>>13480340
fought communism, in an isis kinda way
>C_A trainedSecret Army
honk honk
Memory holed
> https://web.archive.org/web/20050113002227/https://time.com/time/asia/magazine/article/0,13673,501030505-447253,00.html
Welcome to the Jungle
Recruited by the CIA to be asecret armyduring the Vietnam War, the Hmong rebels of Laos fought communism. Now they desperately battle for their own survival
BY ANDREW PERRIN/XAYSOMBOUNE SPECIAL ZONE
Monday, Apr. 28, 2003
There were hundreds of them, perhaps a thousand. They wept and knelt before me on the ground, crying, "Please help us, the communists are coming." I had hiked four days to reach this forsaken place deep in the jungles of Xaysomboune, northern Laos. The Hmong rebels prostrate before me were convinced they would all soon die. They knew they were a forgotten tribe, crushed by a military campaign that is denied by the communist leaders of their small, sheltered nation.
In all my years as a journalist I had never seen anything like this: a ragtag army with wailing families in tow, beseeching me to take news of their plight to the outside world. I walked among starving children, their tiny frames scarred by mortar shrapnel. Young men, toting rifles and with dull-eyed infants strapped to their backs, ripped open their shirts to show me their wounds. An old man grabbed my hand and guided it over the contours of shrapnel buried in his gut. A teenage girl, no more than 15, whimpered at my feet, pawed at my legs and cried, "They've killed my husband. They've killed my mother, my father, my brother …" But before she could finish, others were pushing her aside to sob out their own litanies of loss. In this heart of darkness, nobody has a monopoly on grief.
Now, for the first time in nearly three decades, this dwindling group of outcasts are completely surrounded by the Lao government troops that hunt them. They are trapped in a narrow swath of jungle, with all avenues of escape blocked by either soldiers or antipersonnel mines. "This time," says Moua Toua Ther, 46, the one-armed leader of the camp and commander of its pitifully equipped fighting force, "we will not be able to run or hide. When the helicopters come we will be butchered like wild animals."
What is the crime this ragged bunch has committed? It is simply that they are Hmong, mostly the children, grandchildren or even great-grandchildren of fighters who in the 1960s sided with the U.S. to fight communism in Laos during the Vietnam War. Fabled for their resourcefulness and valor, manyHmong became members of a secret CIA-backed militiathat helped rescue downed U.S. pilots and disrupted North Vietnamese supplies and troop movements along the Ho Chi Minh Trail through central Laos. The communist Pathet Lao movement—and its patrons in Hanoi—has never forgotten the Hmong's complicity with the Americans. Shortly after the Pathet Lao took power in 1975—two years after the U.S. had fled the country and left the Hmong soldiers to their fate—a communist newspaper declared the Party would hunt down the "American collaborators" and their families "to the last root." But until TIME recently reached one of the last Hmong outposts, no one truly believed that, after 28 years, the Lao government still meant it. This, then, is the final act of a war that, according to history books, ended in 1973.
The Hmong, who migrated to Laos from southwestern China in the 19th century, have always been a proud,warlike people. In the 1920s a Hmong rebellion against their French rulers erupted in much of Laos and northern Vietnam, ultimately failing but leaving thousands dead. When the French left Laos in 1953, the Hmong found themselves fighting again—this time against the threat of communism. Among the resisters was ayoung Hmong general named Vang Pao, who in 1961 was commissioned by the CIA to set up a secret army to fight the advancing communists. Over the next decade nearly half of the 40,000 Hmong fighters in Vang Pao's army are thought to have perished during the fighting. The reward for their sacrifice? The Paris cease-fire agreement of 1973, which signaled an end of U.S. aid. Vang fought on for two more years, but when it became clear that the Pathet Lao would win he fled to Thailand and then to the U.S. Today, some 200,000 other Hmong live in exile communities in the U.S. But not all Hmong made it to America: 15,000 of Vang's brethren were cut off from escape and were forced to melt away into the mountainous jungles of Laos.