Tung M. Nguyen killed in possible 'friendly fire' incident

U.S. Army Sgt. 1st Class Tung M. Nguyen was killed Nov. 14 while fighting in Baghdad. American bullets may have taken his life.

American bullets may have taken the life of South Vietnamese refugee and Green Beret Tung Nguyen — Tracy’s sixth casualty in the Iraq war.

Nguyen, 38, was a Tracy High School graduate who died fighting for the U.S. in Baghdad on Nov. 14, the U.S. Department of Defense announced Friday.

Nguyen arrived by boat with aunts and uncles before moving to Tracy as a 15-year-old and settling in as a foster child with the Cracraft family in a mobile home off MacArthur Drive.

He left Tracy for Schofield Barracks in Hawaii to serve as an infantryman after he finished high school in 1986.

Foster relatives remembered Nguyen on Friday as a well-spoken, quiet kid who was reluctant to talk about his Vietnamese past.

“He was like a Rambo — he could do anything, and he thought he was invincible,” said Tracy’s Jim Cracraft, Nguyen’s foster brother and classmate. “He was a good guy. He liked to challenge things.”

Nguyen fought for many years to bring his father, Nguyen Van Tuan, and mother, Phan Cong Duc, to the U.S., Cracraft said.

“He did everything and anything he could — that was his goal, to bring them over, and he succeeded,” he said. Nguyen’s parents moved to Alameda, 50 miles west of Tracy, in the 1990s.

“He supported his family,” his mother said in an interview Friday with ABC News. “He loved his father. He loved me and his father.”

Nguyen earned a green beret and became a Special Forces soldier in 1993, when he joined the Airborne 1st Special Forces Group in Ft. Lewis, Wash.

The Bronze Star Medal, Purple Heart, Iraq Campaign Medal and Combat Infantryman Badge were added to his long list of awards and decorations after he died.

A military statement said Nguyen appeared to have died after being hit by friendly fire while fighting in Baghdad. The U.S. Army announced that it is investigating the death.

“He loved the Army — he died doing what he loved,” his foster mother, Karen Cracraft, said from the home where she cared for Nguyen. “(He loved) the action and fighting for the country, even though it wasn’t his country.

“When he was here the last time (in 2004), he said that he was going to stay in the states and train for a while,” she said, adding that Nguyen, a naturalized U.S. citizen, visited her every couple of years.

Nguyen trained soldiers at the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School from 2003 through February 2006, when he was sent to Iraq with Company B, 2nd Battalion, 3rd Special Forces Group (Airborne), according to an Army press release.

Many who knew Nguyen said that he loved guns, and the Army statement said he had won two small arms shooting competitions earlier this year.

Julie Condon, who had lived next door to him while he was in high school, remembered Nguyen as a fit and healthy youngster who “could always put a smile on your face.”

Condon said she was rescued by Nguyen from the Stanislaus River when the pair was in high school when her legs became numb after misjudging a cliff dive in Caswell Memorial State Park, near Ripon.

“It was automatic — he didn’t even think about it. He was in the water swimming toward her before we realized what had happened,” said Condon’s mother, Nancy Perata. “He was one of the most responsible teenagers I ever knew.”

Nguyen’s junior-year U.S. history teacher said he was surprised to hear that his student had become a career soldier.

“My impression was that he was a bright kid that would go onto college and major in something,” John Treantos said Friday. “He was the kind of kid that if he wanted to become a teacher, a lawyer or whatever, then he would have been good at it.

“He asked questions, and that’s what makes a student. He’s not what I refer to as ‘goats’ — these people who drift into class and out of class.”

Treantos, still a teacher at Tracy High School, is also president of the Tracy War Memorial Association.

“This is the one thing I’ve been dreading since January, when we lost the fifth guy,” he said. “Now we’ve got six names we’re going to have to put up (on the war memorial).”

Brent Ives, Tracy councilman and mayor-elect, was distressed to hear Tracy had lost its sixth serviceman in Iraq.

“I don’t know why we’re getting an inordinate amount of the loss here, but it certainly is disturbing,” he said.

Military Moms of Tracy estimates there are 45 people from Tracy serving in Iraq.

The 80,000-person city has lost one serviceman fighting in Operation Iraqi Freedom for every 13,000 people living here. With 2,683 combat deaths, the national rate is one lost serviceman for every 105,000 people.

Nguyen is survived by his wife, Marcia, of Raeford, N.C. He grew up with two foster-brothers and one foster-sister in Tracy, along with his foster mother and late step-father.

From the Tracy Press