While a child in wartime Vietnam, Anh Duong vowed to one day help the soldiers who saved her. She and her Navy team helped revolutionise American munitions. Photo / Erin Schaff, the New York Times
After the United States dropped 14 “bunker-buster” bombs on two nuclear sites in Iran, Anh Duong looked up the weapon’s technical details and felt a rush of familiarity.
Duong, 65, is a former Vietnam War refugee who escaped Saigon and found a home with her family in Washington, DC.
Long determined to give back to the nation that sheltered her, she got her chance a month after 9/11, when she was the leader of a team of US military scientists that created an explosive in the same family as the bunker-buster used in Iran.
It was the BLU-118/B, a laser-guided bomb designed to travel deep into confined spaces such as the underground tunnels occupied by al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
BLU stands for Bomb Live Unit, not Big, Loud and Ugly, “which is maybe what the soldiers say”, Duong said in an interview at her home in suburban Maryland.
The bomb produced a high-temperature, sustained blast, “so that our guys would not have to flush out these hills or caves by foot”, she said.
Used repeatedly in Afghanistan, the weapon developed by the Navy’s “Bomb Lady” and her team is credited by others with shortening America’s longest war.
Before designing the BLU-118/B, Duong and her team were working on a new generation of “high-performance, insensitive explosives, that could take the ride and abuse” of travelling through layers of rock or walls of masonry before detonating.
These were part of the family of explosives packed into the bunker-buster, officially the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator, that the US used in Iran.
A dozen of the bombs were dropped on the Iranian nuclear site at Fordow, which is deep underneath a mountain. Two more were dropped on the nuclear facility at Natanz.
Duong did not wade into the debate over the extent of the damage the bombs caused to Iran’s nuclear programme.
President Donald Trump insisted the attack “obliterated” Iranian nuclear facilities, and he has threatened to sue news organisations that raised doubts, including their citation of a preliminary Defence Intelligence Agency report that assessed that Iran’s programme may have been set back by only months.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said the programme was set back by years because the US and Israel destroyed a key facility at Isfahan that converts nuclear fuel into weapons — but that was attacked with Israeli and US missiles, not bunker busters.
In the end, Duong said, the extent of the bomb’s success cannot be measured from Washington, Israel, or even Tehran.
“Think about it,” she said. “You went in and bombed an underground nuclear facility. It’s not safe to send anyone into that facility. I suspect it will be a long time before any real, in-person assessment can be done.”
Reading the Iran bomb’s formula online brought up “fond memories of the faces and the friendships”, she said.
“Explosives developers are a small community. We know one another, and we collaborate a lot. It was not just my work individually. Everything is teamwork.”
She does not recall who nicknamed her “the Bomb Lady”, but as word of her achievements spread, that is how she became known among Vietnamese emigres in the US and abroad.
Duong’s journey from a wartime childhood in Vietnam to a US Navy munitions lab began at the gate of her parents’ home in Saigon in the late 1960s, when she was about 7. Her father was a top agricultural official in the anti-Communist South Vietnamese government. Her brother was a helicopter pilot for the South Vietnamese and was leaving the family home for a mission.
Weeping, Duong wished “for a magic wand, to give him the best, most advanced weapon so he could win and come back intact”, she recalled.
That scene played out over and over during the long war, and eventually the girl at the gate made a promise to herself. “If there was any way, that’s what I would do for the American soldiers who continued to protect me and my family,” Duong said. “I would give them the best means to come back to their own sisters.”
In April 1975, with Saigon on the verge of falling to the North Vietnamese, Duong’s brother and another helicopter pilot delivered her and her parents, siblings, and extended family to a South Vietnamese Navy ship bound for the Philippines.
They were lucky. After the US defeat, millions of Vietnamese “boat people” tried to flee. The United Nations estimates that as many as 250,000 of them died.
The family ended up in the US capital, where they had relatives and a sponsor, the First Baptist Church of Washington, DC.
