LONG TIENG, LAOS – We met in the Laotian capital of Vientiane, not far from the spot on the Mekong River where the Xiong family fled to Thailand one night in May 1975. At the time of their escape, it seemed unlikely that they would ever again see their old home of Long Tieng far away in the highlands.
But one morning in November 2023, a Hmong driver came to pick us up and set out on a journey from the capital to the former CIA-run airbase. Long Tieng was so secret when the Xiongs lived there that it did not appear on maps; now, anyone can find the location and directions on Google. Traveling east and north, the van passed rubber trees and strained and rumbled over an increasingly rocky route as Chinese mining trucks loaded with gold and gravel hurtled by.
“I pity your car,” Mayka Xiong told the driver.
Fifty years have passed since the clandestine military base fell to Communist soldiers, forcing tens of thousands of Hmong people to run from persecution for their alliance with Americans in the “Secret War.” Long Tieng closed to outsiders for decades after the Pathet Lao seized control of Laos, living on in Hmong refugees’ memories and the stories shared with younger generations. After Long Tieng reopened to the public in recent years, some Hmong Americans have finally been finding their way back.
As the Xiongs learned, it is no easy journey.
The drive had taken the better part of the day when we came upon a line of eight trucks stopped on the hillside, blocking the road. The driver shut off the engine. Soon came word: A truck had fallen over a little way ahead. “Tonight, we‘ll be sleeping here,” fretted Mayka’s husband Kao.
Mayka, born in 1952, grew up as one of 10 children in east-central Laos, where they carried water from the well every day after school and foraged for vegetables and bamboo shoots to help their parents. Kao was born in 1943 and raised in a village north of Long Tieng, where his parents were prosperous from farming corn, opium and rice.
Their families fled to the Xayaboury province as Royal Lao Army leader Kong Le swept through at the end of 1960. The country fell into civil war as the North Vietnamese Army invaded Laos with the help of the Pathet Lao and occupied the eastern region for its Ho Chi Minh Trail to send supplies and troops to carry out the war against South Vietnam. As the U.S. fought in Vietnam, it trained Hmong fighters to disrupt North Vietnamese operations and battle Communists in Laos.
Major General Vang Pao led their Secret Army, and the U.S. established the almost uninhabited Long Tieng as his headquarters in 1962. Kao moved there as a schoolteacher; Mayka married him and came to Long Tieng in 1966, living there with her husband’s parents as Kao traveled back and forth to teach in various villages and advanced to principal, then superintendent. Forty-thousand people resided in Long Tieng at its peak.
“The Hmong lived in small villages with nothing,” Mayka recalled. “And to go to Long Tieng, that‘s a city — it‘s drama going on, it‘s exciting to live there."
I met Mayka and Kao Xiong of Des Moines after interviewing University of Minnesota Professor Mai Na Lee about the prospect of stopping in Laos during a trip around Southeast Asia. She knew of people visiting Long Tieng over the last decade — even some Hmong Secret War veterans — but noted that the numbers were not high due to concerns about safety and accessibility. Lee introduced me to a Brooklyn Park relative of Mayka’s who invited me to accompany their family to Long Tieng during their travels across Laos.
Lee explained that the Chinese are looking for minerals and metals and cutting down the same forests that used to provide cover for the anti-Communist resistance. “It‘s so sad when you see that, but they’re exploring all over for silver or gold and tin and any kind of metal they can extract, and it‘s doing massive environmental damage on the highlands,” said Lee, an associate professor of history and Asian American studies.
“It‘s an invasion,” she added, “that I think Laos will regret.”
After nearly an hour, the traffic ahead began to move as the sun was setting. We arrived in Long Tieng after dark and went to the home of the Xiongs’ family friend named Beer Lor. The father of four welcomed us inside, where dinner awaited: boiled chicken, chicken soup, sweet rice and a duck salad called larb ped filled with mint, onion and cilantro. He was from Phonsovan, near the Plain of Jars a few hours east. His late father, a colonel in the Communist army after the takeover, had moved here in 2000 and Lor followed suit.
Lor found a job working for the city of Long Tieng, but he said the government never paid him. His family had an orange grove and rice farm on the other side of the mountain, and he made a little money repairing refrigerators, electronics and other items for the townsfolk. His aunt recently moved to the Twin Cities, and he wished he could join her. “It‘s hard to live like this,” said Lor.
The Xiongs had an uncomfortable night down the road at a lodge where the mattresses were hard, the rooms were cold and the price was $4. After rising to the incessant cries of roosters, the family saw that the building had been transformed from what Kao remembered was Vang Pao’s radio station.
