“I traverse the dark, forbidding depths of the world’s oceans, lakes, rivers and seas where only a select few can follow.”

From the Navy Diver Ethos

HUNG CAO AND MARTY HIERHOLZER both live in Virginia, only a few hours from each other. They have different backgrounds: Hung is of Vietnamese descent; Marty is white. Hung’s father was deputy secretary of agriculture in Vietnam. Marty’s father was stationed at Pearl Harbor in World War II. Hung’s family fled Vietnam when he was four years old, hours before the fall of Saigon. Marty’s family started a farm when he was eleven. Hung went to one of the country’s best high schools, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. Marty went to a normal public high school. Hung is now running for the United States Senate. Marty is disabled and running a business.

These two men, who have never met, have something in common.

They were both deep sea divers in the Navy. It’s an elite role: Navy divers work hundreds of feet below the water’s surface to conduct search and rescue operations, recover wreckage, and perform underwater repairs. The deeper they dive, the less light they have. Sometimes Navy divers work in pitch-black water, unable to see their own gauges. Sometimes they recover bodies. It’s a job few human beings can do.

Hung and Marty were among the best. Hung advanced to become commander of the Navy Diving and Salvage Training Center, where he taught the next generation of divers. Marty retired after 22 years with the rank of Master Diver, the highest rank for divers.

Now long out of the Navy, Hung and Marty have another thing in common: They’re both fighting for the government to judge people as individuals, with one set of rules for everyone.

“My personal Honor and Integrity are above reproach and compel me to do what is right regardless of the circumstances.”

From the Navy Diver Ethos

WHEN YOU’RE A NAVY DEEP SEA DIVER, things that seem important on the surface—what school you went to, or how much money your family had—fall away. What matters is what you’re capable of.

Hung was one of a thousand graduates from the U.S. Naval Academy. Of those thousand, only six were selected for special operations, which includes diving. Of those six, only Hung eventually made it to the senior rank of Captain.

“Do you think I made it because of my background?” Hung asks. “No, I made it because I’m the best at what I did. I hate to say it like that, but it is true.”

When Hung commanded the Navy Diving and Salvage Training Center, he had to cut about 75 percent of the students who came in for training. “When we’re beating you up in the water—ripping off your mask, spinning you around and stuff like that—people freak out,” he says. If you can’t make it through training without panicking, you can’t be depended on in a mission.

Hung was the final decision-maker on whether to disenroll a struggling student from the program. He would receive a stripped-down version of a student’s file: no name, no photo, no sex. He could have been looking at the file of an admiral’s son and would have no idea. His decisions were blind, based only on each student’s individual performance.

“That’s how it should be,” Hung says.

He wants the same for Thomas Jefferson High School (TJ), where, in the 1980s, Hung and his classmates were “iron sharpening iron,” as he put it in The Washington Post. The admissions process at TJ should be blind, Hung says. It should favor the most qualified applicants, regardless of background.

Hung has been speaking out against TJ’s new admissions process, which is weighted against Asian American students—currently a majority of the school, and therefore seen as having too much privilege.

“Discriminating against one minority group to benefit another minority group has no place in our society,” Hung wrote in the Post.

“The laws governing my chosen profession are absolute and unforgiving . . .”

From the Navy Diver Ethos

MARTY TRAVELED THE WORLD during his two decades in the Navy. His work included saturation diving, where you dive down to a thousand feet below the surface.

“It’s very hard on your body,” Marty says. He has back, shoulder, and knee problems; he also has tinnitus in his ears, caused by explosions and loud equipment.

After leaving the Navy, Marty went to work for a defense contractor that sold diving supplies. He couldn’t stomach it. “The company was in business for one reason only,” he says, “and that was to get as much money out of the government as they could.” He started his own business instead, MJL Enterprises. He provides equipment and administrative services to VA hospitals. The company’s motto: To serve those who serve.

The Small Business Administration sets aside some government contracts for “socially and economically disadvantaged” small businesses. Marty figured he’d apply for the program. His injuries from his Navy service qualify him for disability pay; he thought that meant the government considered him disadvantaged. Getting into the SBA’s program would allow Marty to compete for contracts he’d otherwise be barred from winning.

But Marty was rejected. Even when he explained his physical disability, he was told he’d failed to demonstrate his disadvantage in society.

Is he advantaged or disadvantaged? How could you possibly tell from the color of his skin?

Meanwhile, the government automatically considers business owners with certain racial backgrounds to be disadvantaged.

