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A Sense of Duty: My Father, My American Journey
by Quang X. Pham
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Ballantine Books (2005-04-12)
ISBN: 0891418733
EAN: 9780891418733
Dewy Decimal #: 959.7043092
Hardcover: 288 pages
Edition: 1st
Release Date: 2005-04-12
SKU: 07120234
Condition: Very Good Very Good
Comments: Hardback in very good plus condition with no markings. Dust jacket in like new condition with minor shelf wear. Tight binding and clear crisp text. Very nice book.
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
Quang X. Pham’s A Sense of Duty, the first book written by a former Vietnamese refugee who became a U.S. Marine, is an affecting memoir about fate, hope, and the aftermath of the most divisive war America has fought. It is both a heartfelt salute to the spirit of America and a recounting of a son’s reunion with his long absent father, himself a devoted officer who saw combat firsthand.
In 1964, Hoa Pham, a South Vietnamese fighter pilot, was shot down by Viet Cong antiaircraft fire while supporting American forces. Rescued by an American helicopter after crash-landing, he returned home briefly to witness the birth of his son, Quang, before rejoining the fight against the Communists.
Just before the fall of Saigon, Hoa made sure that his wife and children escaped Vietnam. He himself was not so lucky. In a rush to help relatives flee the chaos, Hoa was captured by Communist troops and subsequently imprisoned for more than a decade in reeducation camps.
Twelve years later, after gaining his citizenship and graduating from UCLA, Quang enlisted in the U.S. Marines to serve his country as his father had served his. Though part of the victorious effort to free the Kuwaitis from Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War, he could not shake off the feelings of guilt and inadequacy associated with his “refugee complex.”
When father and son at last reunited, Hoa’s revelations about his wartime experience left Quang even more conflicted about his service in the Marines. But after years of struggling to reconnect with each other and the homeland they left behind, Quang and his gravely ill father set out on a final and profound quest–to make sense of the war in Vietnam.
A Sense of Duty traces Quang’s uniquely spirited yet agonizing journey from the Vietnam War to the Gulf War, from his experiences as an uprooted refugee to his becoming a combat aviator, and his many incarnations in between. It reveals the turmoil of a family torn apart and reunited by the fortunes of war. It is an American journey like no other.
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Customer Reviews
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A Profoundly Inspiring Story!
Rating  (5)
Date: 2008-09-15
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
A Sense of Duty is a superbly written, multilayered story of war and remembrance set against the backdrop of the tumultuous Vietnam era. It reveals one of the least publicized and even less understood themes emerging from the Vietnam experience: the South Vietnamese contribution to the war effort and the disappointment many Vietnamese-Americans feel as a result of their countrymen's role in the conflict being minimized or simply overlooked.
Not content to only detail his father's selfless sacrifice and heroic exploits as a Vietnamese Air Force pilot flying missions in support of U.S. forces, the author, Quang Pham, offers great insight into the significant, but underappreciated, role South Vietnamese forces played in stemming the tide of communist aggression. In this sweeping account of his experiences first as a child growing up in the war-wracked country of his birth and then as an immigrant facing a less-than-tolerant America, Pham's story is both timely and edifying.
Given the many challenges he faced, readers would expect a cynical, even bitter Pham in A Sense of Duty. Instead we are treated on one level to an uplifting story of a young man's coming of age and emerging from his father's larger-than-life shadow. Like many of us, Pham is challenged into his adulthood to reconcile his deep respect for his father with the recognition that he needs to become his own man. After they are reunited, Pham also discovers his father's considerable flaws which cause him to recast his father in the role of human, not hero.
On another level entirely, A Sense of Duty is a classic Horatio Alger story involving an immigrant shedding the identity of his country of origin, developing a love for his adopted America, and successfully pursuing the American dream.
Perhaps the most improbable turn of events in this amazing story, Quang eventually seeks a career as a U.S. Marine and pays homage to his father's intense love of flying by becoming a pilot himself. Quang's story comes full circle when, like his father, he flies missions supporting Marines in ground combat. While his father's missions are in fighter and transport aircraft over the treacherous jungles and rice paddies of South Vietnam, Quang's are in helicopters over the vast, unforgiving deserts of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
Quang acquits himself quite admirably as his father's son, every bit as courageous but perhaps a bit less brash. Quang exchanges the swashbuckling boldness of his fighter pilot father for the cool steadiness of the helicopter pilot he decides to become. Great stuff!
