Kim Mitchell: The Books That Remembered Her Name

In 2011, Kim Mitchell sat across from the nuns who ran the Vietnamese orphanage that took her in as an infant. They kept no records of how children arrived, but three books with names written inside had survived. She wrote down the name from her infant passport, and the nuns paged until they found it. She went on to seventeen years as a Navy surface warfare officer and the top job at Veterans Village of San Diego.

FEATURED STORYWOMEN WHO LEAD

Camille D. Ford

8 min read

Kim Mitchell. Photo courtesy of Kim Mitchell.

In 2011, Kim Mitchell walked into a room in Vietnam and sat across from the nuns who had once run the orphanage that took her in as an infant. Friends had arranged the meeting as a surprise. She had not expected the nuns to still be alive, let alone in the country. The idea of looking for them had never crossed her mind.

The nuns did not keep records of how children arrived. Their job had been keeping them alive, not tracking their origins. But they still had three books with names written inside, the only ones that survived. Mitchell knew her Vietnamese name from the passport she had carried as an infant, so she wrote it down for them. The nuns paged through the books until they found it.

“I love that,” she says now, and she still sounds a little amazed telling it. The name in the book was proof. At some point, she had been in their care.

She was born in Vietnam and lost her mother young enough that she carries no memory of her at all. A South Vietnamese Marine found her near a bridge outside Quang Tri and carried her to the orphanage. He gave her the name he had been saving for a daughter of his own, a last name and a common middle name that translates to something close to precious. She has never used that name since. At ten months old, a United States airman stationed at the air base in Da Nang adopted her and brought her home to northern Wisconsin, where he gave her the name she has carried ever since: Kimberly.

There was no Vietnamese culture in the house growing up. She did not taste Vietnamese food until after she graduated from the Naval Academy, when a Vietnam veteran took her to a restaurant. She never went looking for her birth family the way many adoptees do. She did not know what she would even be searching for. The subject just never came up.

The Constant Thread

Mitchell has told her story from stages for years, and it changes shape depending on the room. A crowd of Vietnam veterans gets a different emphasis than a room of judges, or business people, or high schoolers. “You gotta be able to tell things that make them understand,” she says. “Because they're not all relatable.” But the throughline never moves: born in Vietnam, her mother killed, the orphanage, adoption by a U.S. airman, growing up in Wisconsin, the Naval Academy.

She built the skill the same way anyone builds a skill, by doing it badly first and then doing it enough times to see what lands. She says she does far better in person than on Zoom, where she cannot read a room through a camera that is usually off anyway. In person, she is watching for something specific. “If I can see someone wipe their eyes within the first few minutes, I know I've got them,” she says. She tries to walk an audience through a full range of emotion, laughter to sadness to appreciation to understanding, and land them at a desire to do something about it.

“If I can see someone wipe their eyes within the first few minutes, I know I've got them.”

Part of how she opens a room is by naming something true and uncomfortable early. She tells audiences there is no such thing as a perfect family. Mental health struggles, addiction, incarceration, something touches nearly every household, she says, even the ones that look put together from the outside. “You don't know what happens behind closed doors,” she says.

A Year Away From Annapolis

Mitchell's father was in the military, and she wanted that kind of structure for herself. He assumed she would go into the Air Force, like him. A Navy admiral she met during her sophomore year of high school talked her into a different branch entirely. She liked the order of it, the routine, the discipline.

She left the Naval Academy in August of 1991 and did not return until the end of June the following year. In between, her father died. Most profiles of her mention the gap in a single sentence and move on. She recently wrote about that stretch of time for a book project with a doctoral instructor, one chapter among contributions from eleven female veterans on leadership turning points. Her chapter centers on a single conversation, on her first day back at the Academy, and the emotions she was still carrying from that summer. She had to decide whether to return at all. Northern Wisconsin, she says, had nothing left she wanted to stay for. She wanted a career in uniform and a chance to see the world beyond it.

Every Day Is the Job

Mitchell spent seventeen years in the Navy as a surface warfare officer, including a tour as operations officer. She describes life on deployment as a life with no room left over. “The minute you wake up, you're like, all right, what's going on today,” she says. Watches, drills, spot checks, inspections, duty days, whatever needs doing before the ship gets underway again.

Mitchell as a lieutenant commander in the Navy. Photo courtesy of Kim Mitchell.

One memory she rarely tells stayed lodged from a port visit in Central America. The ship had six hours to take on food, fuel, and water before getting underway again, and the pier was stacked with pallets that needed hands to move them. She could not find anybody. She got on the 1MC as the officer of the deck and gave the crew two minutes to form a working party on the pier, or she would go looking, “space by space, berthing by berthing.” People appeared. “I was in a whole other place that I probably never would have visited had it not been for my job,” she says, of the country she was standing in that day. “But to me, this is just work.”

