她是迄今为止军衔最高的越南裔美国女性,曾在美国陆军指挥一个作战旅。
她的名字是丹妮尔·吴。
那是1975年4月29日。西贡沦陷的前一天。
她的母亲Thai-An,当时只有24岁,抱着丹妮尔和她年幼的妹妹Lan-Dinh,登上了一架美国军用货运飞机的舷梯,而北越火箭弹正如雨点般倾泻在檀香山机场。士兵们正将设备从飞机尾部推下,为难民腾出空间。
他们是最后一批从那个机场逃离的人之一。
她的父亲不在那架飞机上。
他是南越军队的上尉,他选择留下来继续作战,而他的妻子和两个年幼的女儿则逃离了。
几年后,他才抵达美国,与家人重逢。
一周前,南越政府限制了出行。丹妮尔当时在海滨小镇Vung Tau,远离母亲身边。她的祖父拒绝让这个家庭在国家崩塌之际分离。
于是他乘坐八辆巴士和摩托车,穿越战区,将这个三岁的小女孩带回母亲的怀抱。
当告别的时刻到来时,他知道自己无法随她们同行,于是祖父跪下来,折叠了一张一美元的美钞,塞进她小小的衬衫口袋里。
这是她从成为难民那天起唯一记得的东西。
飞机降落在威克岛上,那是一个位于太平洋上距夏威夷2300英里的小点。他们在那里一个难民营度过了三个月,等待得知是否有国家愿意接纳他们。
美国接纳了他们。
在夏威夷和阿肯色的营地之后,一位叔叔为他们担保,全家终于在马萨诸塞州安顿下来。他们在补贴住房住了八年。丹妮尔和Lan-Dinh是学校里仅有的越南女孩。她们的母亲通过副学士、文学学士和硕士学位一步步努力前行,并坚持要求孩子们在家只说英语,这样她能通过她们学习。
丹妮尔17岁时,她请求母亲签署她的入伍文件,以便加入陆军预备役。
她的母亲以一句只有难民母亲才能说出的话拒绝了:
“我不是把你从战争中拉出来,让你再回去投入另一场战争。”
但丹妮尔早已下定决心。她这样说:“我加入陆军,是因为母亲说过是陆军救了我们。”
陆军曾将她从西贡带走。她决定用一生回报。
她于1990年入伍,并于1994年从UMass获得学位,从波士顿大学获得委任,选择军队中最艰难、最男性主导的道路之一:作战工程。
她不想要更安全的任务。她想要空降。她想要作战单位。
2001年,她成为一个直接隶属于作战旅的作战工兵营中首位女性连长。
她被部署到波斯尼亚。到伊拉克,在那里她的旅是第四步兵师的一部分,参与了抓捕萨达姆·侯赛因的行动。到阿富汗,帮助规划增兵计划。
她在卡森堡指挥第52工兵营,其士兵在科罗拉多历史上最具破坏性的两次野火——沃尔多峡谷和黑森林大火中,开辟了防火线。“我想你可以说我们是自然灾害营,”她说。
2016年,她在夏威夷接管第130工兵旅,成为有史以来首位指挥美国陆军作战旅的越南裔最高军衔女性。
到2021年,陆军将她描述为整个军队中越南裔现役最高军衔的女性,仅次于越宣良少将。
她于2023年4月退役,服役33年。
多年后,她返回越南,找到了她的祖父——那个乘坐八辆巴士并给她一美元的人。他们几乎无法交谈,她的越南语已淡忘,他的英语也很有限,于是他们在他的小艺术品店里坐下,互相传递手写便条。
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.
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