For this reader, it is Quang's patriotism and, well, sense of duty that make his story such an interesting one. As a friend of Quang's, I can attest to his devotion to his adopted country and, despite some trying experiences with intolerance and bigotry, his basic belief in the American ideal and the essential goodness of the American people. It is clear from reading Pham's account of his father's 12-year struggle in communist 'reeducation' camps that the American withdrawal in 1973 left an enormous vacuum from which many thousands of South Vietnamese never emerged. For this and other more personal indignities, Vietnamese-Americans have every right to be bitter and resentful.
A Sense of Duty brings to light the second and third order effects - some not evident for years down the road - of our government's foreign policy decisions. Quang Pham very ably elucidates, through his family's remarkable experiences, the downstream impact of our involvement in Vietnam on successive generations of South Vietnamese immigrants.
Surprisingly, Quang is neither bitter nor resentful. He does not dwell on tragedy and disappointment. Indeed, more than just another Vietnam literary catharsis or a querulous tale of one man's exorcising his demons, A Sense of Duty inspires us to recall what makes our country great: immigrants like Quang Pham who venture to our nation's shores and who pull themselves up by the bootstraps to pursue America's bountiful opportunity. Thankfully, many, like Quang, choose the military as their springboard to success. They serve nobly and honorably, defending the many liberties of our "shining city on a hill."
We certainly know where Quang gets his strength and internal fortitude! Like his father, Quang's mother demonstrates an uncommon tenacity, industriousness, and indomitable will to succeed. No whiners here! Remarkably, despite her many struggles to raise 3 children alone in her often inhospitable adopted country, Quang's mother eventually volunteers to serve for 2 years with the Peace Corps in the former Soviet Union. Incredible!
It is Quang's family's selflessness that ultimately makes them so endearing. At a time when immigration remains a divisive issue in this country, we read A Sense of Duty, and we are brought together. We rally behind a great American and a proud family tradition of serving a cause greater than oneself. Finally, through the Phams we celebrate the seemingly limitless and enduring gifts immigrants continue to bestow on our great country.
This is a tale of grit and determination and, in the face of much adversity, striving to succeed!
Thank you for your service, Quang, and for a profoundly inspiring story!
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Personal History at Its Best
Rating (5)
Date: 2007-12-11
3 out of 3 customers found this reveiw helpful
Quang X. Pham's moving memoir, "A Sense of Duty: My Father, My American Journey," reads like a modern Horation Alger success story. But more than that, it is a rare look into the difficult private lives of one fragmented and frightened family who barely made it out of Saigon during those infamous "last days." Pham's father, a South Vietnamese AF pilot, stayed behind, a victim of his own sense of duty, and paid a heavy price. In cuttingly clear and elegantly simple prose, Pham tells of his life, from the refugee camps of Guam and Arkansas to the working-class "mean streets" of Oxnard, California, and of the ceaseless toil and sacrifices made by his mother in a strange land. "A Sense of Duty" also tells of Pham's hard-won transformation from a ragged refugee boy to UCLA graduate and decorated USMC pilot and Gulf War veteran. But underneath it all is an aching yearning to know a father who was lost and then found again. Pham's story is indeed an "American Journey," one that will be read, and read again. This is more than a memoir; this is personal history at its very best.
- Timothy James Bazzett, author of "Love, War & Polio: The Life and Times of Young Bill Porteous" and "Soldier Boy: At Play in the ASA"
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A Voyage of Discovery
Rating  (4)
Date: 2007-11-10
2 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
What or who makes us who we are? The choices we make, our families make, or fate simply dispenses all help to create the individuals we are. However, we must make the journey of discovery to find our individual selves. Quang Pham shares with us his journey of discovery.
The author was born in Vietnam and left around the fall of Saigon. His father was a pilot in the Vietnamese air force and after getting his family to safety, was not able to get out. He would spend many years in prison and re-education camps. The author grew up in the United States and would later serve in the United States Marine Corps. Pham takes us through his journey for identity as a Vietnamese American, a family member, and as an individual.
