Tag Archives: Hmong fighters

One last fight for secret soldiers

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MINNEAPOLIS — In asmall building on Arcade Street in St. Paul, about a dozen Hmong veterans of the Vietnam War — all trained, paid and armed to fight for the United States by the Central Intelligence Agency — gather regularly to discuss upcoming public service events or festivities where their honor guard might be needed.They dress in old military uniforms they have bought on their own and have decorated with patches of their own design.



The meetings now come with a renewed urgency.

When they die, these secret warriors of a secret American war want to buried in veterans cemeteries alongside their American comrades. But even though they now are commonly acknowledged as having fought for the United States in northern Laos, they are prohibited by law from being buried in national or state veterans cemeteries, which are reserved for American service members and honorably discharged U.S. military veterans and their families.

http://www.stripes.com/news/veterans/one-last-fight-for-secret-soldiers-1.170566

Colonel Jambon Goes out with a Message

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For generations the Hmong hill people, (pronounced ‘Mung,’)  fought proxy wars for first French, then US interests in South East Asia. Back when the place was called Indochina, the Hmong formed the backbone of indigenous forces fighting Communists across what is now Laos-Cambodia-Vietnam.

When the French left, the Americans picked them up, when the Americans left, the Hmong found themselves abandoned again.

As RFI reports,

A retired French colonel killed himself at a memorial to the war in South East Asia, in protest against what he called official indifference to the treatment of the Hmong minority, French police said on Monday.

Jambon

 

Robert Jambon, 86, shot himself on the steps of the Monument Indochine in the Breton town of Dinan on October 27, police said, and in a suicide letter published by the newspaper Ouest France, he described his act as a protest.

“After a long period of disappointment, I have decided to play my final card, or more precisely my final bullet,” he wrote in the letter, a copy of which was posted on the daily’s website.

In the note, he said the suicide was aimed at expressing his shame and “to protest against the cowardly indifference of our officials in the face of the terrible misfortune that is hitting our friends in Laos.”

“This is not a suicide but an act of war aimed at rescuing our brothers-in-arms facing death,” he continued.

Jambon, who fought alongside Hmongs during France’s 1950-54 war in Indochina (the French name for a territory that now includes its former colony Vietnam) had spent decades trying to raise awareness of the minority’s treatment.

Meanwhile, short of everything but hope, the Hmong soldier on