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An airport encounter with two new friends
By DICK TRAIL
McCook
Recently I was sitting in the lounge at Red Willow Aviation visiting with a fellow pilot and in walked a pair of young men.
Both were short in stature, black hair, brown skinned and bright brown eyes. They were dressed in green military-style flight suits. Asking what they were flying the response was "Our Cessna 152 Citation!"
Now everybody knows a Cessna 152 is a small single engine prop driven trainer and the Citation is one of a family of business jets. The two terms just don't go together! Their response piqued my interest.
The two smiled at me with a twinkle in their eyes when I asked their ethnic backgrounds, "Are you Chinese or Vietnamese"?
Their response with a slight accent, "Laotian"! "Ah you are Hmong," I responded.
Their incredulous re-sponse "How you know?" Then I asked if they knew Vang Pao and instantly I was with friends.
During the Vietnam war, we flight crews were briefed on the possibility of a bailout over the country of Laos. We were informed that there were Highland Lao's and Lowland Lao's.
It isn't hard to tell, because one lives in the fertile valleys and the other live on the mountain tops and upland plains. The country of Laos was ostensively neutral but the Lowland Lao's were known to turn over escaping Americans to the North Vietnamese Army. If you fell in among the Highlanders, the Hmong (pronounced mong) people, you would be defended and taken to the American Forces.
Eventually I flew many tanker missions over the beautiful country of Laos.
Bordering on North Vietnam, Laos was where we met our F-4 and F-105 receivers, fighters laden with bombs, rockets and extra fuel drop tanks, flying from their home bases in Thailand. We would top them off with fuel and then loiter until they returned from their mission north needing more gas to make it back home. Sadly, too many times the empty fighters returning were less in number than the ones we refueled heading north.
The U.S. denied to the world that we were flying and fighting in that neutral country and to keep up the pretext we flight crews were always careful to keep outside a thirty mile circle around the capital of Vientiane.
From my perch in an air-conditioned jet flying above 25,000 feet, I was privileged to view that lush many-hued, green steep mountainous country. It seemed that there was always a constant pall of smoke from the thousand small fires used to clear the jungle for slash-and-burn agriculture.
Having been raised in production agriculture, I marveled at the fact that the majority of the food produced in the world is from the slash-and-burn agriculture as laid out below me.
Actually, the CIA had a large number of personnel secretly operating in Laos and had cultivated a close ally in Vang Pao the head of the Hmong people.
We christened him "General," but perhaps warlord was a more appropriate title. The Hmong were a Stone Age tribe who over the centuries had warred against the Lowland Lao and North Vietnamese. They considered the Americans their great ally because after all we furnished guns, ammo, food and medical care to help their cause.
At the end of the war large numbers of Hmong were allowed (helped to) immigrate to the United States. The last I knew General Vang Pao was living California.
The Hmong were wonderful warriors, perfectly suited to guerrilla warfare in the steep jungle covered mountainous country of their homeland.
A few were trained by the U.S. and became excellent fighter/bomber pilots in converted T-28s, basically the very same airplane that I flew during Air Force pilot training in 1960.
Sadly most of the tribe's young men were killed in the war and we left thousands of the remainder to their unfortunate fate when we cut and ran at the end of the war.
Our story of abandoning a faithful ally is not one of America's finest moments.
My two "new" friends told me that they had flown from St. Paul, Minn., the night before. They spent the night in McCook and were headed for Sacramento, Calif., I believe it was.
Now flying all the way to California in a 100 mile per hour little Cessna is no waltz in the park. For one thing, the little Cessna is rather limited in altitude so they would have had to head south almost to Mexico to fly around all the high mountains between St. Paul and their destination.
I fit rather tightly into the little trainer but these two were slight of build and probably had plenty of room. With their happy outlook on life I am sure these two gritty young men happily made it to their destination whatever it happened to be.
Just seeing these two men, out on a great adventure, makes me reflect on what a wonderful country we live in today.
A country where a Stone Age people can become sophisticated members of society in one generation! Freedom is a wonderful gift.