Hoa Van Pham, Patriot in Two Countries
OBITUARY: He respected the values of the United States and clung to a love of his native South Vietnam.
November 23, 2000
Hoa Van Pham
Born: Oct. 10, 1935, Saigon, South Vietnam
Died: Nov. 10, 2000, Mission Viejo
Survivors: Sons, Quang, An; daughters, Thi, Uyen, Thu; three grandchildren
Services: Have been held. Arrangements by Westminster Memorial Park.
By ROBIN HINCH, the Orange County Register
Talk of patriotism is easy. Flags fly on national holidays, license plate frames read, "I (heart) USA."
But true patriots are rare.
In Hoa Van Pham's mind, he was a patriot in two countries - the one in which he was born and the one that nurtured his family.
He loved and respected the values of the United States, where he lived while receiving pilot's training, where his children were educated, and where he died - an American citizen. But he held fast to an equal loyalty to his native South Vietnam.
He made choices that both helped and hurt his family and brought great hardship on himself, but Hoa (pronounced "hwa") lived knowing that he had done his best to fight for and stand by both countries.
He was 65 when he died Friday in his Mission Viejo home of complications from a stroke.
Hoa was born in Saigon, now known as Ho Chi Minh City. He grew up in a middle-class family when the French were in Vietnam and the Japanese were entering the country.
Against his father's will, Hoa joined the newly formed South Vietnamese Air Force in 1954. He felt he had to do what he could to preserve the sovereignty of South Vietnam.
Three years later, he was commissioned an officer and was one of the first Vietnamese pilots sent to America for training. He arrived at Reese Air Force Base in Lubbock, Texas, fluent in French and speaking only a few words of English.
Racial tensions were at a high level in the South, and Texans often mistook the Vietnamese for Mexicans. When they tried to enter diners that displayed "No Mexicans Served Here" signs, they had to show their passports first. Later, when Hoa went to Alabama, he never knew whether to sit in the front or the back of the bus.
He spent two years in Texas, receiving flight training and learning airplane mechanics. Outgoing and funny, he was nicknamed "Sugah" for his sweet, winning ways.
Hoa loved America for all the things he wanted for South Vietnam - freedom, tolerance, an open and prosperous way of life. When he returned to South Vietnam, he joined the Air Force's first fighter squadron to continue fighting for the things he valued in the United States.
He married Niem Nguyen, whom he'd known since high school, in 1963, and was shot down while she was pregnant with their second child.
But he continued to fight until the end of the war in 1975. One week before the fall of Saigon to North Vietnam, Hoa managed to get his wife and four children into the cargo hold of a C-130 and flown to safety in the United States. His son, Quang, who now owns a Newport Beach dot-com, was 10. Hoa's daughters were 11, 6, and 2.
While his family huddled in a confused, if free, world in the Philippines, Guam, then a Fort Chaffee, Ark., refugee camp, Hoa stayed for the final, futile fight and was quickly captured and sent to a re-education camp. He spent 12 years in the harshest rural regions of North Vietnam, doing hard labor and being fed rice and water every other day. And being told repeatedly of the evils of the totalitarian U.S. regime.
Finally, in 1987, Hoa was freed and lived with his mother-in-law in Saigon while awaiting paperwork that would send him to America. It took five years. He was under constant watch and wasn't allowed to work.
By the time he arrived in California, his family members were strangers. His children were grown, educated and successful. His son was a U.S. Marine, stationed in Tustin.
Hoa's wife was an accountant -- a strong, independent woman who had raised the children on her own and wasn't about to return to the traditional role of subservient wife. They ended up divorcing.
Still, he praised his wife for the fine job she'd done. "What you did is harder than what I did," he acknowledged.
Then Hoa set about constructing a new life. He helped elementary school children with math. He tried to get acquainted with his children.
He sipped pho (a rich Vietnamese broth) with friends at Pho Bolsa in Westminster and went fishing.
And he never looked back, never laid blame on his tormentors or complained about the outcome of the war.
"You can't redo the past," he said repeatedly. "You have to move forward."
Last year, he became a U.S. citizen. This year, he cast his first, and only, presidential ballot.