Celebration of life for Dinh Van Tran
Donation protected
Hi, my name is Frank and I am a close friend of Richard Tran, and I am fundraising for direct and encompassing funeral expenses for his father, Dinh Van Tran.
Dinh Van Tran, beloved husband of the late Chau Tran, and father of Richard, Daniel, Diane, and the late David Tran, has unfortunately succumbed to his injuries sustained from a fall several days ago and has passed away today on Christmas day.
He was a patriot and a war hero, who trained with the US armed forces at Fort Benning to fight the VC; and was a POW who subsequently escaped to lead an immensely populated refugee camp in Indonesia before immigrating to the United States to raise his family.
Although Dinh lost the love of his life over the past year, he never wanted to burden anyone with how heavy his heart was with her passing. He seldomly asked anything from the people around him, and almost always took on issues under his own resolution. Given this, I hope it is comforting to let you all know that he lived the last few months here filled with joy and happiness when Richard moved his father down to live with him.
I ask everyone to help the Tran family during these difficult times by embracing them with financial support so that they can focus on spending time together over the course of holidays. We collectively can make a significant impact in their lives during these difficult times. Thank you very much for all your support
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Name: Trần Văn Định
Birthplace: Hưng Yên/Thái Bình, VN
Age:82*
Education: Boston University
Occupation:
America: 18 years in Technology/Semiconductors Industry as a Principle technical systems engineer
Vietnam: 20+ Years - South Vietnamese Army Intelligence and US Marine Corps Captain in a unit of 60+ soldiers
DOD: 12/27/2021 12:12PM
Location: UCI Medical Center
Early life:
Up until six years old he lived a pleasant life in Hanoi with his sister, mother, and father who was a wealthy contractor. Then the Communists came to his home, killed his Father and took their property. His mother died a year later due to grief. After the takeover, his surviving sisters and him had to move to their ancestral rice growing, peanut oil lantern, mud house village in the Thai Binh province where life would humble any homeless person in America.
At 15 years old he joined the Army of the Republic of Vietnam and received special US intelligence and language training which led him to become a Captain in the US Marine Unit. After the fall of Saigon he was imprisoned along with US Soldiers in “re-education camps” ,sarcastically called the Hanoi Hilton, which consisted mostly of torture, disease, etc. Definitely not one of Hilton’s recommended hotels.
After being released he escaped with my mother and her family, who lost everything to the communists in a very similar way, by small boats where most refugees would not even survive the journey to reach land. Luckily, they ended up at a refugee camp in the Indonesian islands where they made him the representative leader of over 100,000 refugees.
Recent: (Words from Richard)
A Son/Daughter’s worst nightmare. My dad just passed after fighting for a week from and traumatic brain injury he sustained when he had a mini stroke right next to me.
His wife, my mother, passed October 2020 from cancer. The depression that followed was very apparent but he would say and act likes he’s fine but he wasn’t falling anyone. He planned for us to take care of my mother and made us promise to do so when his time came but yet he outlived his wife and one of his sons. He stopped caring about things he used to like. He is normally a very reserved person but he got even more anti-social without my mother. I would basically come up to San Jose every week and come up with creative ways to trick him into experiencing random things that he would never have done. He also didn’t crave to eat anything. He only liked Vietnamese food and was surprisingly a great cook so it wasn’t like he didn’t eat. He just didn’t care to make anything unless it was for us. He was living alone in San Jose at 82 years old so I would have to check the cameras every day to make sure he was breathing when he was sleeping. So I moved him down here permanently for the past four months. Huge change.
Ever since he’s he’s been living with me it was undeniable how happy he was. This anti-social straight edge military guy was making plans for the future. Everything was going to be great. He has his own 2nd master bedroom at my house with thew worlds greatest bed, and son. My brother was building an ADU in the back of his house for my father 5 miles away from me, and he was joining a Vietnamese active senior living community that is almost finished (that building by Garden Grove and Brookhurst that took forever to build).
Everyday he would leave and and explore or hang out with his actual childhood friend who seemed like a social butterfly, so the opposite of him, and would come home and telling me new things he learned or experienced like “oh the senior center has a thing on this day I’m gonna go to it”
We were even just recently joking around about our age when I told him I can’t believe I’m 40 and I don’t feel any different really and he said “Yea! I’m 80 and nothing's really different. Time just went by so fast”
And texting, he swore he would never text because “you can just talk on the phone”. So not only did he start texting all of us ands everyone else every day, he discovered emojis and memes and gifs. Wow! I am still stuck in the generation of Iive TV but he has even surpassed me and turned into those people who don’t use TV and only watches Youtube. Ridiculous! I even had to tell him to stop texting at the dinner table because i would be having a full on conversation with him and then he would look up at me and go “huh? What!!?”
He suffered a subdermal hematoma and the ER showed no signs of urgency even though they agreed that every minute that goes by is crucial. When he showed an altered mental state and lost consciousness we argued that he needed to do that second CT scan to get him Into surgery immediately. The nurse taking care of him decided to go on break in the middle of this and never came back so another nurse was assigned and admitted they forgot to check his blood to give him platelets to slow the bleeding. Took 6 hours until he went to surgery but at that point the survival rate was slim. After surgery his intracranial pressure was in the 60’s. The next day it went to 40’s. Then for some reason it climbed to 80-90 overnight and stayed there for over 24 hours which compressed the brainstem that’s controls consciousness and breathing. He had reached the the point of no return at that point. A discharge summary from the hospital will requested and it was recommended by the doctors to file a formal complaint, which was also recommended by bros who work at that hospital and bros who are doctors around the country.
