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"They raped my wife and killed my son." One Child Soldier remembers the Secret War.

Left behind by the CIA after the Secret and Vietnam Wars ended, one man recalls the journey to safety.

By Nev OceanPublished 2 years ago Updated 2 years ago 13 min read
2
"They raped my wife and killed my son." One Child Soldier remembers the Secret War.
Photo by Amisha Nakhwa on Unsplash

Author's Note: All names have been changed as per request of subject.

"How old were you when you were conscripted?" I ask him. 

We're sitting in a threadbare living room with furniture that had seen better days. There are small scuffs on the wooden coffee table, signs of a busy family. The recliner that he's sitting in is worn down at the arms, the brown striped upholstery weathering away in the corners. I'm sitting on a modest microfiber sofa in a complementary shade of tan. 

My subject is a small man, Mr. Yang, but I call him uncle out of respect. In his senior years, his gait had slowed and he was a few inches shorter than his granddaughter. He sat in his chair slightly stooped over with chapped hands that showed the gnarled twisting of arthritis. His face was lined with the evidence of a hard life and long hours spent underneath the burning California sun. He couldn't be much older than my own father, perhaps hovering somewhere in his late sixties, but the traumas of his life had aged him in a way that defied definition.

The fog had been particularly thick that winter morning when I'd pulled up to the old ranch-style home on the outskirts of Fresno, my car scattering the small flock of silkie chickens that had gathered by the front door to forage. His granddaughter, Jeanie, had greeted me with a hesitant smile. She was so American Hmong in contrast to her grandfather, full of plump cheeks, skinny jeans, and sleek, long hair. She'd been the one to convince him to talk to me, to tell me his story.

"Little daughter," he calls me, a term of endearment in my culture, "when they came for me, I was ten. I was no taller than your waist."

"Did your parents say anything to you when you were taken?" I ask, jotting down some notes so that I would remember the way his feet shuffled in their flipflops. Jeanie has her hand on the sleeve of his cardigan and I watch as her fingers clench. She's looking down at her lap, listening as her family history is told to a stranger.

"Oh, little daughter, my dad had already been killed by the Pathet Lao, and my mother had died long before that. I was an orphan and life for an orphan is a heartbreak life," he says, his eyes far away as he's taken back to those long-ago days. Like so many others I had spoken to, it was a life surreal to the one they lived now, so far away like a mist-shrouded dream that most would rather not remember. 

"When they came to my village, I went with them because there was no life for me there," he continues. Next to him, Jeanie's sniffle draws my attention as she wipes away a tear, her hand reaching to tangle into her grandfather's fingers.

"Who took you?" I ask. "Was it white soldiers?"

"No," he answers, "it was Hmong soldiers. A captain. The Americans sent Hmong soldiers to come take us, all the boys in the village."

I'd heard this before. During the Secret War (a covert CIA war operation in Laos), after 1964, the majority of the Hmong men who had already been conscripted to fight for the CIA had died, so recruitment had started for Hmong boys. The only requirement was that they were taller than the rifles they would have to carry. Age didn't matter. Some as young as nine had been conscripted. 

But one of the little-told facts was that even before 1964, Hmong boys as young as 14 were already being recruited and considered "men." It was easier to call them men to make it sound more morally acceptable, but these had been nothing but adolescent teens. Many of my own uncles had not been much older than 14 or 15 when they had been recruited to fight in the years before the 1964 recruitment of even younger Hmong children.

The modus for recruiting these boys would be a practice that would be mirrored the world over in impoverished countries with wars to fight. It would be their own people who would come take these boys via orders from higher-up governments. The CIA was rarely doing the actual grunt work, but the tactics were condoned and unquestioned. 

Whether the boys wanted to join the war effort or not, there was very little choice. Families who could afford to send their sons away to school were able to spare them in this way, but for the less fortunate, kidnapping, coercion, and poverty forced many into service. There would be two entire generations of Hmong who would never plant their own rice and who would grow up knowing nothing but war, death, and fear.

