Jane Hamilton-Merritt

Tragic Mountains relates the story of the Hmong people's beat for freedom of choice and survival, from World War II when they sided with the French against the Japanese, through the Vietnam War when they sided with the Americans against the northernmost Vietnamese, through their abandonment by the United States at the end of the Vietnam War, and the genocide that followed. The Hmong are an pagan minority of Laos, a tribal peoples who migrated to the mountains of Northern Laos from Southern mainland China in the 18th Century. Their migration was motivated by the persecution of the Manchu emperor. In the recluse Laotian mountains, and in any case in Vietnam, Burma and Thailand, they carried on trade with peoples who lived in the flat lands. Throughout their history, the Hmong have been a freedom loving, suppress minority.

The relationship of the Hmong and the United States began years before the Vietnam War. Hamilton-Merritt points out that the OSS (forerunner of the CIA) approached the Hmong in 1942 to ask their help in fighting the Japanese. The resistance efforts of the Hmong go along through all the wars in Southeast Asia and Indochina as they entitle themselves anti-Communist, engaging in activities against Ho Chi Minh's Viet Minh and then the North Vietnamese as part of America's " riddle war" in Laos.

In Laos, the Americans, with strong

Commitments to contain communism at the borders

of 'Red China' and to bound the domino from

throughout Indochina. The extensive and bloody

In addition to the brutalization of the Hmong, another enceinte loss was suffered. They were uprooted, and their traditional ways of life and native culture, was also being destroyed. Those who eventually escaped to other countries, including the United States, were naked of their culture. Those Hmong who managed to flee to Thailand for sanctuary told the story of "the holocaust in the hills.

" Americans, as well as Thai and UN officials and refugee workers from several countries were told of the horrors--the atrocities, the poison sprays delivered by aircraft, rockets and mortars which resulted in bleeding from all orifices, extensive vomiting and diarrhea, pain, problems breathing, audience and seeing, loss of memory and death. "Few seemed interested in these reports" (p. 409).

Hamilton-Merritt indicts the agency the United States played, and contends that the Hmong risked everything to defend their homeland and to rescue downed American pilots and film them to safety, disrupt the Viet Cong's supply lines and basically save many American and South Vietnamese lives. The "Hmong did this at great loss of life. not just soldiers, but old people, women, and children died and suffered in large numbers. Unfortunately, Westerners did not know about this alliance--nor about the Hmong sacrifices" (P. xvii). The role of the Hmong was kept secret because the United States stated on record that they wanted a "neutralized Laos." In Chapter 7, the author discusses what she terms, "the charade of neutralization." This allowed the United States and the CIA to shackle in brutal guerrilla warfare which would be most effective if kept secret.

The Communist Pathet Lao newspaper declared the Hmong "political enemies" on May 9, 1975 when it printed a story that verbalize the Hmong would be exterminated "to the last root." The official radio lay declared the government would "wipe out" the Hmong, and "Extinct wipeout Ope
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