Is he Vietnamese, American, or Vietnamese-American? This is a question that flows throughout the book, which signifies a tough question. As a United States Marine, Pham honorably served our country as a helicopter pilot. He went to an American high school where he played sports and went to an American university. He delivered newspapers. Through his choices, he is just as American as anyone, but because his appearance was not as common, he spent a lot of time branded as different or non-American. Although born in Vietnam, he chose to be an American. This book gives the reader a glimpse into the struggle to determine who we are as Americans.
As well as our nationality, our family provides us with insight into who we are. For Pham, his father was still in Vietnam during the author's formative years of childhood and early adulthood. Pham looks back in the narrative at what his father must have gone through and what his father had done to help get an understanding of who he is. As a fellow military pilot, he has some understanding, but he is not able to get all the information he wants as his father was trying to put the past behind him and then later, died. The author acknowledges the difference between his father and him by using the Vietnamese tradition of family name first when referring to his father, but using his first name when referring to himself. Even with differences, our families help ground us.
As an individual, we have to explore what makes us different from the other members of the family and the community. The author illustrates this by discussing how other pilots are trying to give him a call sign (since he is a military aviator), but none of the names seem to reflect him. They are names that many others have had or names that reflect either a generic Asian association or the wrong ethnic association. None of these names helped identify Pham as Vietnamese or American. His eventual call sign does blend both in its simplicity.
To function with any amount of clarity and sense of self, we must think about who we are. I would recommend this book not just for people who wish to understand what someone of foreign birth must go through to become an American, but I would also recommend this book for anyone who is struggling to make a personal discovery. Although our own journeys will be different, this book reassures us that others are making journeys also.
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a sense of duty: my father, my american journey
Rating (5)
Date: 2007-01-16
4 out of 4 customers found this reveiw helpful
i enjoyed this book vey much. being a veteran of the vietnam war it helped me to understand the vietnamese side to the war more than i had before. i salute quang x pham for delivering his account in such an honest trully interesting way.
semper fi
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More Than Just A Coming Of Age Story For a Vietnamese Refugee.
Rating (5)
Date: 2006-10-30
5 out of 5 customers found this reveiw helpful
The book "A Sense Of Duty: My Father, My American Journey" is really an American story about coming of age and about father son relationships but with a huge twist of circumstances. We are dealing with a family torn apart by the loss of the Vietnam War and their subsequent separation. Author Quang X. Pham is shipped to the USA after the fall of Saigon with his siblings and mother. His father who is a member of the South Vietnamese Air Force stays behind doing his duty to the very end. Thus begins 12 years of imprisonment in the so called "re-education camps" while his family adjusts to a new life in America.
The author deals with cultural and language issues and some degree of racism and bigoted treatment. However, the deeper issue for him is not having his father there for him. There is also his lack, at that young age, to fully realize the significance of what his father had done with his life and how well he had served his old country. The book is an eye opener for those of us who have wondered what it was like for these new comers to our shores.
When his father does come to the USA after being released from the "camps" he found it tough going. His marriage fell a part and he found that all those lost years with his children, who had grown up without him, haave created a huge gap between them. His children do not really know or understanding who is or even who he was.
The book follows the growing appreciation and understandings that Quang eventually gains for his dad. As he learns more about his father's past and sees his personal courage and sense of duty and what drove him to become the man he was. When the author himself wears the uniform of Marine aviator and fights in the Gulf War, he begins to gain more insights on the sacrifices that his dad had made for his own country of South Vietnam. We take this spiritual and emotional journey with the author as he gradually begins to sense what factors and motives drove his father on his own personal journey.
The book also details and addresses some old history from that time period and that war. Most Americans have either forgotten or never knew about our national attitudes and polices with regard to the war and lack of regard for our allies the South Vietnamese. It may make for some interesting but uncomfortable reading.
It is a well-written and poignant story that embraces two very different wars. His story unites two different generations into an emotional bridge between father and son. It is touching and deeply moving. The author does a great job of making the reader feel a part of the experience. This book receives the Military Writer's Society of America's highest book rating of FIVE STARS!
This book also receives my personal endorsement!
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