The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

  At its peak, the Armée Clandestine was the biggest CIA operation in the world, but until 1987, when a British investigative journalist named Christopher Robbins published a book called The Ravens: The Men Who Flew in America’s Secret War in Laos, the American public had heard little about it except rumors and denials. (A typical sample from the New York Times, July 4, 1962: “A Defense Department spokesman labelled as ‘untrue’ today charges that United States planes were dropping arms to Meo [Hmong] tribesmen in Laos.”) In 1965, Johnson commented sanctimoniously that “the problem of Laos is the refusal of the Communist forces to honor the Geneva Accords.” What he failed to mention was that his own country wasn’t honoring them either; it was just doing a better job of keeping its violations secret. According to Robbins, the war was so classified that American Air Force pilots in Vietnam who were recruited to fly planes for Air America, the CIA’s proprietary airline in Laos, didn’t even know until they arrived in Laos what country they’d volunteered to fight in. It was simply called “the Other Theater.”

  At first glance, it seems crazy that the CIA recruited the most remote ethnic minority in Laos, one notorious for its lack of national consciousness, instead of the dominant lowland Lao. The explanation lay both in the shortcomings of the Lao and in the special assets of the Hmong. A Royal Lao army existed, but its soldiers had never been noted for their bellicosity. A Life magazine article of the period observed, “[The Lao] are among the most charming people in Asia—and the most otherworldly and least martial as well. Consequently, Lao troops have sometimes fired over the heads of the enemy rather than hurt anybody, much to the despair of American advisers.” It was said that Lao soldiers were likely to lay down their weapons the first time they were attacked, or sell them on the black market. The Hmong, on the other hand—to whom the CIA, like the Lao, referred as “Meo”—had a four-thousand-year-long reputation as scrappy fighters. In Laos, they had already proven their mettle as guerrillas during the Second World War, when they fought on the side of the Lao and the French during the Japanese occupation, and after the war, when, similarly allied, they resisted the Vietminh. The CIA thus conveniently inherited a counterinsurgent network of Hmong guerrillas that the French had organized in northern Laos two decades earlier. Reading American press accounts of the war from the early sixties through the early seventies, I was bemused by their simultaneous condescension toward and admiration for the Hmong, who were portrayed as noble savages with thrillingly ferocious temperaments: “Like many primitive peoples, their word for ‘enemy’ and ‘stranger’ is the same, and they are as likely to skewer a visitor on the arrow of a crossbow as to welcome him.” “Meo tribesmen [are] tough little primitives skilled in the savage techniques of ambush and night assault.” “Sketchy reports trickle down from the hills and tell of heavy damage wreaked on Communist motorcades by Meo tribesmen on the pro-government warpath.” “The Meos have never hesitated to kill. Not only are they ready and able to use weapons but they also climb up and down the mountains with the agility of mountain goats, setting ambushes, destroying convoys, spreading terror in the enemy’s rear and then fading back into the mountains.”

  Many Hmong had reasons of their own for defending the Royal Lao government, and thus for collaborating with the United States. Perhaps a fifth of them—mostly members and supporters of the Lo clan, which had a long-standing feud with the anticommunist Ly clan—sided with the Pathet Lao. But the great majority, including those contacted by the CIA, supported the royalist camp, not because communism was ideologically less attractive than capitalism but because it was more apt to threaten their autonomy. It was unlikely that communist agrarian land reformers would look with favor on Hmong swidden agriculture. Moreover, because most Hmong had sided with the French before the collapse of colonial Indochina, they feared reprisals from the North Vietnamese, who had recently inflamed old antagonisms by confiscating Hmong opium crops to trade for weapons. There were also persuasive social reasons for fighting on the royalist side. Traditionally snubbed by the lowland Lao, the Hmong were likely to gain status if they became the heroes of a military victory. Finally, many Hmong had a huge personal stake in the war because they lived in the mountains surrounding its most crucial theater of operation: the Plain of Jars, a plateau in northeastern Laos through which communist troops from the north would have to march in any attempt to occupy the administrative capital of Vientiane, on the Thai border. That the Hmong knew this strategic region like the backs of their hands was not lost on the American military leaders who recruited them. Other hilltribes also supported the royalists, but the Hmong did most of the fighting.

