The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (17 page)

In the United States the conflict in Laos was called the “Quiet War”—as opposed to the noisy one in Vietnam, whose escalation had turned the Laotian civil war into an international free-for-all, with the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China throwing their weight behind the Pathet Lao while the United States continued to back the Royal Lao. But for the Hmong, the war was anything but quiet. More than two million tons of bombs were dropped on Laos, mostly by American planes attacking communist troops in Hmong areas. There was an average of one bombing sortie every eight minutes for nine years. Between 1968 and 1972, the tonnage of bombs dropped on the Plain of Jars alone exceeded the tonnage dropped by American planes in both Europe and the Pacific during World War II. In 1971, an American reporter named T. D. Allman flew over the Plain of Jars and reported that he had counted several hundred bomb craters on a single hundred-foot hill; that most of the plain’s vegetation had been stripped by American defoliants; and that napalm fires burned day and night. The Plain of Jars is still pocked with craters and littered with unexploded American-made cluster bombs, ready to detonate at the accidental prodding of a hoe or the curious poke of a child.

During the latter years of the war, as Hmong casualties mounted, younger and younger soldiers were recruited to fight the constant stream of well-trained North Vietnamese, who were rotated annually. In
Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret Wars for Laos, 1942–1992
, Jane Hamilton-Merritt quoted a former soldier named Vang Xeu who volunteered in 1968, when he was thirteen:

In 1968, Edgar “Pop” Buell, a retired Indiana farmer who directed the U.S. Agency for International Development relief program in northern Laos, told Robert Shaplen of the
New Yorker
, “A few days ago, I was with [Vang Pao’s] officers when they rounded up three hundred fresh [Hmong] recruits. Thirty per cent of the kids were fourteen years old or less, and about a dozen were only ten years old. Another thirty per cent were fifteen or sixteen. The rest were thirty-five or over. Where were the ones in between? I’ll tell you—they’re all dead.”

In 1960, between 300,000 and 400,000 Hmong lived in Laos. There is wide disagreement over what fraction died during the war and its aftermath, with estimates ranging from a tenth (in a 1975
Washington Post
report) to half (in a 1970 report to the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Refugees and Escapees). Some were soldiers who died in battle; most were civilians killed by cannon and mortar fire, bombs, land mines, grenades, postwar massacres, hunger, and disease. Whether one cause of death was chemical warfare in the form of toxic “yellow rain” has been the subject of abundant controversy—a debate that has diverted attention from the holocaust that the Hmong incon-testably suffered from conventional weapons.
^*
Although they suffered far worse losses per capita than the South Vietnamese, whose agonies were featured daily in the American press, the Hmong were almost completely overlooked, partly because all reporters were barred from Long Tieng. (On the one occasion when an American, a British, and a French journalist did manage to sneak into Long Tieng, Vang Pao was so worried about having his secret base exposed that he decided to blow up their jeep, and was dissuaded only with great difficulty by his CIA advisers.) When the Hmong
were
mentioned, the crucial element of American involvement was usually missing from the account, either because the reporter couldn’t confirm it or because the information was embargoed.

In northern Laos, ninety percent of the villages were affected by the war—that is to say, the inhabitants suffered casualties or were displaced, or both. Entire villages fled en masse after their houses were burned and their headmen beaten or killed during nighttime raids by the Pathet Lao or North Vietnamese. Some villages decamped to avoid incidental bombing by American or Royal Lao aircraft. (In 1971, a Hmong leader in Long Pot, a village thirty miles northwest of Long Tieng, was asked which he feared most, attacks by the enemy Pathet Lao or bombs dropped by his own allies. “The bombs!” he replied. “The bombs!”) Some were evacuated by Air America, on the theory that in areas where the Pathet Lao were inevitably advancing, the communists’ military gains would be diminished if they captured only land and not people. Some villages simply collapsed because all the able-bodied men were dead or fighting, and the remaining women, children, and elderly men were unable to work enough fields to feed themselves. By 1970, forced to adapt their migratory habits to wartime, more than a third of the Hmong in Laos had become refugees within their own country. Yang Dao, a Hmong scholar and government adviser, wrote at the time:

