Laos
Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret Wars for Laos, 1942-1992
When I lived in Berlin, I attended the American Church of Berlin (ACB) – an English-language church with a very diverse and international
congregation. To be honest, after having grown up with the strong religious
tradition of the southern United States, I found this environment liberating.
It was open and accepting to all and “Americans” did not make up the majority
of the congregants. At the beginning of my studies, I had joined the
traditional church choir. However, one aspect of the church that I adored was
the gospel choir that performed at least once each month – its membership
coming from the large percentage of the congregation which came from Africa.
After all services there were food, coffee, and always a great deal of
conversation and fellowship. I guess I loved it so much because every Sunday at
the ACB felt like a celebration.
In the spring and summer months if the weather was nice, I
then dedicated the next part of my Sunday to going “tent shopping” at one of
the many street/park markets in Berlin. As one who doesn’t particularly enjoy
traditional shopping, I found myself loving the shopping experience that these
markets provided: digging through boxes of used clothes, haggling the prices
down (in German, no less! Hello 2 euro dresses!), milling around for
hours, listening to the musicians who stationed themselves in the middle of the
market, drinking freshly squeezed orange and pomegranate juice, and finding
little treasures from Germany’s history.
I bought a lot of these treasures for me and for friends –
old DDR (East German) medals celebrating good socialist behavior, crazy inflated
currency from the Weimar Republic (I have a fifty million German mark bill in
my wallet), shards of the Berlin Wall, etc. However, there was one thing that I
must admit that I wanted desperately but knew would be both impractical and
expensive to bring back with me to the US: a gas mask.
I remember digging through a large cardboard box when I
first encountered my first historic gas mask. The old rubber had lost a lot of
its elasticity. Its green color was faded. I was shocked by how heavy it sat in
my hand. I was repulsed by it, but I couldn’t really find the nerve to set it
down. Thoughts raced through my mind, particularly as I imagined the previous
owner of the mask and tried to comprehend his/her fear of the political
situation of the time. Looking at it, I thought of one of my favorite poems as
a teenager, “Dulce et Decorum est” by Wilfred Owen; it brought new meaning to
the words: “GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of
fumbling, Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time… Dim, through the misty panes
and thick green light as under a green sea, I saw him drowning.”
It is with this recent experience that I began to read
Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret Wars for Laos, 1942-1992, written by Jane Hamilton-Merritt and published in 1993 by the
Indiana University Press. I had purchased the book because it seemed like an
interesting (and yet accurate) account of Laos, with positive reviews from
former CIA director William Colby and CNN journalist Peter Arnett. It was only when
I found myself engulfed in the book, that I realized that it was going to cover
to so-called (and still disputed) “yellow rain:” the chemical weaponry provided
by the Soviet Union and used against the Hmong people by the communist Laotian
government in the early 1980s. Seeing the recent images coming out of Syria
while at the same time reading these accounts and seeing photographs of Hmong
children likewise victimized by chemical toxins, I found myself in a state of
disconcertment.

Laos was of particular geopolitical importance in the years
leading up to and during the Vietnam War, according to the so-called “domino theory.” First described by President Eisenhower in 1954, it said that the
countries of Asia could – and would – quickly fall to communism without U.S.
involvement:
You
have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will
happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So
you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most
profound influences.
Laos, bordering both communist China and Vietnam, seemed of
strategic importance to the United States. It found an ally in the Hmong
people, an ethnic group which lived in the mountainous region and had never
assimilated culturally or linguistically to the ethnic Lao, who governed most
of the country. Under the leadership of Hmong leader Vang Pao, for 15 years
alongside the Americans, the Hmong “had destroyed a billion dollars worth of
equipment heading for South Vietnam in order to deny this equipment to Hanoi’s
troops and the Viet Cong there. He [Vang Pao] and his troops had fought the
tough North Vietnamese Army and killed many of them to protect the Hmong homeland
and the Lao towns in the Mekong River Valley. His men had rescued many American
pilots. These efforts had taken a huge toll on the Hmong: some 17,000 soldiers
had been killed and uncounted numbers had been wounded. Perhaps as many as
50,000 civilian Hmong had been killed or wounded.” (page 334)
Subsequently, the departure of United States troops from
Southeast Asia in 1975 was devastating to these people. That same year, the
Pathet Lao (with assistance from the communist Vietnamese army) overthrew the
Laotian monarchy, which further affected the status of the Hmong people. This
book, which covers 50 years of conflict of the Hmong people does not end with
the Vietnam War because “while the Vietnam War was over for the
Americans, the fighting continued for the indigenous people as the new regimes
tried to eliminate opposition. The United States paid little attention to the
plight of its former allies. Most Americans wanted to forget the conflict which
had divided the nation.” (page 10)
The author, a journalist who traveled
extensively throughout Laos, shares her firsthand experience of the “yellow
rain,” or the chemical and biological weaponry supposedly used against the
Hmong people by the Laotian government in retaliation for the group’s pro-US
involvement in the Vietnam War. Most of the documents regarding this incident
are still classified by the U.S. government and it is still a source of
controversy today. However, reading the author’s firsthand experience seeing
the victims of this was a very moving experience. I had no idea of these
incidents (which took place in Laos from the late 1970s until 1981) and found
it very compelling. For anyone interested in the topic of chemical and
biological warfare, I would certainly suggest this book, as the author not only
shares her experiences, but also makes chilling predictions: “Clearly
CBW [chemical-biological warfare] weaponry, cheap and relatively easy to
produce, is the poor man’s equivalent of nuclear capability, and might become
the weapon of choice for poor countries.”(page 436)
Please feel free to comment on these
topics or note something interesting from the book. I look forward to hearing
your opinions!
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