A'ja Smith (@AjaSmith_)

She was the highest ranking Vietnamese American woman ever to command an operational brigade in the U.S. Army. Her name is Danielle Ngo. It was April 29, 1975. The day before Saigon fell. Her mother, Thai-An, just 24 years old, carried Danielle and her baby sister Lan-Dinh up the ramp of a U.S. military cargo plane as North Vietnamese rockets rained down on Tan Son Nhat airport. Soldiers were pushing equipment off the back of the aircraft to make room for refugees. They were among the last people to make it out of that airport. Her father was not on that plane. He was a captain in the South Vietnamese army and he stayed behind to keep fighting as his wife and two small daughters fled. It would be years before he made it to America and saw his family again. A week earlier, the South Vietnamese government had restricted travel. Danielle was in the seaside town of Vung Tau, away from her mother. Her grandfather refused to let the family be separated with the country collapsing around them. So he took eight buses and scooters across a war zone to bring the three-year-old back to her mother's arms. And when the moment came to say goodbye, knowing he could not go with them, her grandfather knelt down, folded a U.S. one-dollar bill, and tucked it into her little shirt pocket. It is the only thing she remembers from the day she became a refugee. The plane landed on Wake Island, a speck in the Pacific 2,300 miles from Hawaii. They spent three months there in a refugee camp, waiting to learn if any country would take them. America did. After camps in Hawaii and Arkansas, an uncle sponsored them, and the family finally settled in Massachusetts. They lived in subsidized housing for eight years. Danielle and Lan-Dinh were the only Vietnamese girls in their school. Their mother worked her way through an associate's, a bachelor's, and a master's degree, and insisted the children speak only English at home so she could learn it through them. When Danielle was seventeen, she asked her mother to sign her enlistment papers so she could join the Army Reserve. Her mother resisted with a sentence only a refugee mother could say: "I didn't pull you out of a war for you to go back into a war." But Danielle had already decided. As she put it: "I signed up for the Army because my mother said it was the Army that rescued us." The Army had carried her out of Saigon. She was going to give it her life in return. She enlisted in 1990 and earned her degree from UMass and her commission from Boston University in 1994, choosing one of the hardest, most male-dominated paths in the force: combat engineering. She didn't want the safer assignments. She wanted airborne. She wanted combat units. In 2001, she became the first female company commander in a combat engineer battalion attached directly to a combat brigade. She deployed to Bosnia. To Iraq, where her brigade was part of the 4th Infantry Division during the operations that captured Saddam Hussein. To Afghanistan to help plan the surge. She commanded the 52nd Engineer Battalion at Fort Carson, whose soldiers cut fire lines through the Waldo Canyon and Black Forest wildfires, two of the most destructive in Colorado history. "I guess you could call us the natural disaster battalion," she said. In 2016, she took command of the 130th Engineer Brigade in Hawaii, becoming the highest-ranking woman of Vietnamese descent ever to command an operational brigade in the U.S. Army. By 2021, the Army described her as the highest-ranking active-duty woman of Vietnamese descent in the entire force, second only to Major General Viet Xuan Luong. She retired in April 2023, after 33 years. She went back to Vietnam years later and found her grandfather, the man who took eight buses and gave her a dollar. They could barely speak, her Vietnamese had faded, his English was thin, so they sat in his little art shop and passed handwritten notes back and forth.