In some spheres, the Hmong reacted to these upheavals, as they had to calamities throughout their history, by grasping their traditional culture even more tightly. Yang Dao reported that displaced families who had lost their livestock continued to go through the motions of ritual sacrifice, using stones in place of animals. The dwindling practice of polygyny, which at the beginning of the war was observed mainly by leaders like Vang Pao as a status symbol, became common again as a response to the mismatched wartime survival rates of men and women. The institution of levirate marriage, in which a widow was expected to wed her dead husband’s younger brother, was also revived. This practice kept the children and their inheritance in their father’s clan but often saddled the new husband, who might well be fifteen years old or have ten children already, with crushing responsibilities.

For the most part, though, the experience of the “internal refugees” was a chaotic and involuntary crash landing into twentieth-century culture. A popularly held notion is that the Hmong refugees who came to the United States after the war were, as one newspaper reporter put it, “transplanted from Stone Age to Space Age.” Not only does that view grossly underestimate the complexity of traditional Hmong culture, but it also ignores the immense social, cultural, and economic changes that many Hmong had already gone through during the course of the war itself. The way of life that had survived centuries of persecution in China, as well as the nineteeth-century hegira to Laos, was irreversibly altered, at least in its outward forms, within a few years. I once asked Jonas Vangay to summarize the effects of the war on the Hmong. “My parents used to travel barefoot and on horse,” he said. “We lived in a rural and mountainous area where we never saw a car or a bus. Suddenly, in 1960, everything went upside down. The French wars hadn’t really influenced us so much. Less than twenty percent of the Hmong were involved in the battle of Dien Bien Phu. But with the U.S. war, it was ninety percent. You couldn’t stay in your village. You moved around and around and around. Four years later, when I went to Vientiane, what struck me is that you cannot see a lot of Hmong with their black clothing anymore. All are wearing khaki and green soldier clothing. And where we had lived, before the war it was all covered with forests. After the bombardments
…il n’y a plus de forêts, il n’y en a plus, il n’y en a plus, il n’y a rien du tout
.” Jonas tended to lapse into French—his fourth language, after Hmong, Lao, and Thai—when he could not adequately express his emotions in English, his fifth language. (“There are no more forests, there are no more, there are no more, there is nothing at all.”)

Although some Hmong had been exposed to lowland life during and after the Second World War, many saw cars, trucks, tractors, bicycles, radios, flashlights, clocks, canned food, and cigarettes for the first time when they were forced to leave their villages for temporary relocation sites. Swidden farming was moribund. A market economy began to rise in its place, encouraged by the soldiers’ cash wages and the availability of manufactured goods. Lao
kip
replaced silver as a means of exchange. Long Tieng became a desultory megalopolis, an unpaved, sewerless city of more than 30,000 where Hmong ran noodle stands, cobbled shoes, tailored clothes, repaired radios, ran military-jeep taxi services, and interpreted for American pilots and relief workers. Except for ceremonial occasions, many Hmong women discarded their embroidered black garments and adopted lowland-Lao
lungi
skirts and short blouses of factory-made material. Both men and women wore polyvinyl thongs. Some children attended school; others trailed after the Americans, begging chewing gum and coins, or squatted in the dirt, playing with bullet casings instead of toys made of corncobs and chicken feathers. Even the Hmong language adapted. Many of the traditional onomatopoeic expressions expanded to make room for new associations.
Plij ploj
, the sound of bamboo breaking, gained the additional meaning of “bullet impact.”
Vig vwg
, the roar of wind or fire, now meant “small airplane motor” as well.
Plhij plhawj
, the sound of birds making brief flights from roost to roost, also meant “helicopter propellers.” A new expression,
ntsij ntsiaj
, meaning “pushing or pulling the bolt on an M-16,” came into use.