The landscape outside was lush and brilliant: Ducks and chickens roamed, and cows lounged on the main road as motorcycles roared by. Hills thick with trees loomed all around. While a number of houses had fallen into disrepair, some were grandly maintained. Driving around, the Xiongs stopped at a Hmong village. Kao joined a group of children playing tuj lub, a traditional top-spinning game. He and Mayka encouraged the children to study hard, but the young people said sometimes the teachers don’t come to school because the government doesn’t pay them.
Kao was excited to see that some old school buildings remained. “We tried to educate [children] in case there is no war, they can have a good future,” Kao said. The school grounds in his day as a superintendent had been well maintained, but he was disappointed to see the grass was overgrown and strewn with trash.
This was Hmong driver Cha Ger Mua’s second time in Long Tieng, having taken one group of Hmong tourists from Minnesota there the year before. When the Communists gained control, his parents fled the base and hid in the jungle, believing in vain that Vang Pao would return. They emerged four years later, forced to accept the new regime. The family landed in a Thai refugee camp in the late 1980s, and a man there took $2,000 from them with false promises that he could get them to the United States. Mua’s family resigned themselves to life back in Laos. He remarked that the economy was “very bad.”
The empty home of General Vang Pao was still standing. A pile of enormous artillery shells rested against a wall. Weathered chairs and a table were still arranged on the second-floor balcony, overlooking an array of smaller houses amid the greenery. The third floor led out to the roof where a helicopter landed to airlift Vang Pao out of Long Tieng on May 14, 1975. A cement square out front marked the site of a small building where Mayka’s brother lived while serving as an interpreter for the general.
The Xiongs’ former house, however, was gone. Mayka excitedly walked through a field and pointed to an opening in the fence, describing how it was on the right side by the pink flowers. Many houses used to sit close to one another on this now vacant land, and Mayka recalled that everybody knew one another’s business from their close proximity.
They saw the ruins of a CIA building and a hospital where Kao’s doctor friend treated many of the injured, marked by stones crumbling in the grass, walls with no ceilings. Most poignant of all was returning to the mile-long runway that transformed Long Tieng into one of the busiest air hubs in the world in the 1960s.
What Mayka remembered most was the wailing women. She often saw helicopters returning from the battlefields carrying slain Hmong soldiers, and felt the anguish of watching young widows kiss their husbands one last time.
Now the outpost was sparsely populated and the cries of sorrow and roar of military aircraft had given way to a haunting silence in the valley. Fog still shrouded the skies, just as it did when Kao’s twin brother died upon crashing his T-28 Trojan into the mountainside during the war.
Kao had stood in this spot every day as he flew back and forth to villages as a school superintendent. He was thinking about all the people he once knew, and still missed, when a van pulled up carrying four Hmong couples living in Madison, Wis. Passenger Welcum Lee enthusiastically greeted Kao. He was a student when Kao was a principal, and this was his first time back in Long Tieng since his family left in 1972.
Lee had kept in touch with Kao after they moved to the Midwest. He remembered how sometimes they didn’t go to school because of the fighting, how it was “very scary” to observe as a boy. His three soldier brothers survived, but many classmates lost their fathers. “It‘s exciting,” Lee said of returning. “It‘s [bringing] memories of when we were young.”
U.S. forces withdrew from Laos in 1973 in accordance with the Paris Peace Accords that also mandated the pullout of American troops in Vietnam. After the fall of Saigon in April 1975, the Pathet Lao took over and the U.S. military evacuated 2,000 people out of Long Tieng. But most of the Hmong were abandoned by Americans — 150,000 in all escaped Laos on their own, walking through the jungle and swimming across the Mekong, suffering starvation and enduring the deaths of loved ones.
Kao’s friend, Vang Pao’s bodyguard, urged him to leave right away. He, Mayka and their five children escaped in a car procured by an uncle. Their youngest child was a mere eight months old, sick with fever and diarrhea. They spent the night at a village along the way, and woke up to find the baby girl cold and stiff. The Xiongs had no choice but to hastily weave a casket and bury her, then carry on their journey.
After spending one year in a Thai refugee camp, they resettled in Iowa. Kao spent many years as a government social worker; Mayka started out as a maid in a hotel and went on to alter clothes for a living. Kao felt that the state suited him because he was fond of hunting and fishing. Mayka, too, appreciated her new home: “I have a better place,” as she put it. She said she told her four children, one of whom died of COVID in 2021, everything about Laos. Yet she felt they didn’t seem very interested.
Mayka’s late brother, the interpreter for Vang Pao, never considered it safe to return to Laos after he resettled in the Midwest. The closest he came, decades later, was going to Thailand, cupping his hands in the Mekong and dousing his head with the water. Then he looked across the waterway proudly toward his old homeland.
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