Hmong in America, Journey from a Secret War

Hmong in America, Journey from a Secret War PDF Author: Tim Pfaff
Publisher: Chippewa Valley Museum
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 112

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Book Description
"In 1961, U.S. President Kennedy sent CIA operatives into northern Laos to recruit a secret army to fight communist forces in Laos and Vietnam. For fifteen years, Hmong highlanders attacked the Ho Chi Minh Trail, guarded U.S. radar installations, and acted as the frontline defense of Laos. In 1975 the Americans withdrew. Thousands of Hmong families fled to Thailand. After months or years in refugee camps, most resettled in the United States. There they faced the imposing challenge of starting a new life in a highly industrialized, technology-driven society with radically different cultural values and practices."--Back cover.

Hmong in America, Journey from a Secret War

Hmong in America, Journey from a Secret War PDF Author: Tim Pfaff
Publisher: Chippewa Valley Museum
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 112

Get Book Here

Book Description
"In 1961, U.S. President Kennedy sent CIA operatives into northern Laos to recruit a secret army to fight communist forces in Laos and Vietnam. For fifteen years, Hmong highlanders attacked the Ho Chi Minh Trail, guarded U.S. radar installations, and acted as the frontline defense of Laos. In 1975 the Americans withdrew. Thousands of Hmong families fled to Thailand. After months or years in refugee camps, most resettled in the United States. There they faced the imposing challenge of starting a new life in a highly industrialized, technology-driven society with radically different cultural values and practices."--Back cover.

The Making of Hmong America

The Making of Hmong America PDF Author: Kou Yang
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498546463
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
This study documents Hmong’s involvement in the Secret War in Laos, their refugee exodus from Laos to the refugee camps in Thailand, and the challenges to find third countries to take Hmong refugees. At the time, Hmong and other highlander refugees from Laos were considered unsuitable to be resettled into the United States. He provides detailed research on the adaptation of Hmong Americans to their new lives in the United States, facing discrimination and prejudice, and the advancement of Hmong Americans over the past 40 years. He presents the Hmong American community as an uprooted refugee community that grew from a small population in 1975 to more than 300,000 by the year 2015; spreading to all 50 states while becoming a diverse and complex American ethnic community. To get better insight into their diversity, complexity, and adaptation to different localities, Kou Yang uses the Hmong communities in Montana, Fresno and Denver as case studies. The progress of Hmong Americans over the past 4 decades is highlighted with a list of many achievements in education, high-tech, academia, political participation, the military and other fields. Readers of this book will gain a deeper understanding of the challenges, complex and diverse experience of the Hmong American community. They will also obtain insight into the overall experience of the Hmong, an ethnic people of Diaspora, found in Asia, the Americas, Africa, Australia, and Europe. They are like bristle-cone pines on the rock that have been exposed to all types of weather, climate and conditions, but they won't die.

Whispering Death "tuag Nco Ntsoov"

Whispering Death Author: Robert Curry
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 0595318096
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
Whispering Death is a shattering account of an eighteen-year-old aviator from the streets of America to Vietnam, into the Macomb world of a Secret War run by the CIA, fought with clandestine forces, the Hmong hill people, and a vast and varied air armada. "I highly recommend this book to be read for knowledge of how the Secret War in Laos was fought and why we owe the Hmong so much." Brigadier General Harry C. Aderholt, USAF, Ret. "A superb tale of aviation adventure in the combat skies of Southeast Asia woven with extraordinary skill. This is a gripping, personal story from a new perspective. A must-read for fans of military aviation during the Vietnam War era." Larry Sanborn-Raven FAC-call sign: Sandy "Whispering Death is one of the most comprehensive and fascinating books ever written about America's most covert war. It embodies the desperate fight for freedom these Americans and Hmong faced together, bound as eternal brothers and sisters. And in the end how an American government left my people to die alone." Yang Chee, President, Lao-Hmong American Coalition

Hmong in America

Hmong in America PDF Author: Chippewa Valley Museum (Eau Claire, Wis.)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Hmong (Asian people)
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description


Out of Laos

Out of Laos PDF Author: Roger Warner
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 512

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Book Description
Out of Laos is the epic story of the Hmong tribe's key role in a secret American war on the other side of the world. It's a grand, sweeping saga, like a movie in book form, told through hundreds of previously-unpublished photos and masterpieces of tribal folk art. The Hmong, the CIA's most trusted allies in Laos during the Vietnam War era, were a hardy, highly spiritual people who lived in remote mountain villages, used shamans for healing, and lacked an alphabet -- but learned Western skills with astonishing speed. Young women became skilled hospital nurses, freeing them from the drudgery of farm work; and young men learned to fly propeller-driven warplanes. Valiant in combat, trusted by all the Americans they worked with, they came to the U.S. after their war ended the wrong way. The Hmong are U.S. citizens now, and their population is bigger than any Native American tribe except the Navajo. Produced and edited by a prize-winning historian of the Laos war (Roger Warner's Shooting At The Moon won the Overseas Press Club's book-of-the-year award) Out of Laos uses a documentary-like format. Gorgeously printed in full color, with a hard cover and sewn bindings that open easily, it is deliberately small in page size (to keep costs down) but 512 pages thick. Turn a page, and you typically see a carefully curated photograph or masterpiece of Hmong folk art filling up an entire spread, with just enough narrative text to provide insight and context. Carefully curated by a talented historian, Out of Laos is a mind-blowing origin story, as accessible as any graphic novel or adventure movie ? and it's true. This is a revelatory book, a slice of U.S. history that few Americans - except Hmong-Americans - knew anything about. Until now.