The most drastic change bred by the war was the loss of the single asset the Hmong prized most highly: their self-sufficiency. With their fields left rotting, their livestock abandoned, and their mountains emptied of game, more than 100,000 Hmong were kept alive by U.S.-sponsored food drops—weather and enemy fire permitting, fifty tons of rice a day, delivered by parachute from Air America cargo planes. As one pilot put it, “There is a whole generation of Meos who are going to be damn surprised when someone tells them that rice doesn’t grow in the sky.” One consequence of feeding the Hmong was that those who still lived in tillable regions could spend more time growing poppies, to the benefit of the opium trade. Not all Hmong villages and relocation sites were supplied with rice, and in those that were, the daily allotment per person was about a pound, half what the Hmong were used to. The memory of the rice drops still rankles. When I asked Jonas Vangay about them, he said, “Are you accusing the Hmong to be idle or lazy? Do you think they were just waiting for rice from the sky? The Hmong have
always
grown their own rice. Lao used to get rice from Hmong in exchange for salt and material. The Hmong never bought rice from Lao! But in the Plain area, there is not enough rice in the war.
Ils n’ont plus de choix
.” (“They no longer have any choice.”)

In January of 1973, the United States signed the Paris Agreement, pledging to withdraw all its forces from Vietnam. Two weeks later, on his way to Hanoi, Henry Kissinger stopped in Vientiane to talk with Prince Souvanna Phouma, the Prime Minister of Laos, who feared the United States would similarly withdraw support from Laos, leaving it to the mercy of North Vietnam. “The very survival of Laos rests on your shoulders,” Souvanna Phouma told Kissinger. “But your shoulders are very broad. We are counting on you to make our neighbors understand that all we want is peace. We are a very small country; we do not represent a danger to anybody. We count on you to make them know that the Lao people are pacific by tradition and by religion. We want only to be sovereign and independent. We ask that they let us live in peace on this little piece of ground that is left to us of our ancient kingdom…. Therefore we must count on our great friends the Americans to help us survive.”

In his 1979 memoirs, Kissinger, whose shoulders turned out to be far less broad than the prince had hoped, wrote, “I cannot, even today, recall Souvanna Phouma’s wistful plea without a pang of shame.” In February 1973, the Vientiane Agreement was signed, calling for a cease-fire in Laos, a coalition government, and the end of American air support. USAID discontinued its relief program, and in June of 1974, the last Air America plane left Laos. On May 3, 1975, two weeks after the Khmer Rouge took control of Phnom Penh, three days after the North Vietnamese occupied Saigon, and seven months before the communist Lao People’s Democratic Republic supplanted the six-hundred-year-old Lao monarchy, the Pathet Lao crossed the ceasefire line into territory held by Vang Pao. On May 9, the
Khao Xane Pathet Lao
, the newspaper of the Lao People’s Party, announced: “The Meo [Hmong] must be exterminated down to the root of the tribe.” On May 10, surrounded by Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese troops, with few surviving Hmong fighter pilots and no American combat support, Vang Pao reluctantly bowed to the counsel of his CIA case officers and conceded that he could no longer hold Long Tieng. During the next four days, between 1,000 and 3,000 Hmong—mostly high-ranking army officers and their families, including the family of my interpreter, May Ying Xiong—were airlifted by American planes to Thailand. (During the month before the fall of Saigon on April 30, American airlifts and sealifts had evacuated more than 45,000 South Vietnamese.) Hmong fought to board the aircraft. Several times the planes were so overloaded they could not take off, and dozens of people standing near the door had to be pushed out onto the airstrip. On May 14, Vang Pao, in tears, told the assembled crowd, “Farewell, my brothers, I can do nothing more for you, I would only be a torment for you,” and boarded an evacuation helicopter. After the last American transport plane disappeared, more than 10,000 Hmong were left on the airfield, fully expecting more aircraft to return. When it became apparent that there would be no more planes, a collective wail rose from the crowd and echoed against the mountains. The shelling of Long Tieng began that afternoon. A long line of Hmong, carrying their children and old people, started to move across the plateau, heading toward Thailand.