We speak for awhile longer and I listen closely as he tells me of his training days, of the friends he'd lost, and the days spent huddled in the jungle. He speaks about the fields of broken bodies, of blood-soaked jungles filled with flies, of chemical rain that burned through clothes, and of endless bullets that ripped through the shroud of night.

"When did you meet your wife?" I ask him as I run down the list of questions I had pre-planned.

"Oh, this wife right now isn't my first wife," he replies. "This wife now I married in 1978, a few years before we came to America."

"Can you tell me about your first wife?" I ask gently.

He pauses and looks at his granddaughter's hands intertwined with his. "Daughter," he says softly to her, "go get us some water."

Jeanie nods and hastens to leave the room. It's silent between me and Mr. Yang, with only the rhythmic clicking of the old-fashioned wall clock to remind us that we weren't locked in time. 

"Uncle," I finally say, "if it's too hard, you don't have to say. It's okay."

He looks up at me, his lips pressed into a grim line. Jeanie enters then with bottles of water and she untwists one to hand to him. 

"If you really want to know what it was like, then I have to tell you," he says to me, his eyes dry and steady. I could tell that he was remembering, going back in time to a dark place. He takes a small sip of his water, his throat working up and down as he swallowed. He leans back into his chair as though the weight of the memories were crushing him.

"Our country had exploded," he said, using the terms in our language that described the eruption of chaos and war. "There were rumors that the Americans were going to leave. I was just twenty-one. I had only been married for a year and we just had our son. He was still so small and I had only seen him once.

"I was far away from my village when the Americans started leaving. They only took the high-ranking Hmong officers with them. They left everyone else behind, all the soldiers and their families. The Pathet Lao were coming for us all. They were going to kill everyone. I had to get my family across the Mekong River to Thailand to the refugee camps, but I was still so far away.

"I hiked for three weeks to get back home."

"How old was your baby?" I ask quietly.

"Oh, maybe five months. When I got to my wife, he was just sitting, but it was so long ago, I'm not sure anymore. I remember that he was small and plump and he was already so good at grabbing things," he says, grabbing his own finger and squeezing as though he could still feel the grip of his child.

"When I got to the village, everyone had abandoned it. The village was empty. They feared the Pathet Lao too much. I searched the mountains for two more weeks before I found my family.

"We hid a lot during the day and would hike at night. The fear was so real that you would be killed if the Pathet Lao found us. There were no more Americans, nothing to stop the Lao from killing us all. 

"We had to blow opium into my son's face to keep him quiet. My wife's milk had begun to run dry because there was no food and we were afraid to hunt because the gunfire would draw attention to us. By the time we got to the Mekong, my baby was so weak, he no longer needed the opium to stay quiet."

"Grandpa, I didn't know that," Jeanie says softly, her lips trembling as she tucks her hands between her knees. "Is that when the baby died?"

Mr. Yang takes a deep breath and that far away look comes over his face again. "If I close my eyes, I can almost see him," he says, "But I can no longer remember my wife's face. I don't even have a picture of them."

It'd been more than forty years now, yet the sorrow was still keen and fresh. He closes his eyes tightly, trying to remember, trying to recapture details that would prove that his wife and child had once existed. Small, silvery tears squeeze through his lids to trail down his brown face, slowly making their way to drip off his grizzled chin. 

"Uncle, don't cry," I say in futility, reaching into my pocket for the tissues I always carry. I hand one over to him, but Jeanie intercepts it, her hands shaking as she dabs at her grandfather's tears. I'm not sure how to comfort him or what to say.

He's so still as he sits there with the wet trails of his tears still staining his face, his eyes closed against the pain. 

"We made it to the river. We had just enough money to hire a boat to get across," he says suddenly, pushing himself to finish the story. "We waited until night. There were so many Hmong on the boat and the Pathet Lao were still patrolling the shoreline. The baby was strapped to my wife's back and all of our belongings were strapped to her chest and to me. Everything we owned.