Thank you everyone for reading this. Please share my father's story so that he will never be forgotten. Please celebrate his life and do not mourn his passing. Please don’t shy away about talking about my father or mother or brother. Having them still in peoples minds is more than anything I can ask for. I am currently in the process of doing some extensive extensive research and attempting to acquire notes from the author who wrote about my father in the book Hearts of Sorrow, when he first arrived in America in 1980, where he was referred to by another name to protect his identity at that time. If anyone can help this happen please let me know.
Son of the the Great Trần Văn Định and ,
Richard
Name: Trần Văn Định
Birthplace: Hưng Yên/Thái Bình, VN
Age:82*
Education: Boston University
Occupation:
America: 18 years in Technology/Semiconductors Industry as a Principle technical systems engineer
Vietnam: 20+ Years - South Vietnamese Army Intelligence and US Marine Corps Captain in a unit of 60+ soldiers
DOD: 12/27/2021 12:12PM
Location: UCI Medical Center
Early life:
Up until six years old he lived a pleasant life in Hanoi with his sister, mother, and father who was a wealthy contractor. Then the Communists came to his home, killed his Father and took their property. His mother died a year later due to grief. After the takeover, his surviving sisters and him had to move to their ancestral rice growing, peanut oil lantern, mud house village in the Thai Binh province where life would humble any homeless person in America.
At 15 years old he joined the Army of the Republic of Vietnam and received special US intelligence and language training which led him to become a Captain in the US Marine Unit. After the fall of Saigon he was imprisoned along with US Soldiers in “re-education camps” ,sarcastically called the Hanoi Hilton, which consisted mostly of torture, disease, etc. Definitely not one of Hilton’s recommended hotels.
After being released he escaped with my mother and her family, who lost everything to the communists in a very similar way, by small boats where most refugees would not even survive the journey to reach land. Luckily, they ended up at a refugee camp in the Indonesian islands where they made him the representative leader of over 100,000 refugees.
Recent: (Words from Richard)
A Son/Daughter’s worst nightmare. My dad just passed after fighting for a week from and traumatic brain injury he sustained when he had a mini stroke right next to me.
His wife, my mother, passed October 2020 from cancer. The depression that followed was very apparent but he would say and act likes he’s fine but he wasn’t falling anyone. He planned for us to take care of my mother and made us promise to do so when his time came but yet he outlived his wife and one of his sons. He stopped caring about things he used to like. He is normally a very reserved person but he got even more anti-social without my mother. I would basically come up to San Jose every week and come up with creative ways to trick him into experiencing random things that he would never have done. He also didn’t crave to eat anything. He only liked Vietnamese food and was surprisingly a great cook so it wasn’t like he didn’t eat. He just didn’t care to make anything unless it was for us. He was living alone in San Jose at 82 years old so I would have to check the cameras every day to make sure he was breathing when he was sleeping. So I moved him down here permanently for the past four months. Huge change.
Ever since he’s he’s been living with me it was undeniable how happy he was. This anti-social straight edge military guy was making plans for the future. Everything was going to be great. He has his own 2nd master bedroom at my house with thew worlds greatest bed, and son. My brother was building an ADU in the back of his house for my father 5 miles away from me, and he was joining a Vietnamese active senior living community that is almost finished (that building by Garden Grove and Brookhurst that took forever to build).
Everyday he would leave and and explore or hang out with his actual childhood friend who seemed like a social butterfly, so the opposite of him, and would come home and telling me new things he learned or experienced like “oh the senior center has a thing on this day I’m gonna go to it”
We were even just recently joking around about our age when I told him I can’t believe I’m 40 and I don’t feel any different really and he said “Yea! I’m 80 and nothing's really different. Time just went by so fast”
And texting, he swore he would never text because “you can just talk on the phone”. So not only did he start texting all of us ands everyone else every day, he discovered emojis and memes and gifs. Wow! I am still stuck in the generation of Iive TV but he has even surpassed me and turned into those people who don’t use TV and only watches Youtube. Ridiculous! I even had to tell him to stop texting at the dinner table because i would be having a full on conversation with him and then he would look up at me and go “huh? What!!?”
He suffered a subdermal hematoma and the ER showed no signs of urgency even though they agreed that every minute that goes by is crucial. When he showed an altered mental state and lost consciousness we argued that he needed to do that second CT scan to get him Into surgery immediately. The nurse taking care of him decided to go on break in the middle of this and never came back so another nurse was assigned and admitted they forgot to check his blood to give him platelets to slow the bleeding. Took 6 hours until he went to surgery but at that point the survival rate was slim. After surgery his intracranial pressure was in the 60’s. The next day it went to 40’s. Then for some reason it climbed to 80-90 overnight and stayed there for over 24 hours which compressed the brainstem that’s controls consciousness and breathing. He had reached the the point of no return at that point. A discharge summary from the hospital will requested and it was recommended by the doctors to file a formal complaint, which was also recommended by bros who work at that hospital and bros who are doctors around the country.
Thank you everyone for reading this. Please share my father's story so that he will never be forgotten. Please celebrate his life and do not mourn his passing. Please don’t shy away about talking about my father or mother or brother. Having them still in peoples minds is more than anything I can ask for. I am currently in the process of doing some extensive extensive research and attempting to acquire notes from the author who wrote about my father in the book Hearts of Sorrow, when he first arrived in America in 1980, where he was referred to by another name to protect his identity at that time. If anyone can help this happen please let me know.
Son of the the Great Trần Văn Định and ,
Richard
Fundraising team (2)
Frank Ngo
Organizer
Garden Grove, CA
Richard Tran
Beneficiary
Richard Tran
Team member