Troops become U.S. citizens on warship named for Marine who loved becoming an American

t was a journey that lasted five years, but it finally brought Min Thadan on Thursday afternoon to the flight deck of the Navy’s new destroyer Rafael Peralta in Coronado.

It began when Thadan was a 16-year-old trying to escape from Burma, an impoverished Southeast Asian nation torn by ethnic strife. Then he became a refugee, resettling in the United States on Sept. 15, 2012. He and his father lived in a string of towns in Minnesota, Indiana, the San Francisco Bay Area and Illinois. And then he became a Marine.

“I was in high school in Illinois and my dad asked me, ‘What do you want to do when you grow up?’ I said, ‘I want to serve my country.’ He said, ‘OK, then you want to join the Marines.’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll join the Marines,’” recalled Thadan, 21, an infantryman assigned to the 1st Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion at Camp Pendleton.

On Thursday, he joined nine other members of the armed forces aboard the Peralta — a warship named in honor of a boy from Mexico who moved to San Diego and successfully pursued his dreams of becoming a U.S. citizen and serving his adopted country through the Marine Corps. The service members, who hailed from nine nations, stood aboard the ship and recited the oath of citizenship. Since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, more than 110,000 foreign-born men and women in uniform have become American citizens. One of them was Marine Sgt. Rafael Peralta, whose namesake guided-missile destroyer is moored at North Island Naval Air Station.

Read more at The San Diego Union Tribune