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Talking Story |
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Former Royal Lao Army Major General Vang Pao (AP Photo/Janet Hostetter, File)
From The Asian Reporter, V17, #28 (July 10, 2007), page 7.
A splendid old soldier
On June 4, officers from a muscular mix of U.S., California, and local Sacramento law enforcement agencies arrested former Royal Lao Army Major General Vang Pao. The esteemed Hmong freedom fighter, along with seven other prominent American Hmong community activists, and a retired California Army National Guard lieutenant colonel, were all charged with federal felonies including attempting an armed overthrow of the rulers of the Democratic People’s Republic of Laos.
To be clear, the communist leaders of Laos are among our world’s most inept and corrupt. The children of Laos are among the least healthy, the least educated.
Still, it is a crime for a U.S. citizen to forcibly remove foreign leaders not at war with the United States. Unless the U.S. really resents a regime — take Cuba or North Korea or Iran. Then it’s acceptable. That’s called "regime change."
You don’t have to actually succeed at toppling bad men, you don’t even need squeeze a trigger, just intending to try is a crime. It’s an additional crime to intend to try along with others. The bigger the guns you and your co-conspirators plan to use, the bigger your crime. Conviction can put you in prison for life. Forever.
To tell the truth
Gen. Vang Pao is also known as "VP" to his admirers — to former highland subsistence farmer-soldiers as well as to veteran members of the U.S. Congress and old hands in America’s national intelligence and military establishments.
Those who fought under VP’s command always begin and end their respectful narratives by recalling his absolute loyalty to his soldiers. The General led by furious example. He battled shoulder to shoulder, hill to hill, year after desperate year, right next to his chronically under-fed, inadequately armed, but fiercely loyal highlander freedom fighters. Everyone of them, in common cause with the United States of America.
What we seldom hear from this honorable old soldier or from his exiled followers in central California, in the Midwest or Northwest, is talk about their quiet community’s inability to absorb the bitter truth of U.S. betrayal, back then in their beloved Lao highlands, right now in urban America. But our truth lies there.
This old school general and gentleman simply will not get his arms around the idea of being abandoned by America. The pain of betrayal. And now, the audacity of a criminal indictment.
By America, by the big brother of little people. Of dreamy people everywhere, wanting so badly to believe. America the Promise.
I am not Hmong. I began working with these proud folk in frontier Thailand in 1979. We assisted their escape and eased their resettlement during those dark 1980s. We mobilized vigorous Hmong enclaves into American voting blocks during our optimistic ’90s.
I don’t know the Old General. I have however, learned a lot from articulate elder uncles just like him. I have felt my way around their elegant universe, as ancient as ours. So much alike we are in our stubborn traditional commitments to how human beings must be. How to be human.
About how honorable soldiers act, I tell you true, we are in complete accord.
On how sincere allies don’t separate, on how solemn oaths are never denied, we will always agree.
On how we send, without second thought, our teenage boys into angry enemy fire to rescue our sworn ally’s helpless son, tangled in his parachute, dangling from my jungle canopy — we’ll forever stand together.
On how my brother-in-arms must take my family into his home after mine is rubble; on how my lost uncles and exhausted aunties shall be soothed, our sorrows revered, there can be no doubt. Not ever.
Some more truth
In the weeks after the Hon. Vang Pao’s arrest, in the days after his hospitalization for his racing heart, his aching old heart, Hmong Americans demonstrated their disappointment with those neglected promises. On the steps of that federal court trying him, around state capital buildings from one end of our chaotic continent to the other, they shook signs asking for him back. For freedom. For justice. For America to make good our simple promise, to make right their unimaginable losses.
It hurts so bad to see them so. Hmong America’s unabashed sincerity. True believers.
I want to tell them to never stop their stubborn dreaming. American dreaming.
We need to assure them that their esteemed general does them proud. He is a soldier true.
A good soldier does not have to win, he needs only try and try and try. He must only stay true to his mother’s and his sisters’ and his daughters’ trust. That is winning.
And if the big heart of this tiger bursts for thus trying, for this truth, for those families — then al’hamdulillah. Thank God for it. It’s how we are, that’s what we must be. Be true.
Let us honor him. Let us respect ourselves because the shame of this episode is not on the Old General or on his simple, on his solid soldiers.
Let us remake our America. Together.