IF WE APPROVE, YOU'RE A FREEDOM FIGHTER...:

Gen.Vang Pao’s Last War (TIM WEINER, 5/11/08, NY Times Magazine)

The wars of the 20th century destroyed many millions of people who once lived in the hillsides and valleys of remote rural worlds. Few were hit as hard as the Hmong, an ancient tribe whose members hewed out rough lives upcountry in Laos, west of Vietnam. Half a century ago, Laos became a cockpit of the cold war. The Hmong, led by a charismatic soldier named Vang Pao, sided with the United States in the fight against Communism in Southeast Asia. They lost everything — their land, their way of life, their country.

Now the war on terror has engulfed Vang Pao in his land of exile, California. It has given him cause to question his faith in America. Last year, the United States indicted the 78-year-old general as a terrorist, accusing him of plotting to overthrow the Communist government of Laos. [...]

It has also dismayed a number of American intelligence officers who worked with the Hmong against the army of North Vietnam in the 1960s and 70s. “We taught him how to do these things — to fight political warfare, to try to defeat the enemy,” I was told by Larry Devlin, a former C.I.A. station chief who worked with the general in Laos. “We helped Vang Pao learn to do some of the things that he and his troops are now charged with.”

The United States forged a bond with Vang Pao and his people decades ago. The pact was created after North Vietnam began carving the Ho Chi Minh Trail through the jungles of Laos in 1959 to send its soldiers and spies southward. The Central Intelligence Agency set to work installing a pro-American government in Laos and building guerrilla forces to attack the trail; the North Vietnamese, in turn, infiltrated Laos and backed the local Communists, the Pathet Lao. In 1960, the C.I.A.’s Bill Lair recruited Vang Pao, an officer in the Royal Lao Army, to lead the agency’s paramilitary fight upcountry. Vang Pao had said, “ ‘We can’t live with the Communists,’ ” Lair recounted seven years ago in an interview for the Vietnam Archive Oral History Project at Texas Tech University. “ ‘You give us the weapons, and we’ll fight the Communists.’ ” In the final days of the Eisenhower administration, the C.I.A. began shipping weapons and military materiel to the Hmong, a mountain tribe whose members were an isolated minority in Laos. (The country’s dominant Lao are largely lowland dwellers.) Within a few months, Vang Pao had organized some 9,000 tribesmen to join the battle. Leonard Unger, the American ambassador to Laos under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, has a vivid memory of Vang Pao saying at the time: “It is I, Vang Pao, and my people who certainly have to keep the Vietnamese from moving into and taking over our country.” His force grew threefold over the next eight years, to some 39,000 Hmong guerrillas.

Recently I met Vang Pao in his lawyer’s office in San Francisco. The ex-general, who is out on bail, has an upright bearing and an impassive gaze and talks in formal and rehearsed sentences; he seems weighed down by decades of political warfare and by the burden of speaking for an entire people. “There were three missions that were very important that were given to us and to me,” he recalled. “One was stopping the flow of the North Vietnamese troops through the Ho Chi Minh Trail to go to the south through Laos. Second was to rescue any American pilots during the Vietnam War. Third, to protect the Americans that navigated the B-52s and the jets to bomb North Vietnam.” Many thousands of Hmong died on these various missions, which were an official U.S. government secret throughout the 1960s and remain one of the least-known chapters in the annals of the American experience in Vietnam.

When Hmong soldiers died, their sons picked up their guns, and when the elder sons died, their younger brothers took over. In 1969, Richard Helms, then the director of Central Intelligence, sent a downbeat report to the White House about Vang Pao and his soldiers. They had “borne a major share of the active fighting” against the Communists in Laos, Helms reminded President Nixon. “These irregular forces are tired from eight years of constant warfare,” Helms wrote. Vang Pao “has been forced to use 13- and 14-year-old children to replace his casualties.” And the secret war in Laos went on for six more years, until the final collapse of American forces in Southeast Asia. “The U.S. put the Hmong into this meat grinder, mostly to save U.S. soldiers from fighting and dying there,” says Lionel Rosenblatt, president emeritus of Refugees International, who has followed the plight of their exile for three decades. “The U.S. had no compunction about putting the Hmong into this role, which saved thousands of American lives.”

By all accounts, Vang Pao did not lose confidence during those difficult days. “Honor with one another, sympathy for one another, faith for one another, that’s how we survived,” he told me. His American counterparts felt the same. “This guy was like a brother,” said Devlin, the C.I.A. station chief, who worked with Vang Pao from 1967 to 1970. “He was an extremely good leader. He was worshiped by his troops. We all admired him. Respected him. Liked him.” The C.I.A. and Vang Pao had an understanding about what would happen if the war went badly. “I had been told when I went out there to tell the Hmong we’ll back them to the end, and if we have to pull out, we’ll pull them out too,” Devlin told me. But that was not how things worked out. The end came 33 years ago this week, in May 1975. It was a disaster. Saigon had fallen; the final rout of American military and intelligence officers from the war zones of Southeast Asia was nearly complete. The C.I.A.’s last outpost in Laos was its mountain air base at Long Tieng, the hub of the paramilitary operation. Tens of thousands of Hmong gathered at the primitive airstrip, looking for planes. Very few came, for there was no coherent evacuation plan after 15 years of secret missions. As Dan Arnold, the last C.I.A. station chief in Laos, later recounted, authorization for an airlift had to come from Washington. In his words, the request met “delays at the highest political levels.”

The evacuation was abandoned after a chaotic race against time. “Of course, most of the Hmong wanted to fly along with me to Thailand, but they couldn’t because we only had enough aircraft to lift the officers and family members,” Vang Pao said. At least 50,000 Hmong, including many fighters and their families, were left behind in and around Long Tieng even as Vang Pao and his C.I.A. case officer flew to safety. Thousands were killed by the victorious Communists, according to survivors. Tens of thousands fled into the jungle and wound up as refugees in Thailand; many became boat people, cold-war flotsam, forsaken. Vaughn Vang, now a 50-year-old school counselor in Green Bay, Wis., and chairman of the Lao Human Rights Council, an organization seeking to bring attention to the plight of the jungle Hmong, became a teenage refugee when Laos fell to the Communists. “I ran through the jungle for two years,” he said. “We were 260 when we left, and 39 of us made it out to Thailand.”

The luckiest of the refugees made their way to the United States. Their traditions were hunting and gathering; they had been slash-and-burn farmers who cultivated opium as a cash crop, animists who believed in the spirit world. They were not well suited for life in Sacramento. Today more than 200,000 Hmong live in the United States, mostly in California, Wisconsin and Minnesota. More than half are under 18. While many of the second and third generation are adapting to life in America, overall a quarter or more of the Hmong live in poverty and speak little English, if any.

...if we don't, you're a terrorist. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 10, 2008 7:27 PM