Former Vietnam War Refugee Moves Up U.S. Army Ranks

The first time Col. Danielle Ngo, USA, stepped onto a military aircraft, she was just 4 years old, and her mother was yanking her to safety as bombs exploded closer.

Ngo, her mother Ngo Thai-An, and her sister Lan-Dinh fled their country of Vietnam in April 1973 with the help of the American military. The experience, which she pieced together with her mother’s memory, lingered in her mind as she grew up in the U.S. — and moved up the ranks in a successful Army career.



“Going into the military was a calling for me,” said Ngo, the executive officer for the Army Inspector General at the Pentagon. “It was something that I had to do and that I wanted to do. It all stems back from feeling like the Army rescued me and my family from the war and getting attacked at the end of the Vietnam War.”
She earned her commission in 1994 and decided to serve in the Army Corps of Engineers.

But she wasn’t just any engineer.
At the time, Ngo said most women engineers were assigned to topographical battalions. But Ngo wanted to be a paratrooper and pursued a career as an airborne combat engineer.
She mentioned her desire to her supervisor, then-Maj. Victor Samuels, who got then-Col. Meredith “Bone Crusher” Temple, the brigade commander, onboard. Temple reassigned Ngo and another woman to staff officer positions in a test pilot jump as a way to get them onto an airborne combat training mission.