Squirrels and Hmongs

We have a couple of squirrels that we feed in a tree outside our kitchen window. High up I stick an ear of corn on a nail that they pick off the kernels one by one and eat only the germ. The rest of the kernel gets dropped for the birds that eat off the ground. I also have a gallon glass jar about six feet high that the scrappy little animals have to go inside to grab the raw unshelled peanuts that I drop in each evening. Obviously, they hate going inside to grab the nuts but dash in quickly to grab one to eat Outside or carry away to hoard and bury for later. Lately, I’ve collected the pits from the Bing cherries we love to snack on raw and mix those hard-shelled pits in with the peanuts. Those little pits get grabbed even before the peanuts. If they are planting them I should have cherry trees sprouting all over our yard. Scrappy little Fox Squirrels are just fun to watch.

Girls gymnastics we especially enjoy watching perform during these Olympics. The Gold Medalist Suni Lee is an obvious favorite. Curious about her ethnic background I found that she comes from the group that calls themselves Hmong-Americans. As a baby Suni emigrated to the U.S from Laos with her parents and now lives in Minnesota with her five siblings and extended family. Her father is her biggest champion of her sport’s success and she proudly states that she does it all for him.

Ah, Laos. The three years that I flew refueling missions in support of the war in Vietnam my crew and I spent many hours over the officially neutral country of Laos. According to our official news releases we, the U.S., had no role in Laos. Of course, we in the military knew that was balderdash and that our CIA had many clandestine assets on the ground and in the air over that country. Supply trails ran from North Vietnam down to southern portions of South Vietnam and both the CIA and our “official” Air Force assets monitored that Ho Chi Minh Trail and regularly rained bombs on anything that they could detect moving along the trail.

We Tanker crews flew at 25,000 feet altitude and above a mainly flat terrain called the Plain de Jars which from our height looked somewhat similar to the plains here in Western Nebraska. Running north and south bordering that flat plain ran rows of tall mountains bare on top above the tree line and covered in jungle below.

The jungle was a verdant green and seemed to be constantly threaded with smoke. Those jungles were populated by Stone Age tribes collectively known as Hmong. They burned small patches of jungle and farmed the small cleared areas. In a couple of years, the thin soil was depleted in nutrients and so they simply cleared another area with fire for another farm plot.

The Hmong were not friendly with the Laotian government, the low land Laos, and they certainly had no love for the North Vietnamese Communists. Our CIA cultivated that distrust and encouraged guerilla groups for hit-and-run strikes against the North Vietnamese Army. We also provided air assets to help protect from enemy action against those guerilla armies. All on the hush-hush of course as the American public had no need to know what was going on.

When the anti-war movement in the U.S. forced our government to cut and run from Vietnam the poor Hmong were left in a fix. Our CIA and our military did all that they could to help the Hmong who had been such great allies to emigrate to the United States which a great many did. They seemed to settle in mainly California under their beloved leader named Vang Pao. Another large group also settled in Minnesota. It was from that community that Suni Lee earned her way to the Olympics.

What a story! In Laos, the Hmong had no cities and lived in loosely aligned small villages. Very few schools and most of the population were illiterate. Moving to the U.S. they had to learn the language and the youth to become educated all over several short decades. Evidently, they also learned Christianity as the church that we attended earlier in Merced, California embraced the Hmong community there and held regular weekly Hmong services in that church.

Somehow assimilation can be hard and I remember a story of a young man in Minnesota that went deer hunting. In that area groups leased areas to hunt and trespassers were not welcome. The young Hmong man found a deer stand that was unoccupied and so crawled up to look for deer. The leaseholders discovered him and yelled at him to leave. Evidently, they weren’t kind and yelled threats at him. His response was to shoot and kill several of the objectors which got him arrested and a life sentence in prison.

Hopefully, Gold Medal Winner Suni Lee will be accepted as a proud Minnesotan and her example will help her Hmong people be even better assimilated into the communities where they live, work and contribute.

That is the way I saw it.

Dick Trail