Best Defense
Thomas E. Ricks' daily take on national security.

A salute to the USS Mustin’s skipper

Remember last year when a Vietnamese-American officer commanded a Navy ship that visited Vietnam? Now, in an interesting follow-up, a Cambodian-American skipper is taking a destroyer to Cambodia. Cmdr. Michael V.K. Misiewicz was adopted by a woman at the U.S. embassy there, the article reports. Seventeen years later, some four years after he enlisted in ...

By , a former contributing editor to Foreign Policy.
public.navy.mil
public.navy.mil
public.navy.mil

Remember last year when a Vietnamese-American officer commanded a Navy ship that visited Vietnam? Now, in an interesting follow-up, a Cambodian-American skipper is taking a destroyer to Cambodia. Cmdr. Michael V.K. Misiewicz was adopted by a woman at the U.S. embassy there, the article reports. Seventeen years later, some four years after he enlisted in the Navy, he learned that some members of his birth family also had escaped to the United States and was reunited with them, according to the ship's website. His command master chief is a woman who was born in Japan. Interesting crew.

Remember last year when a Vietnamese-American officer commanded a Navy ship that visited Vietnam? Now, in an interesting follow-up, a Cambodian-American skipper is taking a destroyer to Cambodia. Cmdr. Michael V.K. Misiewicz was adopted by a woman at the U.S. embassy there, the article reports. Seventeen years later, some four years after he enlisted in the Navy, he learned that some members of his birth family also had escaped to the United States and was reunited with them, according to the ship’s website. His command master chief is a woman who was born in Japan. Interesting crew.

Today’s proposed bumper sticker:

Immigrants: Keeping America great for 400 years.

(Or maybe 12,000 years, if you wanna count Native Americans as immigrants. This may be one reason the Canadian term, “First Peoples,” is more accurate.)

(HT to SS)

Thomas E. Ricks is a former contributing editor to Foreign Policy. Twitter: @tomricks1

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