She says she grew up an introvert, and the Navy turned her into what she calls an extroverted introvert. She is the one who organizes the carpool, who gets a group moving, who cannot sit in a room without starting a conversation. Asked about the loneliest moment of her career, she says she cannot remember one. She has never felt alone in a crowded room.

The Common Factor

From 2017 to 2020, Mitchell served as president and CEO of Veterans Village of San Diego, which runs residential treatment, bridge housing, and reintegration programs for veterans coming off the street. Men, women, officers, enlisted, every branch came through the doors during her three years there. Mental health and substance use, she says, were the common factor across all of them.

She often thinks back to something Judge Robert Russell, who started the country's first veterans treatment court, once told her: people, places, and things. Get mixed up with the wrong people, in the wrong places, doing the wrong things, and a life takes a different path than it might have otherwise. “They needed to want a clean and sober life, more than I wanted it for them,” she says of the veterans who came through the program. The doors were never locked. Anyone who wanted to leave could turn in their belongings and walk out.

“They needed to want a clean and sober life, more than I wanted it for them.”

She saw how homelessness compounds itself. A veteran sleeping on the beach with no curfew starts collecting fines and citations for things like public intoxication or sleeping where it is not allowed, and the fees pile up faster than the path back to housing. “How are you going to get an apartment if you get a job, when you've got all these fines and fees?” she says. “There's nobody that's going to allow you in.” That is where the courts and the community have to step in, she says, not just to hold someone accountable but to connect them to what they actually need.

Mitchell with a group of service members. Photo courtesy of Kim Mitchell.

Humble Heroes and a Job That Ended

Mitchell's most recent role was with the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, working with the living Medal of Honor recipients, sixty-five by her count and all of them men. The only woman ever awarded the medal was Dr. Mary Walker, during the Civil War. About eighty percent of the living recipients are from the Vietnam era or older, some in their eighties, still fielding invitations to speak nearly every week if they wanted to accept them all.

None of them set out to become a recipient, she says. The decisions that earned them the medal happened in a split second, for people they were serving beside, not for themselves. “None of them wear it for themselves,” she says. “They all wear it for those that didn't return.” Her job was helping protect that, making sure the attention that comes with the medal did not become a burden the recipients did not ask for.

This summer, her position with the Society came to an end, and she started the search for what comes next. She is looking broadly, nonprofit work, corporate roles, maybe government. “I just want to have impact,” she says.

The Doctorate She Didn't Need

Mitchell already had a master's degree when her roommates moved out and left her covering the mortgage alone. Someone mentioned that going back to school on the GI Bill would add roughly a thousand dollars a month in housing allowance. A doctorate seemed like the logical next step. She had no idea how much work it would be. “Once I got into it, there was no way I was stopping,” she says.

She still cannot stand APA citation format. But she says the degree, in organizational leadership, taught her to write and communicate in a way her master's never had. These days she comes home to a labradoodle and two Maltese, who get the run of her home office.

Who Kim Mitchell Is Right Now

Asked to set the resume aside and answer as herself, with no stage and no audience, Mitchell doesn't reach for anything bigger than the truth. “I'm quite honestly a person that isn't unlike any other person,” she says. She has her health, a roof, friends, neighbors, family who make her laugh. If she needed something, she says, people would be at her door. She would do the same for them. Mostly, she says, she just needs a job.

She is careful about the shape of the story the country likes best, the veteran narrative that resolves cleanly. Inspiring stories are true, she says, but they can also let people feel finished with a problem that is not finished. Communities cannot wait for veterans to come knock on the window. They have to ask, directly, more than once: how are you really doing? How is your family? Is there something we can do?

It is the same instinct that sent her friends looking for the nuns in Vietnam who still remembered a name written in a book. Someone has to go looking. Someone has to ask.

Mitchell, who spent seventeen years in the Navy as a surface warfare officer. Photo courtesy of Kim Mitchell.

Resources

Congressional Medal of Honor Society | https://www.cmohs.org/

Preserves the stories of Medal of Honor recipients and supports their outreach and education work nationwide.

Veterans Village of San Diego | https://vvsd.net/

Provides housing, treatment, and reintegration services for homeless and at-risk veterans in San Diego County.

Justice for Vets | https://justiceforvets.org/

Supports the national network of veterans treatment courts started by Judge Robert Russell in Buffalo in 2008.

VA Post-9/11 GI Bill | https://www.va.gov/education/about-gi-bill-benefits/post-9-11/

Explains education benefits and the monthly housing allowance available to eligible veterans and dependents.

VA Home Loan Guaranty | https://www.va.gov/housing-assistance/home-loans/loan-types/

Details VA-backed home loan programs that help veterans buy, build, or refinance a home with no down payment.

National Call Center for Homeless Veterans | 1-877-424-3838 | https://department.va.gov/homeless/nationalcallcenter/

Confidential, 24/7 counselors for veterans who are homeless or at risk of homelessness, and for those trying to help them.

Learn More | vem.media

Veteran Excellence Magazine profiles veterans in post-service leadership across every industry.