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  “Get your platoon and go find any survivors before the NVA get to them,” the commanding officer told my father.

  Just as his first mission at the Ho Chi Minh Trail had been, rescuing the American pilots was easier said than done.

  The cargo plane crashed on the far side of the valley near the mountains controlled by the North Vietnamese Army. Hostile soldiers, booby traps, and land mines were positioned between my father’s platoon and the downed pilots. On top of that, artillery fire continually rained on them. Nevertheless, my father did not once question the order.

  From the day the first American airplane was fired on while flying over Laos, Hmong guerrilla fighters had fought and died to save them.

  My father’s platoon took off through the jungle in the dark. Six hours later, they came upon the crash site. No one was there. The Americans were gone. The platoon spread out and searched the immediate area. “Tahaan Vang Pao,” they called out, translated “Vang Pao’s soldiers,” as they searched the area for parachutes and survivors. Finally, they came upon a man hiding behind a rock near a small stream, a makeshift white flag in one hand.

  “Vang Pao,” my father called out.

  “Vang Pao?” the man said.

  “Vang Pao, yes,” my father said, using the one English word he knew.

  From behind a rock, the American pilot stood up and cautiously walked toward my father. Dried blood covered the side of his face, but none of his injuries appeared to be life threatening.

  “Others?” one of the men in the platoon asked.

  “No, no others,” the pilot replied. “They are all dead.”

  My father’s men didn’t speak much English, but they understood the word “dead.”

  “Quickly, come with us,” my father said in Hmong and motioned for the pilot to follow them. The men in the platoon surrounded the pilot like Secret Service agents around the president as they hiked back through the maze of booby traps and land mines toward their camp.

  As soon as they arrived, a helicopter touched down at camp. They shoved the pilot inside, closed the door, and watched the helicopter fly him away to safety. My father never learned the pilot’s name, and few records were officially kept of such rescue operations, but one thing was certain: the pilot was safe.

  My father was on to his next mission.

  Even with all that my father went through in the war, dlaim ntawv, it was not his destiny to die. After six years of active service, most of which were spent behind enemy lines, my father put in a request for discharge.

  During one of his sporadic leaves, he’d married my mother. It was, like most Hmong marriages, arranged by their two families. My grandmother had selected my mother for my father. The couple had grown up in the same village, yet my father had never thought of marrying her. After all, she was seven years younger. However, the families had other ideas. My grandmother paid the dowry to my mother’s parents, and the marriage was sealed. By the time my father requested a discharge, my oldest brother had been born.

  At first, needing every able-bodied Hmong male to fight, General Vang Pao denied my father’s request. Six months later, my uncle, who’d now been promoted to the rank of captain, convinced his superior officer to grant my father’s request. It didn’t hurt that my mother and the commanding officer were related.

  Not long afterward, I came along.

  My father remained a soldier even though he wasn’t with his platoon any longer. Our village was 40 miles from the front lines, and my father was in charge of its defense.

  For as far back as I can remember, I heard cannons and bombs and gunfire. Some nights, the blasts sounded as if they were directly outside our house, even though they were miles away. I would lie awake, fearing the moment the Communist soldiers would storm our village and kill us all.

  From a very young age, I knew what they’d done to other villages. I’d overheard my father’s stories of what he’d seen when his platoon had come upon a Lao village after the Communists had come through. I didn’t know exactly what the word “rape” meant, but I knew it was a very bad thing the Communists did to the women of the villages they overran. And I heard how babies were bludgeoned, children’s abdomens were split open, and men were forced to watch their families suffer before being killed themselves in the most gruesome ways.

  As our uncle and father had, my brother and I made our own pact. If the Communists invaded our village, Xay and I would fight together until the very end. We may have been little boys, but that didn’t stop us from practicing the kung fu moves we were determined to pull on any soldier foolish enough to threaten us. We practiced punching and kicking and screaming. We joked about how, if that didn’t work, we’d shoot them down with our slingshots, like David against Goliath.

  I know my father must have seen his two sons jumping around like Jackie Chan, but he never laughed at us. Instead, he took us into the jungle on hunting trips. There, he taught us which plants were edible and which were poisonous, how to trap small animals, and all of the other survival techniques he’d mastered over the years.

  I didn’t realize it at the time, but my father was preparing my brother and me for the day the soldiers would invade our village. He knew it was simply a question of when, not if, my nightmare would come true, yet I never saw even a trace of fear in him.

  Not only did my father train my brother and me, but he also used to pull the men of our village together and train them in the basics of warfare, using the handful of guns we had in our village. As I mentioned, he knew what was coming. After all, dlaim ntawv, we were destined to live at the time when the Hmong way of life came to a horrific end.

  2. The Hmong place our tribal name first, followed by our personal name.

  3. Jane Hamilton-Merritt, Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret Wars for Laos, 1942-1992 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 123.

  2

  The Hmong Tom Sawyer

  Growing up in Laos, I was always hungry. It wasn’t that my father couldn’t provide. He was a farmer and a very good one at that. He was also an accomplished hunter, one of the best in our village. Even so, when I think of Laos, I think of hunger. No matter how hard my father worked, life in Laos seemed to fight him.

