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A Sense of Duty: My Father, My American Journey
by Quang X. Pham
The story of a son and his father, two wars and two countries
A Sense of Duty is first and foremost a story of a son’s love for his father. The setting for the story covers two wars and two continents, as well as the tale of two men who served their countries.
Quang came to the United States as a Vietnamese refugee. His father, Hoa, a South Vietnamese fighter pilot, fought along side US troops against the North Vietnamese. In 1975, when the fall of Saigon was imminent, he managed to get his wife and children on a USAF plane, and out of the country. Hoa stayed with his country and his squadron.
Quang was eleven when he and his three sisters left their homeland to settle in California. His mother was thirty-nine, spoke no English and had never traveled outside South Vietnam. She raised her four children as a single mother. Together the family found freedom, opportunity, prejudice and loneliness. Quang grew up with unrequited longing for his father and his homeland, coupled with his gradual melding into an American. At the age of twenty, he chose to become a citizen of the United States. He then realized his childhood dream to become a pilot like his father.
His father was captured by the North Vietnamese and spent twelve years as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese. He was held in “reeducation” camps in the beginning and then spent years in hard-labor prison camps. In 1992, he came to the United States where he lived until his death in 2000. Like many of our Vietnam veterans, he never received a welcome home or veteran’s benefits.
Quang managed to work through years of grief and anger at his father. For the first several years, he didn’t know that his father had survived. Through the emotional turmoil, the love remained strong and enabled Quang to focus on his goals. Like most of us, he regrets the things unsaid and undone with his father. But he has come to terms with his feelings.
Like his father, Quang lived by a code of honor, serving one’s country. He attended UCLA. He suffered through the ambivalent feelings of our nation and our citizens about the war and about Vietnam. After graduation, he joined the Marine Corps. He became a pilot and served in the Gulf War in the early 1990s. He felt the sting of prejudice in the Corps, but he learned patience and tolerance along the way. In 1995, he left the Marines, took a trip to Vietnam and discovered that America had truly become his home. He was able to bury many of his ghosts and came home to re-join the Marine Corps as a reserve pilot, and served until 1999.
In 1999, his father became an American citizen, just one short year before his death. He was a man who had suffered much for his country, yet managed to avoid blame, bitterness and hatred.
Quang takes the reader through his intense and life-long emotional struggle in a way that draws one to him. Through him, we can experience the pain of war, family, loss and sacrifice. But most of all, we can feel his love for his father, family and both of his countries.
Title: A Sense of Duty: My Father, My American Journey
Author: Quang X. Pham
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0891418733
Review written by: Pat McGrath Avery
Reviewer's Rating:8
Reader's Rating: 10.00
Reader's Votes: 2
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