The trail of tears from a forgotten war in Laos

In two and a half weeks, Missoula area growers will spread out the first produce of spring on the opening Saturday morning market next to the railroad tracks downtown. Countless Missoula residents will flock to the stands to buy from farmers proffering the earliest local harvests.

There are the perennial regulars among the farmers: the elf-like man with wispy grey chops and beaming red chilies, the Russian woman pressing her cucumbers on passersby with vigor. But there are also many Asian faces behind the stands, with names like “Moua” and “Vang.” They are a little harder to pin down than the other eccentrics. Yet the stories behind the smiles of these Hmong refugees from Laos are jaw dropping ones of a secret war that America has neglected to talk about for 30 years. And in the occasional sadness behind their eyes is the longing for a home to which many will never return.

In the early 1960s, concerned with communism spreading from North Vietnam throughout Southeast Asia, the United States was looking for a way to stem an anti-royalist revolutionary movement in neighboring Laos. Overtly sending in U.S. troops was out of the question – the 1962 Geneva Accords afforded Laos neutral status and assured it freedom from foreign intervention. Eventually, the CIA came up with the answer to fight the Lao communist movement by proxy, with the help of the marginalized Hmong tribal group in the mountainous jungles of northern Laos.

It was a clever maneuver. In 1960, the Hmong numbered about 350,000 in Laos. Unlike the lowland Laos, the Hmong had been warriors for 4,000 years. The Hmong practiced slash and burn agriculture and had little to gain from the agrarian land reforms that the Lao communists proposed. They also feared the North Vietnamese. Add to that planeloads of CIA-supplied M-16s, and the fact that the Hmong knew their jungles like they knew their children, and the ambushes went like clockwork.

In what was to be its largest operation of the time, the CIA gathered 30,000 fighters to form the Hmong Armée Clandestine. It was a cheap way to deter the Lao communists. The Hmong fighters were paid $3 a month. Much of their salary and supplies came from the profits from the opium they harvested and the CIA smuggled out in its operational airline called Air America. The Hmong fighters died at rates 10 times that of U.S. fighters in Vietnam.

All of this was done in secret. The U.S. Air Force pilots recruited from Vietnam to fly arms, opium and fighters around Laos were only told that they were going to “the other theater.” Short briefs ran occasionally in the papers about possible U.S. involvement in Laos, but were categorically denied by the White House. The U.S. government later referred to their involvement in Laos as “the quiet war.”

It wasn’t so quiet at the time, on the ground. In nine years, 2 million tons of bombs were dropped on Laos. In four years alone – from 1968 to 1972, more bombs were dropped on Laos than fell on Europe and the Pacific combined in World War II. Tragically, many of these bombs remained intact and to this day are scattered around the mountains of Laos, waiting to explode.

It was 1974 before the CIA realized that the revolutionary tide in Laos was too far along to be turned back. Across the border, in Vietnam, the policy of Vietnamization was well under way. As the last Air America planes took off from a hidden airstrip in northern Laos, around 1,500 Hmong fighters were airlifted to the safety of refugee camps in Thailand. Many more were dead. As the last planes took to the skies, 10,000 Hmong fighters stood on the airstrip in a homeland in which they were now considered traitors. They were hoping the planes would come back to rescue them as well. But the planes were gone for good.

After the Pathet Lao communists took over the country in 1975, they declared their intent to exterminate the Hmong tribe “to its roots.” In the following years, many Hmong escaped through the jungles and across the Mekong River to the refugee camps of Thailand. The United States quietly granted many of them visas as thanks for their support, and about 200,000 came to places like Fresno, Calif., Saint Paul, Minn., and Missoula, Mont., to set up lives in exile.

The CIA-recruited leader of the Hmong Army, General Vang Pao, bought a 400-acre cattle ranch near Missoula. Now in California, Vang Pao has continued to finance the rag-tag group of Hmong resistance fighters that stayed behind in Laos. Even today the Lao army hunts them in the jungle. They mightn’t bother. Disease, hunger and leftover landmines have already decimated the majority.

Meanwhile, far from recognizing its roles and responsibilities in the “quiet war” that tore a small Southeast Asian nation apart, the U.S. embassy in Laos focuses its energy on combing the jungle for the remains of U.S. Air Force pilots who went missing in action. A byproduct of this proxy war is the Hmong population in Missoula, now a large presence at the Farmers’ Market. Our histories are more intertwined than we might have guessed.