield, or have revision lip because I always said, how would your life be if we had won the war?
25:34
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's a question that everybody has to answer for themselves.
25:37
[SPEAKER_00]: I did it a few years ago.
25:40
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, I want to comment on how really perfect your English is.
25:46
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a lot of guys like, when they're 10, 11 years old, and having command of the English language, and I'm talking about not just the grammatical side, the syntactical side, but having this pronunciation as clear and it's almost like you have an actor's voice when I hear you speak English,
26:07
[SPEAKER_02]: and it's very rare for any man or woman to come at 10 years old and not shake that Vietnamese accent.
26:15
[SPEAKER_02]: What happened?
26:16
[SPEAKER_00]: How did you, how did you do this?
26:19
[SPEAKER_00]: So people have asked me, you know, if you say, well, you're English is still good.
26:22
[SPEAKER_00]: I say, well, I've been here 15 years, 20 years, 30 years.
26:26
[SPEAKER_00]: But the day I say, well, how come your name is still Vietnamese?
26:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Because because I'll go with the first one.
26:31
[SPEAKER_00]: greatest thing my mother gave us with my three sisters and we came with we had a chance to anglicize or change our first name and she came.
26:39
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, one of the first people in in June of 75 when we got to Oxford or California was when you're out of house you can speak whatever you want but you're in the house you're speaking Vietnamese and we're going to keep the names that we gave you.
26:51
[SPEAKER_00]: your father fought for this country and we gave you these names and we have the birth certificates from Saigon and we brought what this to the immigration office.
26:59
[SPEAKER_00]: You're going to keep these names.
27:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Other people are changed their names but we're keeping all of our names the way we were given minus the accents.
27:07
[SPEAKER_00]: I think quick pride in that and I think because we came out of the right age.
27:14
[SPEAKER_00]: I think if you come when you're going through puberty between 12 and 15, there's some certain things, you know, and I've seen that in my cousins and other people who've come later, when you come after the age of 12 of 13, you do have that.
27:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, accident, I'm not everybody, but I seems like that's about the age, we came just be fair that that's one.
27:36
[SPEAKER_00]: You gotta remember we all took French as a second language, like we don't the school inside gone.
27:40
[SPEAKER_00]: So, if I had four years of, you know, or language, a French, yes, so that's really helpful.
27:47
[SPEAKER_00]: I think you gotta go back and look at history, right?
27:51
[SPEAKER_00]: We always ding the French for occupying Vietnam, right?
27:53
[SPEAKER_00]: But a French missionary gave
27:56
[SPEAKER_00]: That's Vietnamese, you know, an alphabet that was Western-based, okay?
28:02
[SPEAKER_00]: The Spanish who occupied the Philippines did give them a language.
28:05
[SPEAKER_00]: They had Tagalog and, you know, to this date, it's still Tagalog and English, right?
28:10
[SPEAKER_00]: The Chinese have their figure-based, the Japanese, the Koreans, the leotians and Cambodian.
28:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Time to get Western-based alphabet, we did.
28:22
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think it's a huge advantage benefit in my opinion and not a hysteria or a professor or some linguistic expert.
28:32
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think the fact that we did grow up around a little side God of Washington DC used to San Jose or Orange County.
28:41
[SPEAKER_00]: We were around Mexican kids.
28:43
[SPEAKER_00]: But where did you go up?
28:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Japanese.
28:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Oxnard and Howard North of Hawaii.
28:47
[SPEAKER_00]: That makes a huge difference.
28:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so I play a little league baseball, I play basketball at high school, everything with English outside the house, where is I think if you grew up in Orange County in the years, there was a dependency.
29:00
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I think that's one.
29:01
[SPEAKER_00]: I think in the Marines, I said, you know this, if you sound weak and weak, you get walked all over.
29:07
[SPEAKER_02]: That was my next question.
29:09
[SPEAKER_02]: That was my next comment is that
29:12
[SPEAKER_02]: in order to kind of thrive and survive in the U.S. military, you have to come with a certain grasp of your English language.
29:23
[SPEAKER_02]: Otherwise, it's over for you as a commanding option.
29:26
[SPEAKER_02]: It's over.
29:28
[SPEAKER_02]: There's no way you can survive.
29:29
[SPEAKER_02]: You're going to get pushed.
