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Tu Lam, a Vietnam kid who escaped communism, became a Green Beret, augmented into Delta Force, and even appeared in Call of Duty.
Tu Lam was born in 1974 on the floor of a Saigon hospital basement, while his mother shielded him from the shells falling on the city above. Months later South Vietnam collapsed. An uncle who had fought alongside the Americans was executed, and the family climbed onto a fishing boat built for 20 people. Over 100 were aboard.
They were turned away at gunpoint, towed back out to sea, and left adrift with a dead motor. For nearly a month they floated across the South China Sea while food ran out and people died around them. The ship that finally pulled them out was Soviet, the same side that armed the army that took their country.
They landed in Fayetteville, North Carolina, home of Fort Bragg and the Green Berets, a town so full of Vietnam veterans locals called it Fayette-Nam. The Vietnamese kid got spit on in the street. His uncle and later his stepfather were both Green Berets, and mornings started with The Ballad of the Green Berets playing through the house.
Tu enlisted the day after graduating high school and earned his Green Beret in 1998. His first mission took him straight back to Vietnam and Laos, clearing American land mines left over from the war he was born into. The refugee returned in a US uniform to clean up the war that had made him a refugee.
Two decades, countless deployments, and almost constant war followed. Due to personnel needs in Tier 1 units during the Iraq War, Lam's Special Forces CIF (Commander's In-Extremis Force) company was augmented directly into Delta Force. He operated alongside Delta and support elements for multiple years before his retirement in 2016.
After his retirement in 2016, Tu's hardest fight started at home. A brain injury, painkillers, and isolation became his new war. The writings of the samurai Miyamoto Musashi pulled him back, and he gave himself a new name: Ronin.
In 2020, Call of Duty's makers put him into the game, the first operator modeled on a real living soldier. His name, his logo on the shoulder, every move motion captured from him. Over 100 million people have played him. Many have no idea he's real.
Ronin means a warrior without a master. For a man whose whole path was set by wars, regimes and ocean currents, no name could be more fitting, and no dream more American.
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