In memoriam: General Vang Pao

Major-General Vang Pao (1929-2011) was a leader of the Hmong people of Laos. He died on Thursday in California after a brief illness at the age of 81.

He had the tragic misfortune to know little other than war for much of his life. As Yahoo! News reports:

During World War II, while still a teenager, Vang Pao fought to prevent the Japanese from seizing control of Laos.

In the 1950s, he joined the French in the war against the North Vietnamese who were dominating Laos and later, as a general in the Royal Army of Laos, worked with the CIA to wage a covert war there.

Former CIA Chief William Colby once called Pao “the biggest hero of the Vietnam War,” for the 15 years he spent heading a CIA-sponsored guerrilla army fighting against a communist takeover of the Southeast Asian peninsula.

After his guerrillas ultimately lost to communist forces, Vang Pao came to the U.S., where he was credited with brokering the difficult resettlement of tens of thousands of Hmong, an ethnic minority from the hillsides of Laos.

There’s more at the link.

There are many who have criticized Vang Pao, calling him a drug smuggler and a multiple, perhaps mass, murderer. Both allegations are almost certainly true . . . but they must be considered in the context of the circumstances which shaped and formed him. Not least of these was the way in which the United States used him and his people, quite cynically and deliberately, as an anti-Communist tool in the region during the Vietnam War era. Estimates of the number of Laotian Hmong, inspired, trained and equipped by the USA, who died fighting Communist forces in Laos, range from 25,000 to 50,000, to say nothing of the tens of thousands more who were maimed and crippled during the fighting. Vang Pao and his people saw the USA cynically using them, and lying to its own citizens, and to the world, every day of the conflict in Laos . . . so why should they be expected to have been more honest?

Furthermore, Laos became the most heavily bombed nation on Earth during the Vietnam War.

From 1964 through 1973, the United States flew 580,000 bombing runs over Laos — one every 9 minutes for 10 years. More than 2 million tons of ordnance was unloaded on the countryside, double the amount dropped on Nazi Germany in World War II. “Certainly, on a per-capita basis, Laos remains the most heavily bombed nation in the history of warfare,” says Martin Stuart-Fox, a historian at Queensland University in Australia and author of A History of Laos.

The U.S. bombing was designed to cut North Vietnamese supply lines that looped into Laos on a route to communist forces in South Vietnam and Cambodia; the trail was designed to bypass the demilitarized zone that separated North and South Vietnam during the war. The bombing runs also supported Laotian government forces fighting a losing battle against communist Pathet Lao rebels and their North Vietnamese allies.

There’s more at the link. It’s estimated that up to 50,000 people have died in Laos since the Vietnam War as a delayed result of the bombing, killed by unexploded bombs and other ordnance left behind in that country by US and surrogate forces. The link above provides more information.

Vang Pao was the driving force behind the immigration of over 50,000 Laotian Hmong refugees to the USA after the Vietnam War, and was regarded by most of them as their natural leader. His stature among them has been compared to that of a mythological demigod. Even when he was charged by the US Government in 2007 with conspiracy to overthrow the Communist government of Laos (something he always denied), their mass loyalty to him never wavered. (The charges against him were subsequently withdrawn without the case ever coming to trial.)

One can’t blame Vang Pao for hating the Communist government in Laos. One of the most tragic outcomes of the Vietnam War and its ‘sideshow’ conflict in Laos is that, for every Hmong who made it to refugee camps in Thailand or the safety of the USA, it’s estimated that anywhere between three and ten were killed in Laos by Communist forces, who hunted them down after the war, or died in their efforts to reach safety outside Laos. The true number of casualties inflicted upon the Laotian Hmong during this genocide will probably never be known, but almost certainly reached tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands. (At the same time, it must be admitted that the Communist government of Laos had no cause to love Vang Pao or the Hmong, who’d been pawns of the USA in opposing them. When great powers manipulate smaller, simpler nations and peoples, the results very seldom hurt those great powers, but they can be devastating to their puppets. The Hmong can testify to that from bitter, brutal experience.)

Vang Pao was undoubtedly a very flawed human being: ruthless, mercenary, fanatically devoted to his people to the merciless exclusion of the interests of all others. He was witnessed on more than one occasion summarily killing offenders among his own army, without benefit of trial, and almost certainly amassed millions through the smuggling of opium. However, those flaws were inculcated in him by the environment of constant war in which he grew to adulthood, and in which he lived for so many years. It’s doubtful whether anybody but a natural-born saint would have turned out any differently, given the same set of influences and circumstances. Since a great many of those around him (including his CIA advisers and US pilots, both those of Air America and the nominally ‘civilian’ forward air controllers known as the Ravens) were anything but saints, and some of them (although certainly not all) did precisely the same things, one can hardly single him out as a particularly evil example. (An excellent article about Vang Pao’s relationship with the Ravens, giving many details of their operations, may be found here. Highly recommended reading.)

The USA owed, and still owes, an enormous debt to Vang Pao and the Hmong people of Laos, who paid a very heavy price for their assistance to us. As the New York Times summed it up a few years ago:

When Hmong soldiers died, their sons picked up their guns, and when the elder sons died, their younger brothers took over. In 1969, Richard Helms, then the director of Central Intelligence, sent a downbeat report to the White House about Vang Pao and his soldiers. They had “borne a major share of the active fighting” against the Communists in Laos, Helms reminded President Nixon. “These irregular forces are tired from eight years of constant warfare,” Helms wrote. Vang Pao “has been forced to use 13- and 14-year-old children to replace his casualties.” And the secret war in Laos went on for six more years, until the final collapse of American forces in Southeast Asia. “The U.S. put the Hmong into this meat grinder, mostly to save U.S. soldiers from fighting and dying there,” says Lionel Rosenblatt, president emeritus of Refugees International, who has followed the plight of their exile for three decades. “The U.S. had no compunction about putting the Hmong into this role, which saved thousands of American lives.”

Vang Pao (in camouflage uniform, right) with US adviser (left), 1969

. . .

Thousands of Hmong survive today as refugees in dismal camps in Thailand. Perhaps 1,000 are still on the run in the jungles of Laos itself. Human rights groups, filmmakers and journalists have documented their plight. Though the jungle Hmong are believed to have staged occasional hit-and-run attacks in the past, Amnesty International reported last year that “the jungle-dwellers’ military capacity is all but depleted decades after some Hmong fought in the C.I.A.-funded ‘secret army’ in Laos during the Vietnam War.” The jungle Hmong say they are being slaughtered by Lao military units who hunt them with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades, exacting blood vengeance for the wars of the 1960s and ’70s. Veterans — American and Hmong — of the secret missions in Laos see this struggle as the last battle of the Vietnam War. “The Communists accuse the Hmong of bringing American bombs to Laos,” Vaughn Vang, the Lao human rights advocate, told me. “This country used the Hmong. They trained them how to fight. Now the Hmong are dying because they were allies of the United States.”

There’s more at the link.

General Vang Pao’s story has long fascinated me. He’s probably taken to his grave many secrets of clandestine aspects of the Vietnam War that, without him, may never be known. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that frantic efforts were now being made, by all sorts of alphabet-soup agencies, to find out whether he left behind any records that might contain such information. I’m sure they’ll want to ‘sanitize’ them before they can be released.

May his soul, at long last, rest in peace, and may his sins be forgiven him.

Peter