29:32
[SPEAKER_02]: You won't even recognize your own self if you can't speak perfect English in the military.
29:36
[SPEAKER_02]: It's crazy.
29:38
[SPEAKER_00]: especially the Marines, right?
29:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Because we have our own language, right?
29:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Renaculars.
29:41
[SPEAKER_00]: We have all these acronyms and a lot of cussing.
29:44
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think, you know, the first time I had trouble with the English language was when I got the officer cannon in June of 1986.
29:52
[SPEAKER_00]: And you got to remember, this is like at the time where, you know, platoon, right?
29:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Full mail jacket came out the year later, you know, you know, apocalypse now.
30:02
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's just certain
30:05
[SPEAKER_00]: American culture, Hollywood culture of the Vietnamese people, they did not care and specifically the Marine, they did not care.
30:13
[SPEAKER_02]: In 93, they didn't care.
30:15
[SPEAKER_02]: The DI's were in the world class in 93, and that's like eight years after you, and they still did not care.
30:23
[SPEAKER_00]: No, and it's still like, you know, to think about it this day, to think they said to be, but how much of it was from Vietnam, but how much of it was from your peers that saw those Vietnam more movies, the way they referred to the Vietnamese, it's never had.
30:38
[SPEAKER_00]: It's never had.
30:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
30:43
[SPEAKER_00]: So there were the, so when I went through Oscar Casco, there was still Vietnam bets on the staff officers and senior listed, you know, they called me Viet Cospine and you know, but there was not only the Vietnam War movies and the characters, but there were movies like 16 candles, long the, don't, you remember him?
31:02
[SPEAKER_00]: I talked about that all the time.
31:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, so that's exact.
31:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
31:06
[SPEAKER_00]: And people wanted to call me that.
31:08
[SPEAKER_00]: So when I got to my, you know, when I got to the Marine Corps to the fleet, you get your call sign when you're an aviator.
31:14
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's either, you know, Nick, name, you see something you did that was stupid.
31:19
[SPEAKER_00]: They give it to you.
31:20
[SPEAKER_00]: They give you the call sign.
31:21
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't get the pick.
31:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Wow.
31:23
[SPEAKER_00]: And so they were trying to, you know, in 1990, when I got to tested in Orange County, I think Mongo was one Kato, you know,
31:34
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm that dumb, you know, the case on bomber and I fought back hard and, you know, people, some of my peers that I was little thin skin and I said, look, my father is in prison.
31:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
31:48
[SPEAKER_00]: He's released.
31:48
[SPEAKER_00]: He's on his way here.
31:49
[SPEAKER_00]: He fought for South Vietnam for almost two decades.
31:53
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't care what movies you watch.
31:55
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't care what books you read.
31:57
[SPEAKER_00]: You can call me anything
32:00
[SPEAKER_00]: but you cannot call me a derogatory Asian home or moniker.
32:04
[SPEAKER_00]: You cannot call me VidCon, you cannot call me Charlie, you cannot call me long-difedong, you can call me idiot, you can call me POS, but you cannot call me, I will fight every guy or officer who's trying to give me a negative,
32:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Asian Monica.
32:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Wow.
32:21
[SPEAKER_02]: And it worked.
32:21
[SPEAKER_02]: So wait a minute.
32:22
[SPEAKER_02]: So yeah.
32:23
[SPEAKER_02]: So when they give you these costs signs, is it like a commanding officer that's giving it to you or is it your peers like, no, you use your peers or the cat.
32:31
[SPEAKER_00]: So I was the first to tell it, you know, new pilot.
32:33
[SPEAKER_00]: They, if you do something stupid to call you, but I had noticed there was a black maybe officer, right?
32:39
[SPEAKER_00]: He was an F-18 pilot.
32:40
[SPEAKER_00]: They call him shadow.
32:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
32:45
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was a Vietnamese
32:49
[SPEAKER_00]: He was an F-18 pilot, he retired into a curl, they call him Charlie, and he was okay with it.
32:54
[SPEAKER_00]: So as the years went by, everybody has a different remembrance of the Vietnam War and their own personal tolerance.
33:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometime it was met in just some time as met in.
33:07
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, negative.
33:08
[SPEAKER_00]: In my era, it was definitely negative.
33:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Not only the Vietnam War movies, and the Vietnamese characters in it, right?
33:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Is that the enemy or a loser or the arvad running the other way?
33:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Or it was a Hollywood...
33:22
[SPEAKER_00]: funny Asian character like London, Dawn, and 16 candles, which was, you know, came out and I think in 84, right when I was in college.
33:29
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I think I'm really hard-standed on that.
33:33
[SPEAKER_00]: And people respect me.
33:35
[SPEAKER_00]: So at the end, my call say I was cute, my initial.
33:37
[SPEAKER_00]: They would call me cute or cute dog, which is my high school nickname for my basketball team.
33:42
[SPEAKER_00]: And it stuck with me all the way now that,
33:45
[SPEAKER_00]: My fellow country club golf members call me Q and some really comes what called the Q dot, but nobody uses those negative I could just live
33:54
[SPEAKER_00]: up to my dad, if he came over the United States and found out his only son was a Marine pilot, they call him the Domino, or Kamikaze, or V.C.
34:03
[SPEAKER_02]: or Charlie, I would not let him.
34:05
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, wow, that's an immense sort of decision to kind of push back at that time.
34:13
[SPEAKER_00]: It was hard, because when you get to your unit, you whether it's a great unit, but the infantry
34:23
[SPEAKER_00]: So everybody has to take a little joking and driving.
34:26
[SPEAKER_00]: You definitely have to know how to fly safely right because you're you know you're putting 12 Marines and back your helicopter
34:33
[SPEAKER_00]: But joking aside, the call sign and the good nature of aviation, just I decided to take a stand.
34:40
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was it.
34:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Like I said, you could call me whatever you want.
34:44
[SPEAKER_00]: You just can't call me one of the negative number type Asian nicknames.
34:49
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, I have a question about thinking about the memories of the Vietnam War as it relates to the equipment, right?
34:57
[SPEAKER_02]: Because some of these things that you flew were probably in Vietnam.
35:02
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, definitely the 46th.
35:04
[SPEAKER_02]: There was a, that's a come from, you know, a lot of these birds came back from from Vietnam and probably did a lot of damage to Vietnamese people.
35:16
[SPEAKER_02]: And when I think about like the American war apparatus and how I separate things today after going to college and becoming a little bit more liberal and not as concerned as I was when I was in the Marines and just basically being in film and that industry where a little bit more, it's a different kind of like outlook.
35:37
[SPEAKER_02]: But when you think back in the time that you are in these machines, did you ever think about like where these machines were in the history of the Vietnam War?
35:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Totally, and I flew to CH-46, the dual rotor.
35:53
[SPEAKER_00]: due to procurement and other delays from the defense industry, we were supposed to get the MB-20 to Osprey in the 90s when I was flying the CH-40s.
36:03
[SPEAKER_00]: So that did happen for it would delay like 25, 30 years.
36:07
[SPEAKER_00]: And so all the 46 that I flew on, and I flew in them for almost 10 years between active duty and the reserve, they all were in Vietnam.
36:15
[SPEAKER_00]: And so they were bullet holes, you know, 7-6-2, mostly 7-6-2, and they were patched up.
36:22
[SPEAKER_00]: So when we went to the Gulf War 90, you know, we had to put some armor plating back under the 46, and you definitely saw where the, with the holes were, that they took hits, you know, going into the different landing zones and the, and the rice paddies in the middle part to come to you, they caught the I-Core, you know, with the, the US Marines were during the
36:45
[SPEAKER_00]: The CH-53 were pretty new, the echo was not in Vietnam and some of the huies and cobras were post-Semitism, but the CH-46 was the image of the Marine Corps helicopter rights into combat and MetaVac of the Vietnam War.
37:03
[SPEAKER_00]: I often thought about that.
37:04
[SPEAKER_00]: They were young Americans.
37:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Like I was, in 90, going into operation,
37:12
[SPEAKER_00]: So back then they had a letter writing so I got letters from American vets.
37:18
[SPEAKER_00]: They would do, you know, and not to any service member and we would get mails and we tried to answer him during desert seal before the war started.
37:27
[SPEAKER_00]: And so a couple of the boxes came to me because they were only two single pilots in our squadron in 1990 in Saudi Arabia.
