Pham Tuan occupies two special places in Vietnamese history books—although both distinctions have attracted some controversy as well as fame. He gets credit for being the first Vietnamese fighter pilot to shoot down a Boeing B-52 Stratofortress and with being the first Southeast Asian to reach outer space.
Born in Kien Xuong District of Thai Binh Province on February 14, 1947, Pham Tuan joined the North Vietnamese military in September 1965 as a radar mechanics student and later trained at the Krasnodar flight school in the Soviet Union. Back in Vietnam,
