Old U.S. Allies, Still Hiding In Laos

VIENTIANE PROVINCE, Laos — They call themselves America’s forgotten soldiers.

A group of veterans live in the jungles of Vientiane Province. More Photos

Four decades after the Central Intelligence Agency hired thousands of jungle warriors to fight Communists on the western fringes of the Vietnam War, men who say they are veterans of that covert operation are isolated, hungry and periodically hunted by a Laotian Communist government still mistrustful of the men who sided with America.

“If I surrender, I will be punished,” said Xang Yang, a wiry 58-year-old still capable of crawling nimbly through thick bamboo underbrush. “They will never forgive me. I cannot live outside the jungle because I am a former American soldier.”

In a small hillside clearing about nine miles east of the Mekong River, Mr. Yang and four other veterans scratch out a primitive existence with their wives and 50 children and grandchildren. Their hidden jungle encampment is a 15-hour walk up and down low-lying mountains from the nearest paved road, across streams that are knee-deep in the dry season but can become roaring torrents when the monsoon comes.

Mr. Yang said his group had been attacked by the Laotian Army twice this year. In September, soldiers killed a 5-year-old boy, whose grave is on the outskirts of the camp. In May, a predawn raid killed a woman and her 2-year-old child. The group moves camp every few weeks to avoid attack, he said.

They are often miles from any rice paddies or hamlets, but sometimes they travel at night, with their AK-47s, to get supplies from sympathetic farmers. They say they got their guns and uniforms from Laotian troops who fled a firefight in 1999.

The C.I.A. operation, from 1961 until 1975, became known as the secret war because, unlike in Vietnam, America’s military involvement in Laos was covert. Instead of sending American ground troops to prevent a Communist takeover here, the C.I.A. hired tens of thousands of mercenaries, most of whom were Hmong, a hill-dwelling ethnic minority.

Today, the number of Hmong veterans and their families who remain hidden in the jungle is somewhere in the hundreds to low thousands, estimates Amy Archibald, a spokeswoman for the United States Embassy in Vientiane, the capital.

Their plight, though little known, has received more attention in recent years, as human rights groups have issued reports condemning the Laotian government for attacking Hmong who worked with the Americans.

Still, finding the veterans in their camps is an arduous undertaking, requiring hours of trekking through the jungle. A recent visit to Mr. Yang’s remote hide-out by this reporter was the first by an American newspaper, one of about a dozen people to have visited any camp of veterans of the C.I.A. operation in Laos.

The former fighters and their progeny clearly welcomed the visit. When this reporter and a photographer arrived at the camp, many of the group began weeping and saying, in Laotian, “America help us, America help us.”

Many in the group said they had not seen a Westerner since the war ended in 1975.

Each of the five veterans in the camp has relatives in the United States; they say their fading dream is to be reunited with them. Mr. Yang’s hope is that Washington will “come back to help old soldiers like me to leave Laos and make it to America.”

“We want America to give us a place to live,” said another veteran, Va Chang, 60. “We want America to give us food and medicine.

“If the Americans don’t want to do that,” he said, “they should drop a big bomb on us and end our misery.”

Reports of Attacks

Human rights groups describe a mostly one-sided fight between the lightly armed and ragged former C.I.A. fighters and a Laotian Army eager to dislodge them from their jungle hide-outs.

An Amnesty International report released in March said that Laotian troops had been involved in numerous attacks on the veterans and their families across northern Laos in recent years, an assessment shared by American diplomats.

“We find these reports very credible, and we know that there are human rights abuses by security forces,” Ms. Archibald said. “What we can’t tell you is who fired the first bullet.”

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