37:34
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know if four single pilots
37:38
[SPEAKER_00]: We got the book of the mail, not only from Vietnam, but who were lieutenant in Vietnam in the 60s.
37:44
[SPEAKER_00]: And goody, but from all the single ladies.
37:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
37:47
[SPEAKER_00]: So it was, you know, we were going through the mail.
37:49
[SPEAKER_00]: And I remember getting this letter and the package of spoiled chocolate, that it took like three weeks to get through the mail.
37:55
[SPEAKER_00]: And he said, I wanted this gift, this card, to go to a single, first lieutenant in HMM 161.
38:04
[SPEAKER_00]: like I got good from America in 1969.
38:07
[SPEAKER_00]: So it was tremendous not only to look back on the helicopters that I would fly in in 1991 that we were in Vietnam, but also getting letters from Vietnam vets.
38:20
[SPEAKER_00]: who were like in the same boat, we were going in to uncertainty about a go to war and flying the same helicopter in the same unit.
38:27
[SPEAKER_00]: And so there's some ghosts over the war that come out and some memories.
38:32
[SPEAKER_00]: But you know, as you know, right?
38:34
[SPEAKER_00]: One operation of temple picks up, you don't think about that stuff.
38:37
[SPEAKER_00]: All you want to make sure is the Bible.
38:38
[SPEAKER_00]: You're gonna do your job.
38:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, survival and make sure you don't do anything.
38:43
[SPEAKER_00]: stupid, uh, to get your fellow Marines killed before they even get to the battlefield and that's like training, you know, that's flying off the amphibious ship, night vision goggles, gunnery training for nation flying at night.
38:55
[SPEAKER_00]: I was very much, um,
39:00
[SPEAKER_00]: focus on the safety aspects of doing what our mission was simple in zone on time.
39:07
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, helicopter pilot in the right zone on time.
39:10
[SPEAKER_02]: That's it.
39:11
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm very torn about military now at my because I've kids and you know, I think about why we go to war and I think about the the different aspects of it.
39:23
[SPEAKER_02]: But on the one hand, I think that the men and women that get
39:29
[SPEAKER_02]: have the privilege to have been in the U.S. military.
39:34
[SPEAKER_02]: You turn out differently.
39:36
[SPEAKER_02]: You can really establish a systematic way of going about your life and it's a really good thing.
39:43
[SPEAKER_02]: It really matures you and then I think about my kids or your kids and I think about like the generations of Vietnamese that are coming up in Vietnam and here.
39:52
[SPEAKER_02]: None of them have
39:55
[SPEAKER_02]: any whiff of war, and you know, I don't wish war on anybody or in a country.
40:01
[SPEAKER_02]: However, I do think about, how are we, is it just part of who we are as human beings?
40:07
[SPEAKER_02]: And then, you know, if we can organize as a war fighting machines, it creates these, you know, like the greatest generation, right?
40:18
[SPEAKER_02]: It creates these amazing characters,
40:22
[SPEAKER_02]: But do we need it?
40:23
[SPEAKER_02]: Do we need that to become the best of who we are?
40:28
[SPEAKER_02]: If we don't get the whiff of death or if we don't get this militarized sort of like training.
40:34
[SPEAKER_02]: So I live and exist in this weird struggle of
40:38
[SPEAKER_02]: Looking at the Vietnamese American diaspora who are in the military today, you know, we talked about that, you know, I look up to a lot of the generals and the admiral who are Vietnamese Americans today and, you know, on one hand, I could just respect
40:53
[SPEAKER_02]: I respect the work that they've gone through in their careers.
40:56
[SPEAKER_02]: But at the other end of it, I worry about why we go to war.
41:01
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, the reasons we go to war.
41:02
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's constantly struggle.
41:04
[SPEAKER_02]: But my question is really about the next generation, your kids, my kids, they're softer.
41:11
[SPEAKER_02]: Like how do we mitigate the meaning of becoming, you know, strong people as it relates to why we go to war?
41:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I think you have to look at just the broader generation of Americans.
41:23
[SPEAKER_00]: That's just a Vietnamese American.
41:25
[SPEAKER_00]: But over the years, right?
41:27
[SPEAKER_00]: We had a draft until 1973.
41:28
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you were a young man at 18, you had a register.
41:34
[SPEAKER_00]: And so you have a choice either.