A Great Place to Have a War

A Great Place to Have a War PDF Author: Joshua Kurlantzick
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451667892
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
The untold story of how America’s secret war in Laos in the 1960s transformed the CIA from a loose collection of spies into a military operation and a key player in American foreign policy. January, 1961: Laos, a tiny nation few Americans have heard of, is at risk of falling to communism and triggering a domino effect throughout Southeast Asia. This is what President Eisenhower believed when he approved the CIA’s Operation Momentum, creating an army of ethnic Hmong to fight communist forces there. Largely hidden from the American public—and most of Congress—Momentum became the largest CIA paramilitary operation in the history of the United States. The brutal war lasted more than a decade, left the ground littered with thousands of unexploded bombs, and changed the nature of the CIA forever. With “revelatory reporting” and “lucid prose” (The Economist), Kurlantzick provides the definitive account of the Laos war, focusing on the four key people who led the operation: the CIA operative whose idea it was, the Hmong general who led the proxy army in the field, the paramilitary specialist who trained the Hmong forces, and the State Department careerist who took control over the war as it grew. Using recently declassified records and extensive interviews, Kurlantzick shows for the first time how the CIA’s clandestine adventures in one small, Southeast Asian country became the template for how the United States has conducted war ever since—all the way to today’s war on terrorism.

Covert Ops

Covert Ops PDF Author: James E. Parker
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312963408
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
At the same time the Vietnam War was being broadcast into the living rooms of Americans across the country the CIA was conducting a large-scale secret war in northeastern Laos that few heard about. Agency case officer Jim Parker's five years of combat and immersion in Southeast Asian culture had a lasting influence on him and his family. His dramatic, provocative reminiscence of those years is the first account by a participant to portray America's involvement in Laos.

Soul Calling

Soul Calling PDF Author: Joel Pickford
Publisher: Heyday Books
ISBN: 9781597141680
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
A photographic documentary of the Hmong people, both in the United States and overseas. Divided into two parts, the author explores the cultures and communities of Hmong immigrants and Hmong Americans living in Fresno, California as well as the dramatically different way of life of Hmong villagers in Laos.

The Latehomecomer

The Latehomecomer PDF Author: Kao Kalia Yang
Publisher: Coffee House Press
ISBN: 1566892627
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
In search of a place to call home, thousands of Hmong families made the journey from the war-torn jungles of Laos to the overcrowded refugee camps of Thailand and onward to America. But lacking a written language of their own, the Hmong experience has been primarily recorded by others. Driven to tell her family’s story after her grandmother’s death, The Latehomecomer is Kao Kalia Yang’s tribute to the remarkable woman whose spirit held them all together. It is also an eloquent, firsthand account of a people who have worked hard to make their voices heard. Beginning in the 1970s, as the Hmong were being massacred for their collaboration with the United States during the Vietnam War, Yang recounts the harrowing story of her family’s captivity, the daring rescue undertaken by her father and uncles, and their narrow escape into Thailand where Yang was born in the Ban Vinai Refugee Camp. When she was six years old, Yang’s family immigrated to America, and she evocatively captures the challenges of adapting to a new place and a new language. Through her words, the dreams, wisdom, and traditions passed down from her grandmother and shared by an entire community have finally found a voice. Together with her sister, Kao Kalia Yang is the founder of a company dedicated to helping immigrants with writing, translating, and business services. A graduate of Carleton College and Columbia University, Yang has recently screened The Place Where We Were Born, a film documenting the experiences of Hmong American refugees. Visit her website at www.kaokaliayang.com.

Hmong and American

Hmong and American PDF Author: Vincent K. Her
Publisher: Minnesota Historical Society Press
ISBN: 0873518551
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
Farmers in Laos, U.S. allies during the Vietnam War, refugees in Thailand, citizens of the Western world, the stories of the Hmong who now live in America have been told in detail through books and articles and oral histories over the past several decades. Like any immigrant group, members of the first generation may yearn for the past as they watch their children and grandchildren find their way in the dominant culture of their new home. For Hmong people born and educated in the United States, a definition of self often includes traditional practices and tight-knit family groups but also a distinctly Americanized point of view. How do Hmong Americans negotiate the expectations of these two very different cultures? This book contains a series of essays featuring a range of writing styles, leading scholars, educators, artists, and community activists who explore themes of history, culture, gender, class, family, and sexual orientation, weaving their own stories into depictions of a Hmong American community where people continue to develop complex identities that are collectively shared but deeply personal as they help to redefine the multicultural America of today.