Word: pathetic
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...lead-up to the Vietnam War, North Vietnam carved a maze of transportation routes through the jungles of Laos, creating a crucial supply link later known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Laos was in the middle of a civil war between the Royal Lao government and the communist Pathet Lao. Seeking to disrupt the North's supply routes, the Americans enlisted the help of the Royal Lao government's highest-ranking Hmong leader, Vang Pao. He welcomed American guns, money and expertise, assembling thousands of Hmong fighters from the hills. Together, they would tackle a common enemy, the communists...
After Saigon fell, America abandoned the secret army, and in 1975, as many as 10,000 Hmong were slaughtered at the hands of the ascendant Pathet Lao, according to Roger Warner, an author who is researching a book on Vang Pao. Others fled to neighboring Thailand and the U.S., where about 100,000 were eventually resettled. It was not until 1997 that Washington officially acknowledged the valor of the Hmong soldiers. A small stone with a copper plaque was placed in their honor between the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the John F. Kennedy Eternal Flame in Arlington National...
...fifth and latest Dr. Siri mystery, Curse of the Pogo Stick, is set in 1976, shortly after the communist takeover of Laos, and revolution is still very much in the air. The doctor, a former Pathet Lao guerilla who happens to have studied medicine in Paris, has been pressed, with much grumbling, into service as a coroner. Politics rudely intrudes when a body arrives in his morgue booby-trapped with a live grenade. Dr. Siri soon finds himself untangling a mystery involving Hmong insurgents, a possible demonic possession, and a plot by a female terrorist known as the Lizard...
...Among those charged with conspiracy to kill, kidnap and maim, among other accusations, was General Vang Pao, a member of the Hmong minority whose guerrilla forces had been funded by the CIA during the Vietnam War to fight the Viet Cong-aligned communists of the Pathet Lao. Along with an estimated 200,000 Laotian Hmong, Vang Pao fled to the U.S. after America withdrew from Indochina in 1975 and communist forces took over Laos and Vietnam. Now, the 77-year-old ex-CIA operative, along with nine other Laotian-born Americans and a former U.S. Army ranger who served...
...Minh Trail through central Laos and to rescue downed American flyers involved in a covert bombing campaign. The Hmong campaign was not publicly acknowledged by the U.S. until 1994, when former CIA Director William Colby told Congress of the Hmong's "heroism and sacrifice." Shortly after the Pathet Lao regime took power in 1975-two years after the U.S. had left the country-tens of thousands of Hmong refugees began arriving in neighboring Thailand to escape persecution in Laos. Many were relocated to the U.S. In Laos itself, many Hmong have resettled outside the mountains, and the Lao official claims...