41:35
[SPEAKER_00]: You go in voluntarily or you wait to be drafted during wartime.
41:39
[SPEAKER_00]: And it goes back via Dom and before that.
41:42
[SPEAKER_00]: and now women are in the military as well.
41:46
[SPEAKER_00]: And so when you look back at the Vietnamese American that was fake, right?
41:49
[SPEAKER_00]: My generation was, you did it because you want to follow and your father's footsteps.
41:55
[SPEAKER_00]: It part of me, that was it.
41:57
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what I wanted to do as a kid.
41:58
[SPEAKER_00]: When I became a citizen,
42:00
[SPEAKER_00]: I was exposed to opportunity.
42:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Wow, I wanted to fly.
42:04
[SPEAKER_00]: I lived on an air base in Vietnam.
42:06
[SPEAKER_00]: I saw my dad go do it.
42:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Now I get to do it because I've got a college degree and to me, offer me that chance to go be a Marine Officer and an A.V.
42:13
[SPEAKER_00]: entered both.
42:14
[SPEAKER_00]: So I did that because of childhood dream, but in back of my mind, I did it because.
42:20
[SPEAKER_00]: I had studied some history.
42:22
[SPEAKER_00]: I knew about the different groups that were not accepted in this country.
42:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Japanese Americans until the World War II, for the 4th and 42nd, the pre-integrated military, the African Americans and other ethnic groups might already, including women.
42:39
[SPEAKER_00]: prove ourselves.
42:40
[SPEAKER_00]: So I had read a book in late 80s and Marine officer who only served three years and went into broadcasts.
42:48
[SPEAKER_00]: He wrote a paragraph and I still remember this and he said, look, I knew when I completed the Marine Corps that nobody could ever ask me about loyalty or patriotism and basically nobody would ever actually be exactly exactly.
43:01
[SPEAKER_00]: And I read them before I came
43:09
[SPEAKER_00]: retired business people, some of them are veterans, some of my career veterans, some of them most of them have no military experience and they're all across some of them don't ever ask or they're curious about the military because they didn't do it, their kids don't do it and that's fine.
43:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of them talk about, you know, well, I did it this way, you know, my father did this way, my grandfather, my kid's going to do it the same way.
43:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, that's fine.
43:32
[SPEAKER_00]: And then
43:37
[SPEAKER_00]: In-serve, the parents didn't serve in Vietnam, but they give back a lot to charities.
43:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, now in their 50s, 60s and 70s, all since they're the biggest proponent of raising money, call it the scholarship foundations, wouldn't it warrior, sympathize for itself?
43:55
[SPEAKER_00]: I need all three or four of those categories.
43:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Those people who were, you know, their family were in the military, those people who serve, but they had no legacy in their kids.
44:04
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm going and I meet people mostly that have no connection, but that,
44:08
[SPEAKER_00]: as they got older, more senior in their careers, they came and respect the all volunteer force.
44:15
[SPEAKER_00]: And they feel like they're giving back by now contributing to the scholarship to that.
44:19
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think this country is great because we have different buckets of people.
44:23
[SPEAKER_00]: And I guess I have no position in the judge.
44:26
[SPEAKER_00]: I think any,
44:28
[SPEAKER_00]: any way that you, you know, I think one thing I won't stand for, like you, I'm most fortunate is when you disc military service, like backhanded compliments or compliments, like it wasn't really that tough, was it hard in the boys' galt.
44:42
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, those people I just say away from because there is an angle of jealousy and envy.
44:48
[SPEAKER_00]: because let's face it, you can't go back and do this when you're older, right?
44:52
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a young man's game, it's a young woman's game.
44:54
[SPEAKER_00]: You do it after college or before you go to college, it don't take you back in your mid 30s to go do a 300 p.a.t or put you in a cockpit, right?
45:03
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think those people, I run into less and less these days.
45:08
[SPEAKER_00]: I think I run more into people who are just indifferent.
45:12
[SPEAKER_00]: They don't have national security or military service and they're my adult.
45:16
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just the career and their family.
45:19
[SPEAKER_02]: How do you think our kids, not having the experience of the military?
45:26
[SPEAKER_02]: Does that look, do you look at that and go, my God, like my kids are probably gonna be a lot softer than me or my dad, you know, dad's not, you know.
