Pacific News Service -- She's afraid of blood. Otherwise she would have been a doctor. But she almost passed out in high school zoology when forced to dissect, she says, "some small animal." To preserve her perfect GPA, she dropped the course.
She was good in math and chemistry, and got a degree in chemical engineering from the University of Maryland and another degree in computer science just for kicks. After that she asked herself: "What should I be doing with my life?" The answer was unexpected: Nguyet-Anh Duong, now mother of four and a former Vietnamese boat person, became arguably the best bomb maker in the world.
When the Vietnam War ended and communist tanks rolled into Saigon, Duong, then 15, and her family escaped to sea on a crowded boat. Amid the churning waves, they had to jump from their small boat onto a ship that would take them to a refugee camp in the Philippines. Duong replays the moment in her mind -- a misstep meant being crushed between the two vessels. "It's a miracle that I'm here at all," she says.
She's here, and thriving. Duong now supervises one of the world's best teams of explosives scientists, more than half of whom are women, at the U.S. Naval Surface Warfare Center in Indian Head, Md. Thirteen of 15 explosive weapons commonly used by the U.S. military are developed at Indian Head.
The bomb that Duong is most proud of is BLU118/B, termed the "thermobaric" bomb by the Pentagon. It was specifically built to destroy Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda hideouts in the mountains of Tora Bora, Afghanistan. Her team had two months to make it. About a hundred scientists and engineers were involved. 
It's a terrifying device. The thermobaric bomb crushes caves with a super-hot blast that can destroy internal organs as far as a quarter-mile away. Its explosion is designed to tunnel through convoluted caves and pulverize anyone hiding as deep as 1,100 feet inside, and then incinerate whatever remains.
Human rights activists have called the bomb "thermo-barbaric." Greenpeace called for its ban, likening it to nuclear weapons without the radiation. One Russian scientist said the bombs cause small earthquakes, a claim U.S. geologists dismissed as ridiculous.
Duong is undeterred by the criticism. "We've gotten more sophisticated compared to the old days of dumb weapons," she says. "Now you can deliver it exactly where you want it to go. Our strong wish is to avoid as much collateral damage as possible."
But all bombs are designed to kill. How does Duoung reconcile her job with the consequences of her creation?
"I'm not on the operation side," she says quickly, not missing a beat. "We don't deal with human fatality. That's another field."
She pauses. "Look, the way I see it is simple. There are a lot of bad guys in the world. The best defense is offense. If you're not strong you're going to die."
Perhaps it's a lesson from her past. Duong grew up in South Vietnam, a country that, near the end of the Vietnam War, was abandoned by the United States, while Soviet fighter jets and Chinese-made weapons continued to flow unimpeded to the communist North. After holding on for two years, the government in Saigon surrendered on April 30, 1975, and over 2 million Vietnamese subsequently fled overseas.
"If you are weak you will lose, it's a simple fact," Duong says.
Duong says she wishes that the United States never had to go to war. "But if war is inevitable," she says, "if we're going to send troops, we want to make sure that a lot of them will come back. And we better equip them with the best weapons."
A strong patriotism informs Duong's work. Making explosives "is something to give back to the country that gave me so much. My family and I, we feel strongly that we were given a second chance coming to the United States."
A recent multilingual poll by the New California Media, a consortium of ethnic and in-language press, found that up to 85 percent of Vietnamese Americans backed the U.S. war in Iraq.
Asked what she would have done had she not gone into the sciences, Duong says, "I always wanted to be a writer. Every now and then, when the seasons change, I look out my office window and have to resist the impulse to grab pen and paper to write some poetry."
But for now, Duong is working on other weapons projects. For security reasons she can't discuss them in detail, but she does mention one, a sort of "dial-a-yield" bomb. "It's the next stage of guided weapons. Say there are terrorists taking over a hospital and they are on the fourth floor, and there are patients of the 15th floor. Ideally, the explosive device would be regulated to explode in a way that would destroy that floor, and not the entire building."
==Another news story==
Johns Hopkins University -- Nguyet Anh Duong came to the United States as a refugee of war after the fall of South Viet Nam in 1975. She graduated*censored*Laude in Chemical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Maryland and earned a M.S. in Public Administration with Honors from the American University.
Because of her background, Mrs. Duong feels deeply indebted to the American troops for her freedom and safety. She wanted to work for U.S defense in order to serve our troops and has spent her entire career working in Naval Science and Technology. Mrs. Duong is a nationally and internationally recognized expert in explosives. She directed all U.S. Navy explosives research and development and had successfully put 10 new explosives into 18 different U.S. weapons in the 1990’s. Her unrivaled record in this field was cited in her receipt of the Dr. Arthur Bisson Award for Naval Technology Achievement by the Chief of Naval Research in 2000.
