WASHINGTON — On the nights when no mortar shells fell, Anh Duong listened to the Saigon crickets. More often, though, the girl lay by her open window, her hair damp against her cheeks, and wondered, as the lights from flares flickered on the leaves of a plum tree, if the next Viet Cong rocket would smash into her house.
“Why would you want to randomly blow up civilians?” Duong remembers thinking.
Now, 47 and living in Maryland, Duong is still grappling with the question, trying to apply lessons from Vietnam to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Duong is known as “the bomb lady” around the Pentagon and as the engineer behind America’s first thermobaric, bunker-busting explosive.
A suburban mother of four, Duong has become, according to Thomas Betro, director of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, “one of the most important weapons developers of the modern era.”
For Duong, producing tools for U.S. troops is a way of life. After years of pioneering explosives for the Navy, she creates systems to help ID terrorists.
“The biggest difficulty in the global war on terror — just like in Vietnam — is to know who the bad guys are,” Duong said. “How do we make sure we don’t kill innocents?”
Duong’s most recent innovation, the Joint Expeditionary Forensics Facilities project, or “lab in a box,” analyzes biometrics. It will be in Iraq in 2008, the Navy said, to help distinguish insurgents from civilians.
The next stage is to miniaturize, creating “a backpack lab,” so that soldiers who encounter a suspect “could find out within minutes” if he’s on a terrorist watch list, Duong said.
“A war fighter needs to know one of three things: Do I let him go? Keep him? Or shoot him on the spot?”