45:37
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it depends what field you go in, right?
45:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Look, and I want to say Vietnamese and Asian and Indian, right?
45:43
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you go in the medical field, right?
45:46
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a better, not really, right?
45:48
[SPEAKER_00]: If you go to high tech, no, okay?
45:51
[SPEAKER_00]: We were really the exception, right?
45:53
[SPEAKER_00]: There's just not a lot of Asians in the Marine Corps.
45:57
[SPEAKER_00]: There's not a lot of Asian-American officers now or back what I came in.
46:02
[SPEAKER_00]: And then do you say is it because the system does not recruit the system, okay, now that DEI quota all that stuff is out, or the young Asian American Vietnamese Americans have greater opportunities than going in and making $30,000,000 as a young officer, or
46:18
[SPEAKER_00]: God, the truth makes so much to this money, right?
46:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Do I want to do that and prove themselves?
46:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Are they prone to get ridicule or mocked or like you and I did when we first came in the service?
46:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Probably, you know, we don't have those kind of movies, right?
46:31
[SPEAKER_00]: The whole war and the shift is the enemies, not in Asia, except for people always say, well, the Chinese, right?
46:38
[SPEAKER_00]: We got to watch out for the Chinese and sometimes the ages are loved and too.
46:43
[SPEAKER_00]: the fear against the Chinese military, but I don't see it as much.
46:46
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think there's that need to be proven yourself.
46:48
[SPEAKER_00]: I think the economy in the world today, I'll at LC, kids being softer or harder, they join or not.
46:54
[SPEAKER_00]: And certainly in my family, nobody's, you know, I have a daughter, she's that going in the military.
47:00
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, and it's fine.
47:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Like I said, the only thing I wish by is when people disservice or,
47:08
[SPEAKER_00]: they make a negative comment like that it's a waste of taxpayers money and stuff like that.
47:12
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what I, you know, I take a stand and say, well,
47:15
[SPEAKER_00]: That budget for retirees or the DOD is for you and your kids do not have to serve and stand watch.
47:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, during this period, all of us did it voluntarily because it was our turn and our generation turn.
47:31
[SPEAKER_00]: But if you're not going to serve and keep your mouth shut, but if you're going to start digging about tax or pinnacle on a VA spending, then I'm going to take a stand for the guys who serve.
47:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Right on.
47:40
[SPEAKER_00]: I also served.
47:41
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
47:41
[SPEAKER_02]: Have you been to Vietnam?
47:43
[SPEAKER_02]: Have you spent much time in Vietnam?
47:45
[SPEAKER_02]: I have.
47:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Tell me about it.
47:47
[SPEAKER_00]: So I've been now.
47:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I've been to Asia and Hong Kong.
47:51
[SPEAKER_00]: But I haven't been back to Vietnam since 95.
47:52
[SPEAKER_00]: 95 was 20 years after I left.
47:56
[SPEAKER_00]: So I just got off active duty in April, March of 1995.
48:00
[SPEAKER_00]: I had gone to work for Merck.
48:02
[SPEAKER_00]: But I was on terminal, you know, you're still technically still in.
48:06
[SPEAKER_00]: But for me to get clear in from the State Department to go to Vietnam, because I was an active duty military officer, we had no diplomatic relations.
48:13
[SPEAKER_00]: So I had officially be separated.
48:15
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think a week after I was officially out, I went back to the Saigon right before the 20th anniversary of the celebration, the victory celebration.
48:23
[SPEAKER_00]: I made sure I got out of there before that week, because I saw the size and the street and I wanted nothing to do with it.
48:29
[SPEAKER_00]: That was a raw experience and it's nothing like Vietnam today, obviously.
48:33
[SPEAKER_00]: So wait, you haven't been back.
48:34
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the first 30 years.
48:35
[SPEAKER_00]: You haven't been back.
48:36
[SPEAKER_00]: No, I have not.
48:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Hi.
48:38
[SPEAKER_00]: No.
48:39
[SPEAKER_00]: So let me go back to, I'll tell you my whole reason for going back up.
48:43
[SPEAKER_00]: He was homecoming kind of closing the loop.
48:47
[SPEAKER_00]: When I went back in 95, I realized that we were the lucky ones.
48:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Anybody who got out to America had no reason to complain.
48:54
[SPEAKER_00]: And by that time, my dad had been in the United States for three years, after the fall of years in the five years of waiting.
49:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Because I saw the damage outside the city.
49:03
[SPEAKER_00]: I saw my cousins.
49:04
[SPEAKER_00]: I saw my relatives.
49:05
[SPEAKER_00]: I saw the poverty.
49:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Nobody was working.
49:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Everybody was living on money getting sent home.
49:12
[SPEAKER_00]: I saw the damage in the countryside.
49:15
[SPEAKER_00]: I felt really good about America, but I felt the worse for the people stuck behind that wanted to leave, but could not.
49:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Otherwise, every since then, no business.
49:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Once the relatives came out at the H.O.
49:29
[SPEAKER_00]: in the 90s.
49:31
[SPEAKER_00]: I just didn't have not only that of business interest, but just
49:35
[SPEAKER_00]: I've been invited to go, you know, I just got invited next spring to do a three week tour to talk about both of my books, but you know, I just can't take, you know, ten days to be with a bunch of retirees to talk about books on a cruise in the cell China Sea, or I'm running a company, but I've had up to you to go back and I just have it, and I think this plans in the future, and then I keep up with, you know, what's going on there somewhat, but there's that, like I said, um,
50:00
[SPEAKER_00]: All the families pretty much out.
50:03
[SPEAKER_00]: I kind of closed the loop when I went back and wrote the books and there's no business opportunities for me there.
50:08
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that's the only one.
50:09
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yeah.
50:10
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, she's always curious about when guests go or don't go.
50:14
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, right.
50:16
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a bird.
50:16
[SPEAKER_02]: But I was one of the first in my group to go back to.
50:18
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, very early.
50:20
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a different place now.
50:22
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, most people don't even know the details of the Vietnam American War.
50:26
[SPEAKER_02]: They, you know, a lot of the people are born after,
50:29
[SPEAKER_02]: you know, in 1975 and today, you know, I just had two-thirds of the population.
50:34
[SPEAKER_02]: It's crazy.
50:35
[SPEAKER_02]: I just got back two days ago and you know, went to a big concert.
50:40
[SPEAKER_02]: There's like maybe tens of thousands of kids that at this rap concert.
50:45
[SPEAKER_02]: It was, you know, we're living in a completely different state of mind when we think about Vietnam and modernity and how it's being portrayed.
50:54
[SPEAKER_02]: It's just mind-blowing how different society is now when you think about Vietnam.
51:00
[SPEAKER_00]: That's progress.
51:03
[SPEAKER_00]: That's progress.
51:03
[SPEAKER_00]: That's humanity.
51:05
[SPEAKER_00]: You're not supposed to linger over.
51:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely.
51:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Losses when you have life to live.
51:09
[SPEAKER_00]: That's why I get to tell people, you want to mourn the past while
51:15
[SPEAKER_00]: live freedom and the opportunity.
51:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, you could do both, but if you could still be stuck in the past, I think we all have choices, right?
51:22
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't have to read those books, you don't have to go to those services, you choose to be it or not.
51:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Whereas I think 25 30 years ago, if there was a big protest,
51:33
[SPEAKER_00]: and you weren't there, people noticed.
51:36
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you were somebody in the community of any recognition, you were expected to be there at those ceremonies.
51:44
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think it's like that anymore.
51:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Which is healthy for people.
51:47
[SPEAKER_02]: It's healthy from here and at back in the evening.
51:50
[SPEAKER_02]: It's good for a
51:53
[SPEAKER_02]: in that world.
51:55
[SPEAKER_02]: And part of my podcast is to really kind of open and expand this understanding of like we all have different histories in our mind, but living in the present when you get to Vietnam is a totally different experience than what we heard from our mom and dad.
52:13
[SPEAKER_00]: And you know, I think you might have missed this in my background, but I had a short step where I did run for the U.S. Congress in New York County, back in 2009 and 2010.
52:24
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was probably the most distasteful experience I've ever had.
52:31
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, as recent as a few months ago, I received a call to move back to California to explore running for, why was it this public office, why was it this tasteful, I think, I had to think responsibility for that, I think you, I did at least the public, I did, you have this perception of do good, right, that the, how the United States is organized, the Constitution, right, the executive office, the legislative office, the judicial, right, the balance of power.
