Play all audios:
She did. Truong McClure went to college, built a successful career in marketing and business consulting and raised two children. Now 56 and living outside of Sacramento, she has dedicated
much of her time to honoring American veterans — speaking at American Legion events and cleaning debris from the gravesites of veterans. She was a founding member of the Veteran Employee
Resource Network at Hewlett Packard, where she worked for a time. She taught her two children to salute the American flag. “On behalf of many refugees, I recognize that many American
soldiers were not received correctly and properly when they came home; they were called terrible names. I’d like to welcome you home. I want every veteran to see that we are the children
that you have helped to keep safe, who have been able to go on and have happy, healthy families. We are living the American dream, which is what they fought to help us accomplish. Thank you
for giving me my life.” ‘SERVICE TO OTHERS’ REAR ADMIRAL HUAN NGUYEN, 66 Huan Nguyen On Veteran’s Day this past November, a crowd gathered in a field next to a veteran’s monument in the
small town of Draper, Utah. Beneath towering mountain peaks, the flags of each of the American military services flew over this monument, along with the POW-MIA flag and the Gold Star flag
that honors service members killed in battle. The keynote speaker wore an American Naval uniform with enough brass to add a couple of pounds to his narrow frame. This was retired Rear
Admiral Huan Nguyen, 66, the first Vietnamese-born U.S. service member to attain that rank. Born in Vietnam, he escaped with an uncle after his family was killed. He joined the Navy in 1993.
“When I came here in ’75, I landed in Guam,” he says, “and seeing all these service men and women, the Marine Corps, the sailors — they were working hard to make sure we were OK. Part of my
journey is about trying to get rid of the trauma of the past, and the best way to overcome this was to be of service to others.” ‘AN ETHNIC ENCLAVE’ FRANK JAO, 76 Frank Jao escaped Saigon
50 years ago, at age 26, and ended up as a refugee in California’s Camp Pendleton. “I was among the first group of Vietnamese Americans who came to the country, and I could see there was a
need to have an ethnic enclave for this new group.” Jao got his real estate license, then founded Bridgecreek Development in 1978. That company became a key builder of Orange County,
California’s Little Saigon, the largest Vietnamese enclave in the U.S., with nearly 200,000 residents. It includes the Asian Garden Mall, the largest Vietnamese shopping center in the
country, home to pho restaurants, cafés selling bò lúc lắc (“shaking beef”), Vietnamese coffee shops and jewelry shops. It may all feel like Saigon, but Jao embraces his new home.