Mrs. Duong is most well known for her thermobaric weapon created to defeat tunnels and bunkers used as terrorist hideouts, in order to spare U.S. troops from the dangerous task of clearing them out in foot. In only 67 days, her team of nearly one hundred scientists, engineers and technicians successfully went from concept through fielding of the U.S. first thermobaric bomb for Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. This earned Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC) at Indian Head, where she worked, a Meritorious Unit Commendation by the Secretary of the Navy and her team the Roger Smith Team Award, while Mrs. Duong received the Civilian Meritorious Medal. She then led her team through a follow-on effort, the Thermobaric Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration (ACTD), which won the 2005 ACTD Of–The-Year Award by the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense. Prior to her Pentagon assignment, Mrs. Duong was NSWC Indian Head’s Director of Science and Technology. She currently serves as Science Advisor to the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Information, Plans and Strategy, and the Director of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. With a special focus on the Global War on Terrorism, Mrs. Duong is transforming science and technology into anti-terrorism and force protection capabilities. One example is her team’s creation and deployment of Forensic Facilities for U.S. Army and Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Mrs. Duong’s leadership and compassion are well recognized. She received the 2004 U.S. Pan Asian American Chamber of Commerce Award of Excellence for Public Service, and has been featured on newspapers, magazines, national and international radio and television networks. She is keynote speaker at national conferences on topics such as Leadership, Diversity and Leading Change. Mrs. Duong appeared in the Sundance Festival award-winning documentary film “Why We Fight”, discussing her perspective on wars, and was featured in the book Changing Our World: True Stories of Women Engineers, by the American Society of Civil Engineers. She was saluted by the Naval Sea Systems Command during Women’s History Month in March 2006 and featured in a Discovery and Military Channel’s documentary series as one of the masterminds behind the world’s “Future Weapons”. In 2007, Mrs. Duong received the Service to America Medal for National Security by the Partnership for Public Service, presented to her by the Secretary of the Navy. Most recently, she was honored by the Department of Homeland Security with the Outstanding American Citizen By Choice Award in January 2008.
==Another news story==
Newsweek (Title: Anh Duong, Out Of Debt) -- History, said Emerson, is "the biography of a few stout and earnest persons." But history also is a story of unpredictable contingencies and improbable caroms, and of a 4-foot-7, 15-year-old girl's leap from a dangerously bobbing boat to a pitching South Vietnamese ship in the South China Sea. It was April 1975. The Communists were overrunning South Vietnam. At that time, Osama bin Laden was 18. The arc of his life, and Anh Duong's, would intersect.
Her leap propelled her to freedom. She grew up to be a 5-foot-1 chemist who, 26 years later, led the development of a bomb efficient at killing America's enemies in Afghanistan's caves. As a result, fewer American soldiers have had to enter those caves to engage Osama's fighters. This is Anh Duong's story.
The U.S. Navy took her and her family to Subic Bay in the Philippines. Next stop was a refugee camp in Pennsylvania. After five months this Buddhist family was adopted by the First Baptist Church in Washington, D.C. Soon Anh was in a suburban Maryland high school, headed for the University of Maryland and, eventually, degrees in chemical engineering, computer science and public administration.
"I wanted to work for the Defense Department," she says, "because I wanted to pay back the guys who protected us all those years." On September 11, 2001, she was working on Navy munitions and explosives—on, she says, "things that go swish and boom." Rockets go "swish." What they carry goes "boom." Soon after 9/11 it was apparent that U.S. forces would be fighting in Afghanistan, where the enemy often would be sheltered in the deep recesses of caves, reached after many twists and turns.
Sending U.S. forces into those caves would involve a terrible butcher's bill that might be avoided if a new munition could be developed—a new thermobaric (traveling blast and heat) bomb. At lunch at the Ritz-Carlton hotel near the Pentagon, as she delicately eats a hamburger with a knife and fork, she explains that normal bombs do their work by delivering fragments (to punch through things) and blast (to collapse things). But delivered by an F-15 to the mouth of a cave, a normal bomb's blast and fragmentation dissipate too quickly to reach deep into the cave and kill those hiding there. The task for her and her team was a challenge of detonation chemistry. They had to "deliver energy more slowly—we want the energy to last longer and travel."
The three-year plan for demonstrating a prototype thermo-baric bomb was scrapped, and Anh and her team set about confirming the axiom that America is like a boiler—there is no telling how much energy it will produce once you light a fire under it. "I did not need to motivate my team," she says. Osama had done that. In 67 days their three-year mission was accomplished. BLU-118/B, a thermobaric bomb whose heat and blast persist and penetrate deep into caves, went to war.
Her current mission derives from the peculiar nature of the war against terrorists, in which the first difficult question is, she says, "Who am I aiming the weapon at?" This has become, in Iraq, a matter of high-stakes forensics using a huge biometric database. Whose fingerprints are those on that fragment of an improvised explosive device? She is devising portable labs to answer such questions in Iraq.
Anh is hardly a thermobaric person, a weaponized woman. The Washington Post reports that while she was working on the new bomb, her children, then 5 to 11, were not allowed to play with toy guns or read Harry Potter books, which the parents deemed too violent. Their parents even excised the fight scenes from their Disney "Pocahontas" video.
The trajectory of Anh's life, which has taken her from one of America's wars to another, might eventually involve another generation of her family. The oldest of her four children, a 17-year-old daughter, is considering a career in—this apple did not fall far from the tree—homeland security or international affairs.
This autumn, Anh was among a select few federal workers honored with Service to America Medals by the Partnership for Public Service, which recognizes especially meritorious achievements. In front of a large audience at a black-tie dinner she strode to the microphone and, speaking without notes, began: "Thirty-two years ago I came to this land as a refugee of war with a pair of empty hands and a bag full of broken dreams." Describing America as "this paradise," she said:
"This land is a paradise not because of its beauty or richness but because of its people, the compassionate, generous Americans who took my family and me in, 32 years ago, and healed our souls, who restore my faith in humanity, and who inspire me to public service. There's a special group of people that I'm especially indebted to and I would like to dedicate this medal to them. They are the 58,000 Americans whose names are on the wall of the Vietnam War Memorial and the 260,000 South Vietnamese soldiers who died in that war in order for people like me to earn a second chance to freedom. May God bless all of those who are willing to die for freedom—especially those who are willing to die for the freedom of others. Thank you."
And thank you, Anh Duong. Consider your debt paid in full, with interest.
Biography: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nguyet_Anh_Duong
http://afghanistan.pigstye.net/article.php?story=BombLadyVietnameseAmericanMakesToolsforw