“We came here as empty-handed, dirt-poor refugees, and we met so many generous and kind Americans,” Duong said. The outpouring of help renewed her determination to help Americans who had welcomed her family.
The church settled them in an apartment in nearby suburban Maryland. Duong was barely 16 and spoke little English. But she was a talented student, and in 1982, she graduated with honours from the University of Maryland with a chemical engineering degree.
She received a master’s degree in public administration from American University and then pursued a civilian science job for the Navy, gravitating towards “things that go swish and boom”, she told columnist George Will in 2007.
By 2001, Duong was director of Insensitive Munitions Advanced Development at the Naval Surface Warfare Centre’s Indian Head Division in Charles County, Maryland.
She had begun working on the explosives that were ultimately used in Afghanistan when al-Qaeda attacked the Pentagon and Twin Towers.
Air Force Colonel Thomas Ward, a top official at the Defence Threat Reduction Agency, told her, she recalled, that “we’re going to go into Afghanistan quickly. What can we do ASAP?”
Duong and a 100-member scientific and technical team condensed five years of work into 67 days, formulating a lethal, plastic-bonded explosive that was poured like cake batter into Air Force casings. The team did calculations and tested steps simultaneously until they had 420 gallons (1590 litres) of the explosive.
At the end of long days in the lab, “no one wanted to leave,” Duong said. “I had to kick people out. You can’t be tired when you work with explosives.”
In 2002, the secretary of the Navy, Gordon England, awarded the entire civilian workforce of more than 2000 people at the Naval Surface Warfare Centre at Indian Head a Meritorious Unit Commendation, an honour typically reserved for active-duty military units. Every day after that, Duong’s team wore the commendation lapel pin to work.
Although the terrible toll of the Vietnam War was with her then, as it is now, Duong said she found no contradiction between the violence she once experienced and her work developing explosives of fearsome power.
High-tech bombs can help minimise ground fighting and shorten wars, she said.
As a military scientist and an American, “our first duty was to make sure that our soldiers come back alive. I wanted to do anything I could to help them win.”
Duong retired in 2020. She and her husband, a fellow Vietnamese refugee she met in university, is also retired as a software engineer for a defence contractor.
They live near Hagerstown, Maryland, northwest of Washington, and have a daughter and three sons ranging in age from 29 to 35.
When the family saw ads for lottery tickets and stories of Powerball winners on TV, “I would tell my kids, ‘We already won, because we’re here,’” Duong said. “Sometimes it takes an outsider to say, ‘Hey, there’s always room for improvement, but this country is a paradise.’”
In 2007, Duong won a Samuel Heyman Service to America Medal from the Partnership for Public Service, a non-profit group that promotes an effective federal workforce and sponsors the annual awards. In a tribute video, she spoke about her anguish at the gate of her home, her narrow escape and the life she and her family built in the US.
“I never forgot the 58,000 Americans, plus the other 260,000 South Vietnamese soldiers who died in that war,” she said.
“I feel that I owe my second chance in America to all of those people.”
Duong received a standing ovation, and many in the audience wept.
In 2008, she became head of the Borders and Maritime Security Division under the Secretary for Science and Technology in the Department of Homeland Security. There, she vetted technology and equipment used to better secure the borders and ports. “I went from offence to defence,” she said.
In about 2013, Duong was the keynote speaker at a homeland security conference in a border town in Arizona. She was introduced with a short summary of her biography, headlined by her work after 9/11. When the conference was over, a man approached and told her he had served in Afghanistan.
This was rare, she said. In all her years of supplying the military, she had rarely met soldiers.
“He said: ‘Thank you, Anh. You saved my life and spared my comrades,” she recalled. “And I said, ‘No, I’m the one who has to thank you, for risking your life.’”
They parted before Duong could get the man’s name.
“I didn’t tell anybody then, because you don’t brag about these things,” she said. “But that was the best reward anyone could hope for. Better than a bonus, better than a medal, better than a promotion, a war fighter telling me that.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Elizabeth Williamson
Photographs by: Tyler Hicks, Erin Schaff, Maxar Technologies and Anh Duong
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