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Saturday, Mar. 06, 2010

Mike Tharp: Quang Pham is a loss to Congress

The U.S. Congress lost a good man this week.

No, nobody among our 535 electeds died, at least by press time.

And no, nobody among that august group was found in bed with a dead girl or a live boy, at least by press time.

No, Congress lost a good man -- and so did the American people -- when Quang Pham decided to withdraw from the race for the 47th District down in Orange County.

Full and willing disclosure: Quang is a close and longtime friend. We met after the Persian Gulf War, where he was a U.S. Marine helicopter pilot and where I'd been a correspondent on the ground in Saudi, Iraq and Kuwait.

We met during interviews for a book on the war my magazine was writing. Q and I hit it off right away because of war, basketball and Vietnam.

You see, he came here in 1975 as an 11-year-old who spoke about three words of English ("Coke" was one of the clean ones). His dad, a colonel in the South Vietnamese Air Force, put Quang, his mom and sisters on a C-130 just before Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese.

After refugee camps in the Philippines and Arkansas, they wound up in Oxnard. Quang played high school ball there, went to UCLA, got a degree in economics and signed up with a Marine recruiter.

His family didn't know whether his dad was dead or alive back in their motherland. He was alive, barely sometimes, in re-education camps for 12 years.

Quang became the first Vietnamese American to ever pass Marine aviator school. Besides the Gulf War, he also served in Somalia, winding up as a general's aide. He left the Corps as a major.

From our first meeting in 1991, he told me he wanted to write a book. Two years later, I stood on the tarmac with Hoa Pham, Q's father, who had been released from the camps and finally made his way to the U.S. We watched his son land a big chopper at Tustin air station in Southern California.

The father-son reunion made a compelling story: http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/930308/archive_014767.htm

Quang and I stayed in touch. We played ball. Watched NCAA tournament games together. He sold pharmaceuticals for awhile, then -- with several million dollars in startup funds he'd gotten from an elite venture capital firm in the Bay Area -- he launched his own company. Lathian Health, a provider of pharmaceutical marketing services and sales solutions.

He ran that as CEO for awhile. But he still felt an urge in his gut to write a book -- especially after he made a trip back to Vietnam in 1995.

It took him 10 more years, but he did it. Random House published "A Sense of Duty: My Father, My American Journey" in 2005. I'd spent a good part of the previous year editing chapters. Sometimes we'd literally meet on a downtown L.A. corner, he'd hand me an envelope with the latest manuscript, I'd had him one with the edited pages and off we went.

(The paperback version comes out soon, and you can find out more about it at www.quangxpham.com.)

I declined his many offers of money for the editing. So he said that if my grad school, Kansas, and his, UCLA, ever made it to the Final Four, we'd go -- on him. As you may know, they did, in 2008, and Q and I were in San Antonio when the Jayhawks cut down the nets.

We stayed close because we believed in each other. He was the trail boss at an important birthday party for me. I emceed the launch of his book tour at the Newport Beach Yacht Club. He got married to Shannon, and they had Willow, a lovely little girl, forced for years to wear UCLA gear.

We talked a year or so ago about Quang running for office. He wanted to run as an Independent, since neither major party fitted his convictions. But he soon realized that unless he were as rich as Ross Perot, he didn't stand a chance outside the parallel mainstream lines.