In other words, there are different rules for different people. The government sees some people as victims and some as privileged—and it doesn’t make that distinction on an individual level. Instead, it lumps people into buckets based on group identity—and even though Marty-the-individual has a physical disability, the government believes white men as a group have an advantage.

“We’ve come a long way since the Civil Rights times of the sixties to prove equality amongst all us citizens,” Marty says. “And here we have something that clearly causes divisions. And it doesn’t fit the narrative of our nation and what we stand for.”

“The accomplishments of United States Navy Deep Sea Divers are the benchmarks by which the world measures man’s achievements in the sea.”

From the Navy Diver Ethos

WHAT PIECES of a person’s life give them power? Who gets to decide?

Hung’s family was well-off when he was a toddler; then, suddenly, they weren’t. When they left Vietnam, they had only two suitcases. “Someone stole one,” Hung remembers.

Does that make Hung privileged or not? Oppressor or oppressed?

Marty is a business owner doing a job he cares about. He also suffers physical pain from the years he spent in service to his country.

Source: Hung Cao’s campaign

Is he advantaged or disadvantaged? How could you possibly tell from the color of his skin?

Both Hung and Marty have lived extraordinary lives. Marty deployed to almost every country in the world. Hung was one of the divers who found and recovered the wreck of John F. Kennedy Jr.’s plane. Both men pushed themselves to excel. As divers, what mattered was their individual skill and grit. They have memories and achievements no one else on Earth has.

It’s hubris to presume you know how privileged a person is based on certain identity markers. It’s wrong to rig a set of rules because you believe certain groups have too much power.

Maria Popova, a Bulgarian-born essayist, writes, “[W]hen we point the privilege finger, where do we draw the line anyway? The concept itself is so abstract and nebulous.” She points to the life of Maria Mitchell, a pioneering astronomer. Mitchell was one of nine children in a poor Quaker family and was born before most women had access to formal education. But her father educated her and introduced her to astronomy when she was young. Popova asks: “What part is the poverty and what is the privilege, and does either warrant that we dismiss Mitchell’s monumental contributions to science and culture?”

Source: PLF

A person’s power comes from what he knows and what he does. Any system based on group identity—that’s weighted to favor one group or the other—ignores the dynamism and complexity of human beings.

When Hung was a child, his parents taught him that his skill and knowledge mattered more than his background or status. “Basically, they explained to us: ‘They can take away your money. They can take away your position in life. But they can never take away the knowledge in your head,’” he remembers.

A person’s power comes from what he knows and what he does. Any system based on group identity—that’s weighted to favor one group or the other—ignores the dynamism and complexity of human beings. It also sets up barriers that prevent people from excelling as high as their skill should take them—holding the world back.

“My specialized skills, undaunted spirit and unbreakable will enable me to succeed in an environment where there are no second chances. Excellence is my standard.”

From the Navy Diver Ethos

IN THE CASE of Thomas Jefferson High School, the government assumes Asian American students’ success is evidence of their privilege. In the case of the Small Business Administration, the government assumes all black and Hispanic applicants face greater disadvantages than Marty.

Hung points out that college prep services are encouraging Asian students to hide their ambitions. “There’s people that say, ‘Hey, don’t talk about wanting to be an engineer or scientist, because right away it makes you look like you’re Asian.’ It’s ridiculous.”

Hung loves math because the rules of math are the same for everybody. “Math doesn’t lie,” he says. “I mean, I’m 52 years old right now and I can challenge anybody to do differential equations or derivatives all day long.”

To judge people as advantaged or disadvantaged and tilt the playing field accordingly doesn’t make sense, given the reality of individual experience. Even within the government’s flawed racial classifications, there’s no uniformity. Asian Americans are a “vast diverse group … often lumped together under the ‘model minority myth,’” Axios notes. The truth is that 30 percent of Southeast Asian immigrants don’t have high school degrees. How can a school board decide that Asians, as a group, have too much power?

Maria Popova writes,

To deny a person’s merit or talent or voice on account of the circumstances with which he or she was blessed or cursed—without any say in the matter—is not only to victimize ourselves as individuals but to cheat ourselves, as a culture, of the essential gift of the human spirit.

Pacific Legal Foundation represented Thomas Jefferson High School parents and alumni in a lawsuit against the Fairfax County School Board. We also represented Marty Hierholzer in a lawsuit against the Small Business Administration.

Underwater or on land, a person’s capability is what matters—not the government’s assumptions about which groups do and do not have an advantage. ♦

“Hooyah, Navy Diver!”

From the Navy Diver Ethos