  I will never forget one particular day when I went with him to our farm. As we got close to the fields, I heard a strange buzzing sound. Even now, over thirty-five years later, I can still hear that sound ringing in my ears. I never heard anything like it before or since. It had such an otherworldly quality that I wondered if my life was in danger.

  I didn’t want to get any closer to the sound, but my father did. He picked up the pace and nearly sprinted up the hill to our farm just over the rise. Not wanting to be left by myself, I ran after him. The closer we came to the farm, the louder the sound became. My ears ached from the intense buzzing.

  As we topped the hill, I looked at our farm and couldn’t believe what I saw. All of our rice plants had changed color and appeared to sway in a way that wind could never cause.

  “What is it, Father?”

  He didn’t answer, which frightened me more than anything he could have said. He ran down the slope toward our rice fields and began swatting. With each swat, the heads of the plants appeared to rise, then settle back as soon as my father passed by.

  I ran after him. Only then could I see that the plants themselves weren’t moving; insects were. Our rice field had been transformed into something like one of the plagues on Egypt from the Bible. All around me, grasshoppers were piled on the heads of our rice plants. And their sound? It was more than a buzzing. They crackled as their bodies banged against one another, crunched as they chewed on our plants, and sucked the milky sap out of the plants, the sap that was just days away from hardening into grains of rice.

  I tried to keep up with my father. Grasshoppers popped under my bare feet. I looked up to a sky that seemed to be filled with huge, greenish-gray swirling clouds. Grasshoppers had contaminated the entire valley. More a
nd more descended on our field.

  “Father,” I called out. I was afraid. At the same time, as strange as it seems, I was a little relieved. In my young mind, I thought, They’re just bugs. At least my life isn’t in danger. How little I understood.

  My feeling of relief dissolved as soon as I caught up with my father and saw something I never had before: tears ran down his cheeks. Hmong men don’t show emotion, and they never cry.

  Then my father began to pray, but this was a different kind of prayer than I’d heard him say. He cried out with a voice that broke my heart, “God, why did You let this happen to my family? You know how hard I worked. What are we going to eat now?”

  My father knew, just as I was about to learn, that we couldn’t simply plant more rice. In Laos, the planting season falls into a narrow window in the spring, which was long past. The grasshoppers had consumed all of our rice for the year.

  Later that night, my father had to break the news to my mother. It had to be the hardest thing he had ever done.

  Other villagers came to our house and pointed at him, demanding, “What are we going to do now?”

  My father wasn’t just a farmer. He was also the chief elder and pastor of our village. Unlike in most Hmong villages, all but two families in ours were Christians. My father wasn’t the only one wondering why God had allowed this to happen.

  As the men asked my father what to do, the women wailed. Hmong people make a certain cry after a death. Even though no one had died, I heard the sound that night and it terrified me. My imagination was probably running away with me, but I felt extra hungry as I tried to go to sleep.

  The next day, no one cried. No one asked my father what to do. Dwelling on how our rice crop had flown away in the bellies of thousands of grasshoppers wouldn’t give us anything to eat.

  Within a matter of weeks, our rice supplies ran low. My father responded by spending more and more time hunting in the jungle. We ate whatever he killed and brought home. I remember eating everything from deer, wild boar, and game birds to monkeys, gophers, porcupines, and even rats. When you’re hungry, you eat what you can find.

  My father also continued to show my brothers and me how to find edible roots and leaves in the jungle. The days we stumbled across bamboo shoots were the best.

  By not panicking but doing what had to be done, my father taught me a valuable lesson. I learned to never give up, to never lose hope, to never allow my circumstances to rule me. This positive perspective would give me strength in the years ahead.

  The difficulty of life in Laos didn’t stop me from finding ways to have fun. And my idea of fun almost always involved mischief. I’d never heard of Mark Twain, but I was the Hmong Tom Sawyer. Other kids contented themselves with kicking around an inflated pig bladder that passed for a ball. I enjoyed that as much as they did, but I also liked climbing high up in a tree and—how do I put this delicately?—relieving myself on the unsuspecting people below.

  Since my father was the village leader and pastor, the victims of my pranks yelled and screamed not only at me but also at my father, a man who should have been able to control his wild son. At least that’s what they told him, and that’s what he told me as I bent over for the regular spankings I knew I deserved.

  No matter how hard my father tried, lectures and spankings could not drive the Tom Sawyer out of me. I simply had too many ideas of fun and exciting things to try, and my small gang of friends was always eager to do whatever I suggested. None of them ever stopped and asked, “Hey, Xao, do you really think that is such a good idea?” I wish they had.

  One Saturday afternoon, when most of the people of my village were off working on their various farms, my buddies and I carried out the single worst idea I’d ever had.

  For some odd reason, I thought it would be fun to get some big sticks, climb up into the community chicken coop, and smash all the eggs we could find. For a boy who was always hungry, smashing eggs was a foolish thing to do. Unfortunately, my seven-year-old brain didn’t think that far ahead.

