(Norcross, GA)- Honorable Judge John Ngo Trong Nguyen, Superior Court of Orange County (retired), delivered the keynote address for the launch of the Vietnamese American Bar Association- Georgia (VABA-GA). Below is his speech in its entirety.
Honorable John Nho Trong Nguyen’s official portrait before he retired. (Photo: http://uwe-thebeat.org/frame/judge.htm)
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Distinguished Jurists, Chief Assistant Solicitor General Gammage, elected officials, leaders and members of bar organizations, ladies and gentlemen.
Thank you President Jenny Nguyen for your very kind introduction and the Board of Governors of VABA-GA for your invitation. Thank you all for being here.
Congratulations to my brethren Judge Meng Lim on your election victory few months ago to become the first Cambodian American Judge in the U.S. Your awesome story will inspire many Cambodians and others to follow in your footsteps.
Ladies and gentlemen:
I want to begin with a moment of reflection, remembering and giving thanks to the 220,000 sons and daughters of this great state of Georgia who had dropped their sweat and shed their blood in my native land of VN in the sixties and seventies. Georgia offered the largest number of soldiers to serve in the Vietnam War. Please also join me in honoring the highest ranking P.O.W. officer of the US Army, Colonel Benjamin Purcell who passed away two years ago in Clarksville, GA, about 80 miles from here.
After 62 months of captivity in a POW camp in Laos, Colonel Purcell returned home in 1973 and the first words he said to the world are: “Liberty is the most precious thing in a man’s life”.
This moment in time, forty years ago is very special. It is when my native land, South Vietnam, where I nurtured my dreams, where people of my generation struggled very hard to build a nation of peace, prosperity, with democracy, liberty and justice for all, collapsed under the brutal attack of North Vietnamese Communist.
The communist broke the 1973 peace agreement they had signed in Paris with all parties in the war.
The U.S., then embroiled in the Watergate scandal, did not come to the assistance of her ally. The promises made by President Nixon to South Vietnam became naught after he vacated his office. South Vietnamese soldiers ran out of ammunition to fight back. Canons stood idle in the face of barrages of enemy’s fire. There was not enough fuel to fly the fighter planes and helicopters.
Meanwhile the communist bloc continued to pour in massive assistance of tanks, advanced weaponry, rockets and ammunition to support the North. The outcome was inevitable. In 1975, with the fall of Saigon, millions of Vietnamese began to leave their homeland seeking freedom elsewhere. Just as it was to Colonel Purcell, to them,”liberty is the most precious thing in a person’s life.” Without liberty, life lost all its meaning.
Many of us made it to the shore of this great land and entrusted in the fertile soil of America the seeds of their love for freedom.
Today, we are seeing the blossoming of those geminating seeds into beautiful flowers of a new generation of Vietnamese Americans.
This new generation is that of excellent technology innovators and entrepreneurs such as Bill Nguyen, named in 2005 by MIT Technology Review as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under 35 and listed in 2010 by World Economic Forum as one of the global world leaders.
It is the generation of many scientists, engineers, and researchers making advanced technology in robotic, quantum and thermo physic and medical discoveries with far reaching space and lifesaving applications. This is the generation of the first U.S. Army General and about 25 Vietnamese American Colonels currently serving in different branches of the U.S. Armed Forces.
Senator Huff pays tribute to the first Vietnamese judge to serve on the Orange County Superior Court bench (Photo:
http://district29.cssrc.us)
Brigadier General Viet Luong, arrived in the U.S. in 1975 at the age of 10, is now a Deputy Commander of the First Cavalry Division, one of the best fighting force of the U.S. Armed forces, with many combat tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It is the generation of Judge Jacqueline Nguyen, an extraordinary person and a brilliant legal mind, nominated by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the US Senate to serve on the largest Circuit Court of Appeals that has jurisdiction over 11 States and U.S. territories with a population of more than 60 million people.
This is also the generation of the young first newly elected State Senator Janet Nguyen of California and of my good friend, the recipient of the trailblazer honor today, Judge Tu Pham, the youngest ever appointed federal magistrate judge in the U.S.
Thank you Judge Pham for being a true trailblazer for our community.
