viet tan nguyen who is bruce smith? when i was very i went on a field trip to the monterey language institute, which is the army's post for a training soldiers in different languages. and i had a very poor grasp of vietnamese at that age because i was an american and there was a young american soldier there, red haired, wearing a vietnamese aliya who studied vietnamese. and so he said, we'll translate your vietnamese name into english. and the english equivalent that he he could come up with was bruce smith. so that's my alter ego. and have you have you changed your name since you were born? when my parents became citizens, when i was around 12 years of age, they actually changed their legally. so my parents became joseph and linda, these people who said they 100% vietnamese and, they offered me the chance to change my name. and i thought about it for quite a and i went through various names in my mind i thought, what if i were named troy? it just didn't right. to me, this person who himself to be american but still kne

i happen to be calling the widow of bruce smith. bruce was, like tim walz, had been in the national guard for more than 20 years. he had done his duty. he had been deployed not once, not twice, but three times. he lived in a small town, west liberty, iowa, a town of about 3000. he had a wife, had been married for a number of years. they had two teenage kids. wife worked a part-time job, he worked a full-time job. off he went. he was a helicopter pilot. his job was to ferry people in baghdad from one neighborhood to another because you couldn't drive. it was too dangerous to drive, so you had to helicopter. one day, a handheld missile was fired at his helicopter. get the helicopter, and bruce and his copilot had a split-second decision to make as they were able to maneuver the chopper just a bit. do they maneuver it in a way that results in that chopper creating a greater risk for them as copilot and pilot, or do they do whatever they can do to save the 17 people that are on board in the back? bruce did what he was trained to do. he d

viet tan nguyen who is bruce smith?when i was very i went on a field trip to the monterey language institute, which is the army's post for a training soldiers in different languages. and i had a very poor grasp of vietnamese at that age because i was an american and there was a young american soldier there, red haired, wearing a vietnamese aliya who studied vietnamese. and so he said, we'll translate your vietnamese name into english. and the english equivalent that he he could come up with was bruce smith. so that's my alter ego. and have you have you changed your name since you were born? when my parents became citizens, when i was around 12 years of age, they actually changed their legally. so my parents became joseph and linda, these people who said they 100% vietnamese and, they offered me the chance to change my name. and i thought about it for quite a and i went through various names in my mind i thought, what if i were named troy? it just didn't right. to me, this person who himself to be american but still knew