53:01
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think when I jumped in, I never had experience besides writing some checks and voting and campaigning for Puy.
53:09
[SPEAKER_00]: I never had an elected office experience.
53:11
[SPEAKER_00]: I've never ran for public office before.
53:14
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think when you go into it,
53:16
[SPEAKER_00]: It's nothing like you imagine, you're imagining these people legislating and speaking, and you realize and see Spanish, there's nobody in the room, just a camera and somebody's talking into it, but you think like the world is watching and so when you run for art, is you think you're speaking to all the voters and you find out how many people really vote, right?
53:35
[SPEAKER_00]: When you do, when you look at the count, how many people will it, the primary, I think going to a primary and you just see how extreme the parties are.
53:45
[SPEAKER_00]: And to me, up at that point, I was mostly an independent voter and I registered Republican through run against Loretta Sanchez.
53:53
[SPEAKER_00]: And when I stood in front of the Republican primary voters, and the question then was the economy, the warning rock, and Afghanistan, which I was ready to talk about, I didn't get asked those questions.
54:06
[SPEAKER_00]: business community, new majority, backing business, focus, candidates, then was really supportive general to late general Lyon, William Lyon, Lyon Holmes, and a number of other executives would backing me.
54:21
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think the question they wanted to ask me about was abortion, gay marriages, and the basic, you know, political stances, both sides of the party.
54:34
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, when people run for public office at the U.S. Congress or Senate are higher, that never help elective office before, never run one, you're in for a room, a awakening, and now you have no interest, but I find it interesting that I know that there is a military
54:52
[SPEAKER_00]: uh, veteran of Vietnamese American holding and elected office at the U.S. Congress in Orange County, and I didn't even want to know which seat they were trying to get me to move back the run for, but I can imagine, tell me that one, and I just, thank you, but no thank you.
55:08
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just something that is not in my DNA and it's not in my family's DNA and I'm proud of that part too, because it's a different beast altogether.
55:17
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you so much for spending this time with me.
55:20
[SPEAKER_02]: I do hope to have you back on, you know, if you go to Vietnam and I'd love to get your thoughts on what you see and how you're processing that, you know, the visuals when you get to Vietnam and the experience that you've had, either dealing with the government or dealing with people on the ground there, I'd love to get your thoughts once you do go to that journey.
55:41
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I think I do.
55:42
[SPEAKER_00]: But I'll close with this.
55:43
[SPEAKER_00]: I do have the I Terry that I want to see.
55:45
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I want to see the, you know, the central highlands.
55:48
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to see way that I ain't and I want to go up to Illinois and I want to see where my father and his peers were held at the border of China.
55:58
[SPEAKER_00]: between the years of 76 to the 79, when the Chinese invaded, they were all moved off the border, but those are the areas that I would like to see.
56:08
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's so much going with any veteran groups, right?
56:12
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to go with the handful of people with open minds, educators, priorities, but not necessarily a veteran's group that's going to go back and walk the high core of the
56:25
[SPEAKER_00]: too much time that moved on and I think those people need to go back to deal with whatever they need to go back but I would like to go back with just an old mind to see the new generation and the progress there.
56:36
[SPEAKER_02]: I love that.
56:37
[SPEAKER_02]: I love to hear that.
56:38
[SPEAKER_02]: I want to move forward as well and just to hear you kind of lay out those expectations as a birth of fresh air.
56:45
[SPEAKER_02]: Like I said in the beginning about you.
56:46
[SPEAKER_00]: No, I think the, the podcast you have is great.
56:48
[SPEAKER_00]: I've recognized a lot of friends and a lot of people have admired that have been on your show.
56:53
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, an honor to finally be on with you.
56:56
[SPEAKER_00]: As well, likewise, it's an honor to have you on.
56:58
[SPEAKER_02]: Thanks a lot, Juan.
57:00
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, thank you for listening to the Vietnamese with Kenneth Wynne.
57:05
[SPEAKER_01]: Special thanks to Brittany Tran, to Jane Wynne, Catherine Wynne, Tina Fam, Sydney Jamie, and Crystal Tran.
57:13
[SPEAKER_01]: Please find us on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok at the Vietnamese podcast.