The members of VABA GA that we gather here today to celebrate their success and leadership are members of that generation. It takes great efforts and leadership to come together, to work together to form a unifying organization such as VABA GA. I am proud of you and congratulate you, Jenny Nguyen, Minh Nguyen, Ethan Pham, Daniel Huynh, the founders, the Board of Governors, and all members of the Bar for this amazing milestone.
Look at their pictures to see how young they all are. Talk to them to appreciate their maturity and the depth of their thinking on issues affecting the community and the society and to feel their energy and be happy and hopeful for the future of the Bar and of the Vietnamese American community here in Georgia.
I also applaud the community for the support given to this very important organization. They deserve your continuing and strongest support to achieve the important goals they set out to accomplish to serve the community. Members of VABA GA. I understand that some of you have pursued the legal career without the blessing of your parents and sometime even against their wishes.
Don’t be discouraged, my friends. Many of our founding fathers who gave us the magnificent Declaration of Independence, the beautiful Constitution and the Bill of Rights, were lawyers. The great patriot Patrick Henry who gave the world the immortal words “give me liberty or give me death” was a lawyer. The greatest president who abolished slavery and saved our Union, Abraham Lincoln, was a lawyer. Last but not least, Governor Nathan Deal of Georgia is also a lawyer.
Indeed, the legal profession is a noble one. The title “esquire” is an honor only you can place as a suffix to your name. History has shown that, in our country, the United States of America, the envy of the world, the evolution of the society is a function of law. The lawyers working in our court system keep the power of the government in check, keep the criminals at bay, give voice to the voiceless, exonerate the innocents wrongfully convicted on death row, and bring structure and order to society.
They keep America true to our founding fathers’ constitutional aspirations of liberty, equal justice and due process of law and help move our nation forward, peacefully, toward a more perfect union. Our journey in the last forty years has not been without many trials and tribulations and hardship of the generation before you.
The people of that generation represent the free Vietnamese spirit, the spirit of a people who sacrificed so much during the war, suffered so much in the face of the unspeakable hatred and atrocities of the communist victors of the North after the war. Lost the war, dreams shattered, illtreated in peace, thousands had spent years in communist prisons.
Hopeless, physically and mentally broken and at the advanced ages, they picked up the pieces. Many literally walked through dangerous jungles in South East Asia and crossed the oceans, to come to America.
With courage, determination and hard work, they rebuild what’s left with their lives and transform many rundown areas in cities across America into prosperous Little Saigon commercial zones.
But their main purpose is always to have you, and future generations, live free and be able to reach your full potential in this great land of freedom and opportunity. Continue to move forward, to succeed and to make them proud of your contributions to this country, and to mankind. You don’t have to burden yourself with their past, because you cannot build the future by clinging to the past.
However, do keep them in your hearts to reinforce your inner strength and make your success more certain and more meaningful.
Finally, if I may, I invite you to think of Vietnam, with love and not hatred, because love will strengthen our force and shine on the moral value of our ideals, while hatred can diminish the value of our argument and lower us to the level of our adversary.
Please think of young attorneys there like Lê Thị Công Nhân, Nguyễn Xuân Đài, Võ An Đôn, and student activist Nguyễn Phương Uyên and others who speak the truth to power to protect the innocents and to defend the rights of the people to be free from injustice and communist oppression.
These courageous people accept to go to prison to stay true to their conscience and their love for their country. They are among the modern heroes of Vietnam. Do whatever you can and in whatever way you please to help bring democracy, freedom, peace and prosperity to the country of your parents. To help complete that unfinished task the generations before you had set out to do demands contributions from everyone, especially from the elite group of lawyers like you here.
America is our country. We owe her our love, our energy, our allegiance, and our undivided loyalty. By helping to bring democracy, peace, liberty and justice to Vietnam we are extolling the very values that make America the greatest country in the world.
There are many challenges ahead but with challenges are opportunities awaiting you. I have complete confidence that you are the worthy leaders of today, ready to meet whatever challenges coming your way in your service to the common goods and the ideals of liberty and justice.
Thank you my friends. Thank you ladies and gentlemen. Best wishes to you all.
Judge Nho Trọng Nguyễn
March 14, 2015
Atlanta, Georgia
