Word: victors
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Just before leaving for his second tour of duty in Iraq last September, Lance Corporal Victor R. Lu of the U.S. Marine Corps took his mother aside in their family home in east Los Angeles for a quiet conversation. The fourth of six children?and the first boy in the family?Lu, like many other young Americans, had enlisted in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001. In the three years that had passed, the change in him was unmistakable. He had been an indifferent student, a bit of a troublemaker in a mischievous, harmless sort of way. But after 9/11...
...would assume more responsibility as the man of the house; as the eldest son in a large family, that was his responsibility. His father was in his mid-60s, and after working up to three jobs at a time to support the family, he deserved a break. Days later, Victor's Marine unit, nicknamed "Havoc 2," shipped out of Camp Pendleton, California, destined for Fallujah. It was the last time his mother would...
...Every parent has fears when their sons or daughters go off to war. In the case of Xuong and Nu Lu, Victor's parents, those fears were shaped in part by their memories of another war that ended a generation ago. Like more than half a million of their countrymen, the Lus came to the U.S. as refugees from Vietnam, having fled their native Saigon with their two young children after the Communist government took power in 1975. They made their home in east Los Angeles and had four more children. Victor was born in the summer...
...handful of others, like the family of Victor R. Lu, the two wars have become bookends of tragedy, conflicts that upended their worlds forever. Xuong and his wife Nu lived in Saigon, and he worked as a skilled technician in a profitable machine shop. Like millions of other Vietnamese, the Lus are ethnic Chinese, and were residents of a part of Saigon known as Cholon, where many Vietnamese of Chinese descent had settled. Like Chinese diaspora the world over, the one in Saigon was tight knit, industrious and relatively prosperous. Even as the war in Vietnam intensified in the late...
...When Victor Lu joined the Marines in the wake of 9/11, the Vietnam War, as far as he was concerned, was ancient history. If it ever entered his thoughts?as he worked out in order to lose enough weight to qualify as a Marine?no one in his family is aware of it. Friends say he was a highly motivated young man, keen to serve his country. His parents rarely talked about their own history at home, and it seemed of little concern to Victor...