Nine days before North Vietnamese forces captured Saigon on April 30, 1975, a 10-year-old boy and his family fled the capital city of South Vietnam in the middle of the night.
“We left our dog behind,” Quang X. Pham said in a recent interview, recalling the last memory of his childhood home. “He barked, he barked, and that was it.”
After evacuating Saigon and settling in the United States, Pham would go on to become the second Vietnamese American to complete Marine Corps Officer Candidates School and the first to earn naval aviator wings in the Marines.
“It was a very fast childhood,” Pham said.
His father, Pham Van Hoa, was one of the first U.S.-trained fighter pilots in the South Vietnamese military. For all Quang X. Pham’s childhood, his father flew missions from Saigon to fight in the countryside.
“He would come back sometimes in a couple of days, a couple of weeks, sometimes the same night,” Pham said.
While much of the Vietnam War took place in rural jungles, rice paddies and villages, the conflict culminated with the fall of Saigon in the spring of 1975.
“People started to leave, so we knew things were going poorly,” said Pham.
The North Vietnamese forces were quickly closing on the capital city.
Able to see the writing on the wall, Pham Van Hoa loaded his wife and children onto an evacuation flight out of South Vietnam on April 21, 1975.
“We always thought we would just go, and there’d be another battle, and we would come back,” Pham said. “Nobody thought we would go and be gone and never come back to Vietnam.”
The Phams landed in the Philippines, then Guam. They lived in a refugee camp in Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, and finally settled in Oxnard, California.
“So that’s where I grew up and went right to the sixth grade,” Pham said.
Although Pham’s father intended to follow his family, they weren’t reunited for 17 years.
“We had the Vietnamese mom guilt. She said, ‘You know your dad got you to American freedom, right? If you screw up, he’s going to be disappointed wherever he is,’” Pham said.
Roughly 125,000 South Vietnamese made it out around the time Saigon fell.
Over the following decades, the United States would evacuate hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese refugees, including Pham Van Hoa. He was reunited with his family in 1992 after spending a dozen years in a North Vietnamese “reeducation” camp.
“I grew up in America without him,” Pham said, “but I became an athlete like him.”
When Pham arrived in the United States, he knew no English. He didn’t know if his dad was dead or alive. Some Americans assumed he was an enemy, and others thought he might know kung fu — Bruce Lee was popular at the time.
“I played Little League Baseball, got laughed at the first year, couldn’t even hit,” Pham said. “Practiced a lot in the subsequent months. The next year I came back, made the All Stars. We won the league championship.”
By eighth grade, Pham had settled into American life.
After graduating from high school, Pham studied economics at the University of California, Los Angeles. He was preparing to join the business world when he ran into a Marine Corps recruiter.
“He said, ‘You got a degree, you’re an American citizen, this is what you wanted to do. Joining the Marines will change your life. You can always go into business later,’” Pham said.
Pham commissioned into the Corps, learned to fly the CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter and deployed to support Operation Desert Storm. After a year stateside, Pham was back in the Persian Gulf, this time deployed on a ship.
“I completed that, came back and did a one-year as a general’s aide,” Pham said.
After seven years of active-duty service, followed by four years in the Reserve, Pham separated from the Marine Corps.
Post-military, Pham became an entrepreneur.
Amongst other businesses, he founded the publicly traded biopharmaceutical company Cadrenal Therapeutics, where he serves as chairman and CEO. Pham’s also the author of two books: “A Sense of Duty” and the recently released “Underdog Nation: Zero In on Effort and Results for Success.”
“I think Vietnam was a big tragedy that lingered on for many years,” Pham said. “But America took care of us. You know, it fulfilled its promise. It took a long time, almost two decades, but it didn’t leave my dad behind.”
Pham’s dad lived in the United States for eight years; he officially became a U.S. citizen shortly before dying of cancer in 2000.
“We got our dad back,” Pham said, “and so it made my service even more fulfilling.”
