This week, the United States Senate, fulfilling their constitutional “advise and consent” function, will host a hearing for Hung Cao to become the undersecretary of the Navy.

Captain Cao, USN (ret.), an Annapolis grad and distinguished combat veteran, escaped with his family fifty years ago from Saigon as South Vietnam fell to the North.  He was a very young child at the time.

The title of his book is Call me an American — Refugee to Patriot: Lessons Learned for a Strong America.

He is the right person for the right job, and it is the right time for his confirmation in these increasingly dangerous years.

The Vietnam War was truly a seminal moment in American history.  As the helicopters left the roof of our Embassy, all was not lost for a generation of warriors.  As Hung’s family’s epic journey shows, the power and strength of America is in our welcoming immigrants.

“We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, and oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty.”  Those are President Kennedy’s words from his inaugural address, January 1961.

President Kennedy’s immortal words inspired us in the Boomer generation to become an unwavering part of the great American tradition of a quest for freedom and well-being for all.  From President Kennedy’s words, with the great advances in civil rights following the truly blessed leadership of Martin Luther King, to eventually facing down the Evil Empire of the Soviet Union, to our small minority of 2.7 million warriors, out of the fifty-two million Baby Boomers, who fought the war in Southeast Asia, along with many more of our peers having personal convictions that the war was wrong...it was truly an epic time.

For those of us in military service from 1965 to 1975, it was a mission of honor, even if some of our generational peers attacked and derided us just for serving in uniform.  After President Johnson symbolically marched us into the “Big Muddy” and then ran away, it took President Reagan to tell Vietnam veterans at a VEW convention, “It is time we recognized that ours was, in truth, a noble cause.” 

Now, in the U.S. Capitol this week, a Vietnamese-American refugee will hopefully be empowered to protect all Americans.  For those of us Vietnam veterans still alive, this is a moment of triumph.

However, Hung Cao is but a human example of courage and fortitude going into the future.  The Vietnam War also has had a lasting positive impact over the last half-century on amazing medical advances that have to be acknowledged.

Vietnam combat warriors, in addressing their struggles to come home in a positive, forward-looking way, created V.A. PTSD Vet Centers.  From that beginning, civilian mental health professionals and insightful writers studying the effects of trauma are now making great steps forward in civilian PTSD mental health treatment modalities. 

The other area of combat dangers–focused research that is making great advances is closed brain head injuries, especially with the recent enemy reliance on improvised explosive devices (IEDs) blowing up road traffic in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Another successful post-Vietnam struggle to address health damage from the adverse environment effects on the battlefield was when the late secretary Ed Derwinski, a WWII Army corporal, connected combat disability to the horrific, at times life-ending health effects now listed on the V.A. Agent Orange Registry.  That Agent Orange Registry of diseases then led to the Desert Storm Registry, and then to the Gulf War Registry, and now to the most recent addition of medical research of nasty battlefield toxins: the PACT Act.  The spillover research to adverse civilian health by exposure to toxic environments is becoming a unified medical work in progress.

Listen closely, America, for a distant roll-call muster on a parade ground of names eternally, ringing out to all who pass, of those who gave their all in the Vietnam War.  The dedicated Vietnam Memorial team lead by Jan Scruggs, succeeded in forevermore remembering all the names of those who have gone before, inscribed in beautiful black stone on the Mall.

Image: Hung Cao (right).  Credit: U.S. Navy via Picryl.