  In 1971, while testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, an undersecretary of state named U. Alexis Johnson said, “I personally feel that although the way the operation [in Laos] has been run is unorthodox, unprecedented, in many ways I think it is something of which we can be proud as Americans. It has involved virtually no American casualties. What we are getting for our money is, to use the old phrase, very cost-effective.” What Johnson was saying, in effect, was that Hmong lives came cheap. The annual cost of financing the Armée Clandestine (via the CIA, the Department of Defense, and the U.S. Agency for International Development) was about $500 million. The annual cost of the Vietnam War was about $20 billion. One of the reasons for this disparity was that in 1971, army privates in Vietnam were paid between $197.50 and $339 a month; Hmong soldiers in Laos were paid an average of 2,000 kip ($3) a month. American soldiers in Vietnam ate army field rations (spaghetti, turkey loaf, ham and eggs, frankfurters and beans), with periodic supplements of steak, ice cream, and beer; Hmong soldiers in Laos ate rice. American pilots were sent home after a year or, if they flew over North Vietnam, after their hundredth mission; the most famous Hmong pilot, Lieutenant Ly Lue, flew more than five thousand missions before he was shot down. “There was no tour to complete,” wrote Christopher Robbins, “no rest and recreation in Hong Kong or Australia, no end in sight to the war. ‘Fly till you die,’ the Meo pilots said.” Hmong soldiers died at a rate about ten times as high as that of American soldiers in Vietnam.

  To call the Hmong American-paid mercenaries, as has often been done, is to forget that mercenaries, whether lured by money or adventure, choose their profession. Not all Hmong became soldiers of their own accord. Some were forced into combat because bombing in northern Laos had obliged them to abandon their fields, and there was no other employment. Some were coerced. General Vang Pao, the CIA-supported Hmong leader of the Armée Clandestine, was said to punish villages that had failed to fill their soldier quotas by cutting off their food supplies or even sending his own troops to attack them. Jonas Vangay, a Hmong leader in Merced, told me soon after I met him, “Vang Pao recruited by force. I was very lucky. My father had money and he pay four other men to serve instead of my three brothers and me. Father sent us to school secretly and those four men fight.” Jonas left it at that. It was only when I knew him better, several months later, that I ventured to ask what had happened to the soldiers who had served in their stead. “All four die,” he said, and, after a moment of uncomfortable silence, changed the subject.

  Vang Pao was both the cornerstone of the war and its most cryptic figure. A natural leader who had begun his military career at thirteen as an interpreter and jungle runner for the French, he rose precipitously through the ranks in the Royal Lao army until, in the early 1950s, he was recommended for officer training school. When the captain overseeing the entrance exam noticed that this promising candidate knew almost no written French, he neatly solved the problem by dictating the answers. (Years later, Vang Pao expressed no embarrassment at having cheated; he emphasized, however, that the captain had merely told him the answers, and not, as the story sometimes went, actually guided his hand. “Whorehouse of shit!” he told a Hmong interviewer. “I know how to write!”) It is worth noting that this incident, far from tarnishing Vang Pao’s reputation—as, for example, Ted Kennedy’s fudged Spanish exam at Harvard tarnished h
is—merely added to his mythology: this was the sort of man who could never be held back by such petty impediments as rules. By 1961, when the CIA tapped him to lead their guerrilla army, Vang Pao was already a colonel—the highest rank a Hmong had ever attained—who had sealed his influence over the Hmong by choosing wives from three major clans. By 1963, he was a major general. He considered himself a modern reformer who supported education, criticized slash-and-burn farming, and urged the Hmong to assimilate into Lao society; yet he once engaged a famous txiv neeb to sacrifice two steers in order to coax an influential Hmong neutralist over to the rightist side, and postponed at least one bombing sortie because the leg bones of the chickens he ate for dinner were inauspiciously positioned. He tortured North Vietnamese prisoners with electric shocks and strafed Hmong villages that collaborated with the Pathet Lao; yet he served as a godfather and surrogate provider to hundreds of war widows and orphans. Even his enemies conceded his courage. He often accompanied his soldiers to the front lines, surviving several crash landings as well as bullet wounds in his arm and side.

