Book review- Tragic Mountains

Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans and the Secret Wars for Laos, 1942-1992

Jane Hamilton-Merritt, 1993

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Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans and the Secret Wars for Laos, 1942-1992 is the culmination of fourteen years of experience and research of the Indochina Wars from journalist, war correspondent, photographer and human rights activist Dr Jane Hamilton-Merritt. Since the 1960s, Hamilton-Merritt has covered war in Indochina and its aftermath, taking a particular interest in the role of the Hmong, an ethnic minority group that live in highland areas of Laos and Vietnam. 

The Hmong are a four thousand year-old culture that originates in southern China, but which extended southwards to Thailand, Laos and Vietnam in a mass migration to escape Chinese persecution in the eighteenth century. During the Vietnam War- more accurately described as the Second Indochina War- thousands of Hmong were recruited by the CIA to assist and rescue American soldiers as a part of the USA’s covert operations in Laos to disrupt the Ho Chi Minh supply trail and to counter insurgency by the communist Pathet Lao. Promised by the Americans that with their help the communists would be defeated, the Hmong, led by General Vang Pao and in many cases trained to become pilots through US and Thai support, became loyal and fearless allies of the United States. However, the Nixon administration’s inauspicious negotiated peace settlement of 1972 left the doors open for rolling communist victory across Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in 1975, without allowing proper provisions to defend their allies in Laos, the Hmong.

Kaysone Phomvihane’s Pathet Lao came to power in Laos with an open declaration to “wipe out” the reactionary Hmong who had fought alongside the Americans for decades. The United States Government’s shameful abandonment of their former allies is detailed harrowingly by Hamilton-Merritt, who became a voice for the refugee Hmong community in Thailand that grew as Hmong fled their homeland in fear of persecution. The author, who shows immense respect and sympathy for the plight of the Hmong, worked for the US State Department as Expert Consultant on Highland Lao Refugees in the 1980s and has several times testified before US congress on issues regarding refugees, human rights abuses and genocide in Asia. Furthermore, she has twice been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for her work on behalf of the Hmong, in 1988 and 2000. 

At over five hundred pages, this edition does justice to the many years of dedicated research that went into it. Personally, I found myself losing interest in the details of military operations throughout the American war in Laos, a focus that takes up much of the middle part of the book. Where Hamilton-Merritt’s work really comes into its own is in the explanation of events after the American withdrawal and communist takeover; when Laos became one of the world’s most secretive totalitarian states. “Extinct Destruction Operations”, a genocidal campaign by the newly-formed Lao People’s Democratic Republic (LPDR) to eliminate the Hmong minority, passed almost totally ignored or denied by the international media. The most startling element of this came in the reports from Lao Hmong who had escaped to Thailand of poisonous rains dropped over Hmong settlements in their home country, causing acute sickness and death to those infected by it. The theory that the Soviet Union had been violating the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention in providing the LPDR with chemical weapons to attack the Hmong- later discovered to be true- was denounced by the US government and international media, who preferred the explanation of scientist and politician Matthew Meselson that the ‘yellow rain’ reported by the Hmong was in fact bee faeces. Hamilton-Merritt’s dynamic journalistic skill allows that the wider issues pushing US policy- in this case, the Carter administration’s wish to pursue better relations with the Soviet Union- are examined as closely as the individual cases of Hmong families, to which the author applies great care and interest. This allows the reader a broad understanding of the context of US policy decisions, as well as a deeper appreciation of the impact these decisions had on Hmong lives. 

The USA’s ‘secret war’ in Laos is not widely known of, a consequence of the reticence that surrounded American actions in Laos at the time and for years following the end of the war. Even less understood is the role played by the Hmong as allies of the USA, and the horrifying consequences this kinship brought. The first edition of Tragic Mountains was published in 1993; in the 1999 edition, Hamilton-Merritt’s introduction describes the moment, on 15th May 1997, when the Hmong contribution to the USA’s anti-communist fight in Indochina was finally given official recognition by members of Congress, at a procession of three thousand Hmong and Lao veterans who served under General Vang Pao. Nonetheless, Hamilton-Merritt wrote in 1999, “it is true that the identity of the Hmong people is not yet established among all US policymakers, and that the American public remains largely uninformed [about the role of the Hmong in supporting the USA in Laos]”. 

Ban Vinai was the largest Hmong refugee camp in Thailand, accommodating the thousands of Hmong who fled over the ‘Berlin Wall’ of the Mekong River that marks the border between Laos and Thailand. Following a programme agreed by Thailand, Laos and the USA in regards to these refugees, Hmong in Ban Vinai began to be forcibly repatriated to Laos without proper security measures in place to ensure that they would not automatically be pushed into ‘seminar’ forced labour camps. As recently as 2010, TIME magazine reported on the fears of Hmong refugees still living in Thailand of being forcibly returned to Laos, where sporadic insurgency by Hmong groups against the communist government has been ongoing. 

Tragic Mountains is highly commendable for its comprehensive analysis of the Hmong-CIA relationship and its terrible consequences for the Lao Hmong. I did not learn as much about Hmong society from Hamilton-Merritt’s work as I did from The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, another book written by a woman with many years of experience of the Hmong; however, it provides sufficient information on the Hmong lifestyle, character and history for an understanding of how and why this group became involved in the CIA’s covert operations and the impact this has had. Reading Tragic Mountains has significantly developed my understanding of the recent history of Laos and has opened my eyes to a shocking and shameful element of the Indochina War- the abuse and betrayal of America’s former allies, the Hmong- that continues to be overlooked and uncompensated.