VNAF & me

Securing the seas from the North Atlantic to the Baltic.

Productive meeting with Vice Adm. Jan Christian Kaack, Chief of the German Navy. Our naval forces are moving out on the necessary investments vital to operating seamlessly across the maritime domain.

Elizabeth Pham is the first Vietnamese-American woman to fly fixed-wing fighter jets in the United States Marine Corps.

When Saigon fell, her mother and father were among the hundreds of thousands who ran for their lives. Her father had been a military doctor for South Vietnam. Now he was a refugee.

They washed up at a place called Camp Murray, a National Guard post in Washington State that, for 133 days in 1975, became a tent city and temporary home for more than 600 Vietnamese refugees who had lost everything.

Elizabeth was born in Seattle a couple of years later, in 1978.

She grew up hearing what her parents had survived. She never forgot that the only reason she existed was that strangers in uniform had given her family a chance.

There’s a story she tells. As a young woman, she met an old Army veteran who had lost three-quarters of his unit in Vietnam and his own vision in one eye. She reached out to thank him, because without men like him, she said, her family would never have made it out.

He told her something she has carried ever since:

“That is what it is all about, giving others the chance to have a better life.”

She decided she would spend her life doing exactly that.

She graduated with honors from the University of San Diego and was commissioned a Marine officer in 2000. Then she went after the hardest thing in naval aviation: jets.

In September 2003, she earned her wings of gold — graduating at the top of her flight class and taking the “Top Hook” award for best carrier landing performance.

She became the first Vietnamese-American woman to fly fixed-wing aircraft in the United States Armed Forces. The cockpit of an F/A-18 Hornet.

Then she took it to war.

Flying with the “Bats” of Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 242, she deployed to Iraq and flew more than 130 combat missions — part of the first all-female F/A-18 aircrew to do it. Over her career she would log more than 1,000 mishap-free flight hours in the Hornet, one of the most demanding aircraft on earth.

In 2015, forty years after the fall of Saigon, there was a ceremony at Camp Murray, the same patch of ground where her parents had once arrived as refugees with nothing.

This time, one of the keynote speakers was a U.S. Marine Corps fighter pilot in dress uniform.

It was their daughter.

“I’m able to defend and serve as part of the American dream,” she told the crowd. “Freedom is never free… to know the legacies of the past, and to embrace those legacies.”

Today, Elizabeth Pham wears the eagles of a full Colonel. She has commanded, fought, and is now the Director of Joint Plans and Operations at the NATO School Oberammergau, Germany.

If you have read this far, thank you for taking the time to read this story. Please let me know in the comments who I should profile next.

-Tom Le