  The CIA considered Vang Pao—according to the narration of a propaganda film of the time—“a charismatic, passionate, and committed man, a patriot without a country.” He was twice flown to the United States, invited to the White House, and, as the New York Times noted, during a 1969 visit to Disneyland “was given a Zorro suit as a jest [that] he wore recently, according to sources close to him, when he toured the Plaine des Jarres, the vital area his forces recently captured.” Realizing that the best way to guarantee Hmong collaboration was to support their opium trade, the CIA used its Air America aircraft to pick up crude opium bricks in remote villages, and gave Vang Pao his own airline, Xieng Khouang Air Transport (nicknamed “Air Opium”), which flew opium from the secret Hmong military base at Long Tieng, in northern Laos, to markets in Vientiane. After it was refined, much of the Hmong opium crop ended up in South Vietnam, where it helped addict an estimated 30,000 American soldiers to heroin. A large portion indirectly subsidized the Armée Clandestine, which is one reason the war was such a bargain. “I knew nothing of this,” former CIA director Richard Helms told a reporter for Frontline, who obviously didn’t believe him, in 1988. “It certainly was not policy.”

  Some of Vang Pao’s recruits were sent to training camps in Thailand. Others massed in Long Tieng, an abandoned opium field, surrounded on three sides by a protective barrier of limestone mountains, which during the war became the largest Hmong settlement in the world. New recruits drilled on the landing strip built by the CIA to accommodate cargo planes. Using cardboard targets their wives had cut from surplus butter boxes, they practiced their marksmanship with American M-l rifles and M-2 carbines, as well as with captured Soviet submachine guns. They also learned how to handle mortars and surplus Air Force rockets, which they fired from homemade launchers. Since they could not read, trail watchers assigned to spot North Vietnamese convoys were provided with radio transmitters whose buttons were labeled with pictures of trucks and tanks. Their CIA advisers marveled at how quickly the Hmong, accustomed to crossbows and flintlocks, mastered the technology of modern warfare. “You give one of these little guys an M-l rifle and fifty rounds of ammunition in the morning,” said an American trainer in 1961, “and when he comes back that night he’ll be able to kill a man at 200 yards.” Christopher Robbins reported the story—perhaps apocryphal, perhaps not—that in the early days of the war, Hmong villagers peered under the fuselages of airplanes to determine whether they were male or female. A few years later, some of those villagers were crewing or piloting propeller-driven T-28 training planes converted to bombers. The Hmong also impressed the Americans with their adaptability. With little available timber, soldiers who had transplanted their families to Long Tieng built houses out of empty rice sacks, knocked-down ammunition crates, and flattened fifty-five-gallon oil drums. They used grenades to fish, and stuffed them inside chickens as bait for tigers. They used parachute cord to rope water buffalos.

  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:

  Everyone knew that Vang Pao had been a soldier at 13, so many young boys volunteered to fight to protect our land. I was a small, weak boy but determined to help my people…. In my first fight, I discovered that I couldn’t shoot my weapon by hand-holding it; it was too heavy. I had to find a rock or tree to steady it on before firing. That was dangerous. So, I asked Vang Pao if I could be a paratrooper. He agreed and I trained for that. On my first jump, I was so light that I floated and floated and came down far from my unit. To solve my floating problem, the next time I jumped with a B-40 grenade launcher. That brought me down. But once on the ground, I wasn’t strong enough to operate the B-40 effectively. I asked Vang Pao if I could be trained in intelligence. He agreed. That was the right place for me.

  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 accoun
t, 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 Houa Phanh and Xieng Khouang provinces, the war has reached into every home and forced every individual, down to the very youngest, to make the agonizing choice of flight or death…. [Displaced people] have taken refuge in temporary settlements to the south, where there is little to eat, where schools are nonexistent, where sanitary conditions are deplorable, and where hopelessness and despair are constant companions.