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Ken Blackwell🚨 Acting United States Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao: "Don't come to this country and ask for the American dream if you're not willing to obey the American laws and embrace the American culture!"🚨 Hung Cao fled communist Vietnam as a four-year-old child, gave twenty-five years to the United States Navy, and today leads that Navy as its Acting Secretary. His life is the answer to a fight raging right now over what it means to be an American, a fight most of the loudest voices have never once had to earn. He earned it in some of the most dangerous places on this earth, and his story ought to quiet every person who treats this country like something they are owed.He knows exactly what the alternative to America looks like, because he was born into it. Hung Cao knows what it means to live under communism. He has said that the scariest sound in the world is a knock on the door in the middle of the night, because in a communist country that knock means someone you love is about to be dragged away. In his own family, fathers were taken in the dark and never seen again. That is not a chapter he read in a book. That is the story he was born into.In 1975, just days before Saigon fell to the communists, his family ran for their lives. Hung was four years old. They reached America with nothing in their pockets and everything to prove.They did not arrive asking this nation to carry them. They arrived asking for a chance to carry themselves.His father was an educated man who had earned a doctorate, and he spent his life helping farmers feed people. For a time the family even lived in West Africa while his father served through USAID. Hung came back to the United States at the age of twelve, learned a new language and a new home, and went on to graduate in the very first class of Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Virginia, one of the finest schools in the entire country.In 1989 he joined the Navy at the very bottom as a seaman recruit, and he earned every single promotion that followed. In 1996 he graduated from the United States Naval Academy with a degree in ocean engineering, and he later earned a master’s degree in physics. He became a deep sea diver and an explosive ordnance disposal officer, which is one of the most dangerous jobs in the whole military.He was the one who walked toward the bomb when everyone else was running the other way. He defused explosives for our SEAL teams and our special forces in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and in Somalia. He was also part of the Navy team that recovered John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife, and his sister-in-law from the ocean after their plane went down in 1999. When the nation needed steady hands in terrible moments, Hung Cao was there.He gave twenty-five years of his life to the United States Navy. In his own words, he wrote a blank check to this country up to and including his life. He retired as a captain in 2021, decorated and respected, having stood watch in some of the most dangerous corners of this world.Hung Cao says it plainly, as an immigrant himself. “Don’t come to this country and ask for the American Dream if you’re not willing to obey the American laws and embrace the American culture.” He earned the right to say those words, because he lived every one of them. His own family waited seven years for their naturalization papers and did it the lawful way, with patience and respect for the country that took them in.Gratitude is the beating heart of this man’s story.Hung Cao looked at America and saw a home worth defending, and then he gave his life’s work to defending it. He understood that liberty is a gift from God, and that a gift this precious carries a sacred duty to guard it and to hand it down whole to our children and grandchildren.When he finally took off the uniform, Hung Cao kept right on serving. He ran for Congress in Virginia in 2022 and for the United States Senate in 2024. President Trump nominated him to be Under Secretary of the Navy, and the Senate confirmed him in October of 2025.This year he rose once more, this time to lead the Navy as its Acting Secretary.The frightened little boy who arrived here with empty pockets now helps command the most powerful Navy the world has ever known.There is one more piece of this story that shows the hand of Providence.When his family first fled Vietnam all those years ago, they passed through Guam on their way to freedom. Decades later, as a leader in our Navy, Hung Cao was given responsibility for that very same island.The boy who landed on Guam as a refugee came back to help defend it. You could not write a more American story if you tried.And he did not build this life alone. He built it with his wife April and their five children, one of them adopted, raised in a home grounded in faith and hard work.That is the kind of family that makes a country strong.I believe God has a way of writing stories that no human author could ever imagine. A child who once feared the knock of the secret police now stands watch over the freedom of a whole nation.That is the promise of America, and Hung Cao is living proof that the promise is still alive and still worth fighting for.So let us thank God for men like Hung Cao.Let us honor every immigrant who comes here the right way, who loves this flag, who learns our laws, and who gives back far more than he ever takes.And let us never forget that freedom is never free, and that it is worth every sacrifice a man like Hung Cao has offered to defend it.Hung Cao sums up his whole life in a single breath. “We came to this country with nothing. We asked nothing from this country. Together, we will make America great again.”God bless Hung Cao, God bless our sailors, and God bless the United States of America.