If Army veteran Paulnhu Nguyen was nervous, you couldn’t tell.
He dabbed green paint on his nose and playfully smudged it on others. He draped his arm around his mother and introduced her as his great-great-great-grandmother. And he told people he was his identical twin brother when they came looking for him.
“Humor is one of those tools to bring morale up,” he said.
But on Sunday, Aug. 6, Nguyen fessed up to being “slightly anxious” as 17 volunteers — including three Medal of Honor recipients — worked to paint the Anaheim home he shares with his mother.
The volunteers, from nonprofit organizations Heroes Linked and Habitat for Humanity Orange County, worked together to transform the one-story home from a shy salmon color to an outgoing juniper-ash green. Nguyen, 41, grew up in the home and remembers being in junior high the last time it was renovated.
“They’re here picking up paint brushes and providing sweat equity,” said Heroes Linked volunteer Chairman Bob Jerome, who traveled from Florida to pitch in on the home, which is owned by Nguyen’s mother. Heroes Linked was founded in 2014 to help veterans and their families. Together with Habitat for Humanity, it selected Nguyen for Habitat’s Home Repair program, which is partially funded through Anaheim’s Community Development Block Grant, for low-income seniors and veterans.
Selecting Nguyen from a large pool of deserving people, was “a no-brainer,” Jerome said. “He defended our country, and his house was falling into disrepair. He doesn’t take what we are doing for granted.”
Monique Davis, president and CEO of Habitat for Humanity Orange County, has been at the job for just over a year. She’s hoping to expand the Repair Program from 40 to 60 homes annually.
“Home ownership is self-sustaining and provides generational wealth,” Davis said. “The challenge is there is so much need. It can be overwhelming.”
Nguyen served two combat tours — Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003 and the troop surge in Kuwait in 2007 and 2008.
The latter deployment eventually led to a Purple Heart for “wounds received as a result of hostile actions.” It’s the nation’s oldest military award, dating to the American Revolution. In August 2010, after serving more than nine years and reaching the rank of specialist, his military career was over. “Any chances of continuing to serve my country in the U.S. Army were no longer an option.” His physical and mental injuries caught up to him and he was medically retired.
No one knows better than Nguyen how plans don’t always go as expected.
On July 22, 2007, Nguyen’s up-armored Humvee and two other gun trucks were protecting a 30-vehicle convoy. They were hauling supplies from Baghdad to Kuwait under cover of darkness to avoid detection.
Two other soldiers were in his truck and they were last in line. For safety, Nguyen was supposed to follow the exact tracks of the vehicle in front of him to avoid hitting an improvised explosive device. Maybe it was fatigue, Nguyen wondered out loud as he recalled the event. Maybe it was complacency. But he veered the Humvee “a little off course.”
The concussion boom reverberated through his body. His head hit the top of the truck. “I saw a flash going out and upward from the passenger hood and then experienced a delay in senses.”
His mind was slow to register what his eyes were seeing. Everything became a slow-motion blur. Before that evening, Nguyen said he didn’t know the meaning of seeing stars.
All three survived the IED explosion. Nguyen attributes this to the bomb being “planted incorrectly, blasting upward instead of blasting toward us.”
As trained, the soldiers in the convoy continued their journey until they reached safety. Once back in Kuwait, Nguyen was given the Military Acute Concussion Evaluation and determined he could return to duty after taking three days off. On Nguyen’s first day back, he was in the front half of a 40-truck convoy. The lead vehicle hit an explosively formed projectile. “In the distance, I saw a puff of smoke and a black mushroom cloud. Imagine the feeling you would get. This is not a video game,” he said. “This is someone who just got (messed) up.”
If coming home from his first tour was “mentally challenging,” now he knew life would be even more difficult.
“My heart was crying,” Nguyen said, “because I knew this (expletive) would catch up to me.”
Diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, post-concussion syndrome and a herniated disk with sciatica running down his left leg, he spent two-and-a-half years in Warrior Transition Units before the Medical Evaluation Board retired him.
He came back to a life he could no longer understand and people he could no longer relate to. They seemed petty in their concerns and he now believed, “good doesn’t always triumph over evil.”
After almost 19 years of counseling and learning to readjust to a non-life-or-death existence, Nguyen declared himself 60 percent better than he was after combat. “It’s like breaking a bone,” he explained. “You can strengthen it but it will never be like it was before it snapped.”
Sharing stories at the house-painting event with Medal of Honor recipients Col. Jack H. Jacobs, Spc. James C. McCloughan, and Lt. Col. William D. Swenson, “really touched my heart,” Nguyen said. “Chatting can be very intimate and painful at times.”
When President Barack Obama issued Swenson the Medal of Honor on Oct.16, 2013, he described a remarkable and unexpected act captured on grainy and shaky video from the combat helmet cameras of a MedEvac crew: “(Swenson) is without his helmet, standing in the open, exposing himself to enemy fire, standing watch over a severely wounded soldier. He helps carry that wounded soldier to the helicopter, and places him inside. … Amidst the whipping wind and deafening roar of the blades … he leans in and kisses the wounded soldier on the head – a simple act of compassion and loyalty to a brother in arms. … Will reminds us what our country can be at its best. A nation of citizens who look out for one another.”
On Sunday, Swenson, still in active duty, stood on the second step of a ladder leaning against Nguyen’s home. His outstretched arm painted around the eaves.
“As we cross paths we find similarities and common stories,” he said. “It’s all about us staying part of a team.”
He feigned annoyance when he was asked to come down and join the group of volunteers for a photo.
“I just don’t want to get paint on me,” he joked. “I hate to be dirty.”
Then a departing visitor thanked Nguyen for his service.
Nguyen paused for two seconds. “You are well worth it,” he said.
