US Proxy War Displaced My Family 50 Years Ago. We Still Live in the Wreckage.

When my son was born almost two years ago, we held a small hu plig or “soul-calling” ceremony to welcome his spirit to the world and into our family. The shaman my parents appointed for the ceremony, a Hmong man from Laos, was both a friend of the family and kin on my mother’s side. A gregarious and exuberant man, he stood at the front door and chanted for my son’s spirit to come home while the sound of his metal hoop rattle erupted into a rhythmic chiming. After the first segment of the ritual was complete, he took a break and sat down at my dining table. It’s custom for the ritual to happen in two segments, and the second segment takes place only after the ceremonial chicken has been butchered and parboiled in preparation for divination.

I kept the shaman company while we waited. We talked about the ritual, and he explained my son was going to be fine before relaying his own experiences caring for his grandchildren. Our conversation landed on the Laotian Civil War — waged from the early 1960’s to 1975 — and the losses that followed Hmong people. The shaman told me the Americans brought war to Laos. The Americans, he said, tore the country apart and we Hmong could no longer live there as a result. There is no country for us to return to, no homeland in which to belong. Hmong people have lost so much in the process, he mourned.

I was reminded of this interaction as I considered the staggering fact that this month marks 50 years since the United States withdrew from its wars in Southeast Asia. Fifty years of cycling through trauma implanted by way of being Hmong. Fifty years to contend and reckon with the fallout of American foreign policy — and yet it seems the chasm only deepens.

Growing up as a daughter of Hmong refugees during the eighties in Fresno, California, was to grow up with little to no context for myself or the collective history I shared with others. My parents rarely ever spoke about the war, but I do recall two emotionally broken people attempting to reground in a new country, with mother, at home, forlorn and some days passing the hours seated on the bed talking to herself, while father, who at one time worked as a dishwasher at a restaurant, often came home worn and defeated, having had to tolerate the aggression of a world that did not look kindly upon him.

In college, the fractures came together when I finally learned about the war and the devious ends to which Hmong people served an American agenda of warfare abroad. I learned how Hmong people were left behind by the Americans to fend for themselves against the Pathet Lao communists who sought retribution. I learned about the exodus of over 130,000 Hmong refugees into Thailand and elsewhere. And I began to construct from these fractures a context and history for myself, a way of getting to know my parents without pressuring them to talk about the war.

Today, I don’t think of this war as anything else but a proxy war initiated by the United States to exert anti-communist ideological control. Tens of thousands of Hmong boys and men, along with other Lao and ethnic Lao soldiers, were thrust into a covert war schemed by the CIA. In flowed a river of guns, bombs, boots, battle fatigues, supplies, food, and other provisions to bolster the U.S.’s secret army, even as international agreements had declared Laos neutral in the conflict. The Americans even went so far as to establish what became a town, a major airbase, and a secret operations center in Long Tieng. Under the leadership of the late General Vang Pao, Hmong soldiers fought long and grim battles in northern Laos while rescuing downed American pilots, disrupting traffic on the Ho Chi Minh trail, and gathering intelligence.

The Americans had brought together the mechanisms necessary to undertake proxy warfare, a model for engaging in conflict abroad that would shape its foreign policy in the decades to come. Proxy warfare ultimately allows for someone else to die in one’s place — in other words, for Hmong to die in the place of Americans, which they did, at an alarming rate, 10 times as high as their American counterparts.

When the United States could no longer uphold its promise and well after the damage had been done, they ended the war in 1975 and packed up to go home. The American abandonment of the war in Southeast Asia and the communist victory prompted hundreds of thousands of people throughout the region to flee for their lives. Without military support to defend against the communists, many of those who allied themselves with the United States were eventually hunted and executed.

Fifty years have now passed, and I’m aware not everyone will agree with the shaman. A good number of Hmong are content with their lives here in the U.S. and have put the past behind them, so they say. But on the flip side, there are even greater numbers of Hmong, particularly the last living generation of elders to survive the war, who remember the war and share in the shaman’s reflections of loss.

As a poet, I, too, share in those reflections. Even as I’ve tried in my writing to avoid reducing the Hmong narrative to the war, the war finds a way to force the conversation. Even when I’m writing about a highly rare and critically endangered animal called saola, a mammal endemic to the Annamite Mountains between Laos and Vietnam, even when I’m assembling poems about saola to shape what eventually becomes my third book, Primordial, released this year, I’m still drawing myself back to the war. In the book, I wondered about the ways a war-torn landscape might serve as a thriving ecosystem supporting rare and elusive species like saola. I thought about how the environment, the wildlife and the fauna become casualties to the horrors and aftermath of war. Then came larger considerations around extinction and survival — Hmong on the run, saola on the run and a return to primordial memories. The book is about saola, but it’s also a window into the war.

Someone once hinted to me I should be more grateful for what I’ve been given, for the privileges endowed to me by the “first world,” for the access to education, housing, health care and social services that my family and I were lucky enough to receive. I scoffed at the insinuation. This person had missed the mark entirely. It isn’t about gratitude or a life of continual fawning or demonstrating subservience in return. As far as I’m concerned, these are things I’m owed, and that are owed to refugees, the children of refugees, and anyone whose village or mountain or sense of home has been razed and ravaged at the hands of the United States government, whether through direct or proxy or surrogate warfare, anyone coerced into soldiering on behalf of the Americans and then discarded to fend alone.

To continue writing from a place of being Hmong means I can’t escape the war. Or rather, it’s the other way around. It’s that the war can’t escape me. I will keep telling the truth of this war and how the U.S. government’s experiments in foreign policy resulted in the mass displacement and upheaval of a people. I will keep haunting the war and I will keep digging into its wound, 50 years since, and perhaps for 50 onward.