"She couldn't swim very well, so I put her in front of me. There were already too many people on the boat so we had to go in the water. We were tied to each other and we were holding onto the boat with a rope. We started crossing, but a patrol saw us and started shooting. The entire boat flipped over and our rope came loose. 

"I was holding her hand so, so, so tight, but the water was too rough. We got separated. Everywhere, there was water. Above me, under me, everywhere. I didn't know what direction I was going, it just kept pulling me and it was so dark."

He's shaking his head now, his eyes glassy and his fist tight in his lap. I wanted to tell him he can stop, that he didn't need to go on and relive this memory. I could see the pain and the sadness battling across his face in the furrow of his brow and the tight set of his lips.

"Maybe I blacked out," he says with a heavy breath. "I can't remember. I just remember hearing my baby cry and I opened my eyes. It was morning. The birds were beginning to sing and I thought it was just birds I was hearing, but I kept listening and I could tell it was my baby. 

"I was on the shore. There was enough light that I could see across the river. That's when I realized I was on the Thai side, but my wife and baby were on the Lao side. I wasn't alone. There were a few bodies next to me, some dead, one or two still alive. It was the same on the other side, but I could see my wife. She was still carrying the baby. 

"I wanted to swim to them, but I was so weak, I could barely get up. Then the Lao patrol came and me and the other survivor had to run into the jungle and hide. They would shoot us if they saw us, even across the river. They started shooting the bodies on their side and tossing the bodies back into the river. I prayed they wouldn't find my wife and son. I begged the heavens that they wouldn't, but I did not have such luck.

"I watched them pull my baby off my wife. I could see him kick and I could hear him cry. They just tossed him into the water. It hurt my heart so much to see how they just tossed my son into the river like he was just an animal. The other survivor had to keep me quiet because we would be dead too if they heard us.

"Then they tore my wife's shirt open and one of the soldiers took off his pants. I couldn't watch. I closed my eyes, but I could hear her screaming. The man with me kept his hand on my mouth and he kept whispering to me that I had to be quiet or we would be dead. Then I heard the gunshot and I opened my eyes to see them toss her body into the river too."

He stops then, his breath choppy and short. He swallows hard and his hand shakes as he reaches for his water bottle.

"I beg forgiveness, Uncle," I say to him because I'm not sure what else I could say. 

He goes on to tell me that he finally made it to the refugee camp where he was able to meet up with his cousins. It wasn't until the passing of the Refugee Act of 1980- - a whole 5 years after the last American had left Southeast Asia - -that his family would make their way to the states.

After about two hours, I finally leave their home, his story haunting me the rest of the week as I listen to the interview over and over again. I call Jeanie a few days later and ask how Mr. Yang is doing, if he's okay. I know how insidious unresolved PTSD could be and I worried that I'd asked too much of him. I worried for each one of these child soldiers I spoke to, asking them to open themselves back up to a past that many would rather leave behind them. If it weren't for the importance of making sure our Hmong history was recorded and passed on, I would never ask anyone to remember the war.

"He didn't sleep that first night," Jeanie tells me, "and he cried a lot after you left."

I feel terrible and my apology sounds ridiculous to my own ears. 

"No," Jeanie continues, "he says he's glad he told you. I think he needed to tell someone. I think he wants everything to be remembered."

"Okay," I say, "I'll try to do him honor."

I hang up with her and curl up in my bed. Outside, spring will be budding the trees and greening the grass soon; and tomorrow, I tell myself, tomorrow, I'll listen again to this man's pain and I'll try to tell his story. But more importantly, I'll make sure his grandchildren and future generations of Hmong children and the American public knows of the sacrifices like his that brought the Hmong here.

.

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About the Creator

Nev Ocean

Fantasy, romance, fiction author.

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