  I was the first one to climb into the coop, stick in hand. The chickens barely stirred when I stepped in and hardly knew what to do when my stick came down with a loud pop! on the eggs in the first unattended nest. Pop! Another egg. Then another. And another. My buddies joined in, and eggs popped everywhere.

  Soon the chickens caught on that something was amiss, which sent them all squawking and flying around the coop. From time to time, I had to shove a stubborn hen off her nest, then—pop! pop! pop!—the eggs burst. Yolks, feathers, and hay filled the air as we rushed around, popping eggs as fast as we could. By the time we were done, my buddies and I were covered from head to toe.

  Since we left yolk-covered footsteps down the coop ladder and all the way back to our hideout, my father didn’t have to call in the village CSI team to figure out what had happened.

  As I recall, my father had to pay the chicken owners for their lost eggs, and I could hardly sit for a week.

  The great chicken caper was still fresh in the villagers’ minds a couple of months later when my great-uncle returned home from church and discovered his prize pheasant dead in its cage.

  Even though this man was my grandfather’s brother and my great-uncle, we all called him Grandpa as a sign of respect because, though he was probably barely over fifty years old, he was one of the oldest men in our village.

  Now, one dead bird may not seem like much, but this was a serious offense in my village, where we relied on hunting for food. Grandpa specialized in hunting game birds and used this pheasant as a live decoy. To him, this wasn’t just any bird. He treated it better than he did his own children. Because this pheasant was such a valuable possession, he hung its cage in a place of honor on his porch.

  According to Grandpa, this bird had been alive and well when he’d left for church that morning. When he returned, he found it lying in a heap in such a way that indicated it had not died of natural causes.

  As soon as Grandpa discovered his dead bird, he grabbed the cage and went straight to my father.

  As the chief elder of the village, my father was the one everyone brought their problems to. That’s all I thought was going on when I saw Grandpa, his wife, and their two adult sons storming up the path to our house.

  Every time a villager came to my father with a problem, I always tried to position myself near him to listen in. I admired my father’s wisdom and wanted to learn from him, which is why I didn’t run away when Grandpa came to see us. Little did I know that my curiosity would get me into trouble once again.

  Grandpa and his sons were visibly angry but kept themselves under control.

  “All we want to know is who killed our bird,” Grandpa said. “It had to be someone who was not at church today, because, clearly, that’s when they killed it.” And then he said something that made my heart jump a beat. “I noticed,” he said as he turned toward me, “that Xao and his friends were not at church today.”

  As soon as Grandpa said this, my father turned to me and looked me in the eyes. “Xao, did you miss church today?”

  Unfortunately for me, I had made the mistake of choosing this particular Sunday to skip church and spend the day looking for sweet adventure in the jungle.

  The closest thing we had to candy was a certain fruit that grew wild not far from our village. According to my calculations, it was about time for it to be ripe. I’d come up with a brilliant plan for my gang to skip church and spend the day gorging on fruit.

  As always, my buddies had gone for it. As it turned out, the fruit wasn’t ripe, so we went to the river and spent the day swimming and playing with marbles we carved out of rocks.

  Since church was pretty much an all-day affair, we managed to get home before it let out. No one noticed we’d been missing.

  Or so I thought.

  “Xao, I asked you a question. Were you in church today?”

  I swallowed hard. “No, sir. I was not.” I knew what was coming.

  “Xao,” my father
said again with that tone that melted my spine, “did you kill Grandpa’s bird?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Did you witness one of your friends killing the bird?”

  His look filled me with dread. “No, sir.”

  “Do you know anything about the death of Grandpa’s bird?” His tone was growing increasingly stern.

  “No, sir. My friends and I spent the day at the river. We’d planned to go collect some fruit, but it wasn’t ripe, so we went to the river instead. We returned home right before church let out.”

  “But you broke all those eggs a few weeks ago.”

  My heart sank. “I know, sir, but we did not touch Grandpa’s bird.”

  Grandpa exploded. “This is ridiculous. How can you believe anything this boy has to say? I know he and his little band of thugs killed my bird.”

  All I could think was, Xao, you picked a very bad day to skip church.

  I guess Grandpa could tell my mind was wandering because he leaned down, got right in my face, and screamed, “You tell your father what you did, you terrible boy.”

  My father immediately chimed in. “Xao, if you did this, just tell me and everything will be fine.”

  He may have said everything would be fine, but I knew it wouldn’t be for me or my backside. I stood there, silent. Tears formed, but I refused to let them fall.

  Grandpa continued yelling and cursing, with his two sons chiming in.

  Word of what had happened spread through the village, and everyone rushed to see what the commotion was about. I guess the growing crowd made my father think he needed to end this as soon as possible, so he sent my older brother to round up the rest of the members of my gang.

  I can still picture the way they looked as they came walking in my house, their heads hung low, hands folded as if they’d been handcuffed.

  To me, they looked scared; to the gathering crowd, they looked guilty. People yelled, “All the culprits are finally here. We can tell you’re guilty.” People even yelled things about the chicken coop caper. Then someone yelled, “Teach them a lesson,” which we all knew meant a sound beating.