Hmong

The world is littered with monuments to warriors – from kings down to the Unknown Soldier – but how long would it take you to find one memorial to the Unknown War Orphan …?

There’s at least one thing common to all wars: a blatant asymmetry between responsibility and suffering. The more influence someone has on the decisions and actions leading to armed conflict, the lesser the likelihood that they will find themselves homeless, starving, raped, or maimed.

What are the odds of spotting the illustrious general’s wife among a sad procession of people fleeing from the advancing front by foot, or of finding the remains of a propaganda minister or an imam among the torn pieces of human bodies in a trench hit by a missile, or of meeting a prince in an overcrowded and dingy POW camp – or of seeing those bigheads’ children roam the wastelands between the lines, motherless and fatherless, in search of a morsel of food? How likely would that be and how likely was it in any war?

The great leaders, the chieftains, the emperors, the pashas, the biggies of human history and present, along with their entourage of technocratic mandarins, nabobs of big finance and big industry, clan elders, religious pundits, »noblemen«, mafia bosses – whoever forms the kind of elites in the respective time and place, the kind of elites who start wars: they will happily enjoy the blood-stained spoils and laurels if all goes well. But if the outcome is less fortunate, they mostly fall on their feet and only seldom suffer a fate commensurable to their responsibility.

On the other end of this spectrum, we find those who are, by nature, free from any evil and any guilt and who, at the same time, have zero means to influence or evade events, who are utterly powerless and maximally dependent on others – and who pay dearly for wars they cannot even understand: children.

Like the little Hmong girl shown above.

I’ve seen a gripping documentary about a not so well-known facet of the wars in South East Asia (or Indochina as it was then called) from after the Second World War until far into the 1970s: the civil war in Laos and the role that the Hmong played in it.

The Hmong are a people settling the mountainous regions in northern Vietnam and Laos and also in southern China. Some of them sided with the nationalist and later communist forces in Vietnam and Laos but most of them fought on the side of the Laotian Royal forces and proved themselves staunch allies of the Americans during what became known as the Secret War in Laos.

The Hmong blood flowed in streams, so much so that the guerilla regiments that were hastily raised and sent into battle after only some weeks of training were increasingly composed of child soldiers.

And when finally the war was lost, it was not over for the Hmong. Facing reprisals from the victorious communists, many thousands of them fled the country trying to find safety in Thailand.

The documentary shows pictures of the civilians, marked by fear, exhaustion, hunger, and illness; among them children, so many children. Seeing those kids’ faces cannot let anyone unaffected.

A Laotian woman who was interviewed for the film told the story of her flight as a little girl. Of how her parents managed to cross the forests with her and her siblings and how they finally arrived at the bank of the river Mekong. How could they cross a huge, rushing river patrolled by the enemy? Her parents hastily improvised crude life jackets, just two pairs of bamboo canes fixed across one another and leaving an opening in the middle through which you could stick your head and arms. Somehow they made it. However, they lost sight of each other and the little girl had to fend for herself in Thailand. She found a refugee camp and joined a host of war orphans and children who had lost their parents somewhere on the way to the camp and were still hoping to find them again.

…

How often don’t we stand in front of memorials to King X who had conquered some other king’s lands, or of Grand Marshal Y who so gallantly pushed his cavalry squadron into that brillant (though vain) charge, or of Sultan Z who reconquered the capital of the infidels; and in what awe don’t we look at all the gold and the marble and the heroic faces raised toward the sky? – We should not. We should laugh at them or spit at them. And we should instead build a memorial to the Unknown War Orphan.

The Laotian woman mentioned above has captured her recollections on a so-called story cloth, a traditional way of keeping memories alive and passing them to the descendants. I found this article about Hmong textile art on the Garland Magazine website: »The fabric of memory: Story cloth as art and history for Hmong in USA«. If you look closely at the story cloth shown above the article, you will recognize the Mekong, the patrolling boats – and the family swimming for their lives.