The Vietnam War Is Better For My Parents

Being a Hmong-American in the United States was hard. Growing up in a community that was full of Americans, and being in a private school in my early years, (consisting mostly of Americans and little diversity) was difficult. In that kind of environment, I never saw each person differently. The characteristics that I saw were our skin color, and another distinction that I saw was our religious and cultural backgrounds. I started to lose touch of my own culture and identity as a Hmong-American girl. My family told me that in the stages of my toddler years, I used to be good at speaking my native tongue until I started school.

It was very tough for the Hmong’s that were still in Vietnam and Laos after the war. The American armed forces was these people’s only protection and after they just picked up and left for their home shores the Hmong people that were still alive faced severe hardships. They had no food and water and most of their homes were all destroyed. Most of the men and young adult boys were killed in the war and the Vietnamese and Laos soldiers were still pursing the Hmong people because they wanted to terminate the Hmong people. It was also tough for the Hmong people that were left because the American’s had stopped bringing food drops along with medical supplies.

Growing up without parents is a rough task, but growing up without parents amongst a raging war is absurd. Having to run and hide in fear as your village is raided by North Vietnam soldiers is something no one should have to experience, but to those such as my dad, who has experienced this, it can be terrorizing. My dad grew up in the little town of Long Cheng, Laos living day to day struggling to survive. Living conditions for the lower class in Laos was already harsh enough, but when the Vietnam War broke out in 1961 these conditions got even worse. My father and many other Hmongs in Laos were in great danger of the communist armies.

Wars are a difficult place to be. “THE VIETNAM WAR transformed a generation” (Roberts 1). With all that happened during the war such as exposure to

I have learned a lot about what life was like at the time of the Vietnam War by interviewing my grandfather. My grandfather, Franklin Torr, was living in Dover, NH at the time, in his late thirties, married, and had three young children. The Vietnam War impacted my grandfather’s life in a unique way. One aspect of his life that changed at the start of the war was that a lot of his tenants, in the mobile home he owned, were in the New Hampshire National Guard and were stationed in Vietnam, flying missions, and some were advisors. He said the following about them; “Of the tenants that fought in the war, they thought they were doing the right thing at the time” When asked if he could provide a story of one of his Vietnam War veterans, he said that not a lot of them liked to talk about their war experiences in depth, two of his tenants that served in Vietnam died in Vietnam. One of his former classmates was a Marine Colonel, one thing he remembers this man mentioning was; “the troops did a great job while they were there”. The most shocking thing that he remembers from this

The Vietnam war was an absolutely brutal time in American history. The war lasted for the majority of the 1960s and left many young men dead. The short story “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien and the film Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam give us just a glance into the war by giving using the three themes of fear, pressures, and blame/guilt to embody the concept of war and how it absolutely changes a person. War not only destroys countries, but it destroys people.

during the vietnam war the US fought two wars at the same time the one in vietnam and the one back home between the government and its people. As time went by the US knew they had no chance of winning the war in vietnam so the US then tried to bring home all its troops and get out of vietnam. When a ceasefire agreement was made on February 1972 the US evacuated their troops and left the Hmong soldiers who were left behind to fight the North Vietnamese bye themselves. After US left the Hmong people were killed for helping the US.

However, alternating between Hmong and English at school confused this crowd of people I went to school with, thus creating a boulder of stereotypes of the Hmong language. In fifth grade, it was my first time I ever heard, “Do you speak Chinese?” Trying to be in an environment where learning and diversity should be welcome it only confused my sense of self because now I felt that I couldn’t express who I am at school in words that could’ve been explained properly in Hmong. This idea that alternating between languages can produce stereotypes of one’s culture made me aware of how I can speak to others in the public.

During what is called The Secret War (1953-75), thousands of Hmong fought in the Royal Lao Army led by General Vang Pao against the communist Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese military, on behalf of the U.S. and France, who promised to let them come to the U.S. and receive veterans’ benefits if defeated. France and the U.S. broke their promise, and thousands of Hmong survivors and veterans were forced to evacuate their country by foot in the most agonizing and dehumanizing of conditions, many dying along the way. Many of them, despite all odds, managed to make it to refugee camps where conditions were also miserable. Finally, when the Hmong were forced to resettle, many were brought to the U.S., but not after some delays and without ever receiving veterans’ benefits. They were placed in certain cities in the U.S., including Merced.

In 1975, the ‘Fall of the Saigon’ marked the end of the Vietnam War, which prompted the first of two main waves of Vietnamese emigration towards the US. The first wave included Vietnamese who had helped the US in the war and “feared reprisals by the Communist party.” (Povell)

“During the Vietnam War, General Vang Pao galvanized the Hmong - an ethnic minority in Laos - to leave their farms and villages and fight the communist invasion from North Vietnam. After the CIA pulled out of Laos in 1975, Vang Pao helped resettle tens of thousands of Hmong refugees to California, Wisconsin and Minnesota” (Robert Siegel, 2011, p.6). These actions had an impact on us Hmong people because without him doing that, me, my parents, or my grandparents wouldn’t be here right now and I wouldn’t even exist. So he gave me and us Hmong people a better chance at life.

The Hmong were a tremendous Help to the Americans in the Vietnam war, they had shown the Americans where to go and aided them in gunfights, they helped heal some men who had injuries. Many Americans who were injured had aided by the Hmong people. The Hmong who consequently supported the American Military was called a terrorist. In return, they helped the Hmong, the bomb called the yellow rain dropped and killed a huge amount of innocent Hmong and died. The Yellow Rain was designed to kill the northern Vietnam army but had a large widespread killed radius (BOFFEY). The U.S couldn’t stop the war and brought some of the Hmong to America to help and ignited a new life trying to free them from their misery, hell, and torture. The Hmong held a parade

As a child, around the age of five, I became friends with the children of a family that had just moved to our neighborhood from Hawaii. The parents would occasionally make statements in a language that the children could not speak. I realize now that they were making these statements in Hawaiian, although they did not speak the language fluently, and their children did not speak the language at all. Unfortunately, this loss of language from one generation to the next has been quite common in Hawaii since the early nineteen-hundreds when the influence of the United States resulted in institutionalized language death.

The Hmong people were terrified of their own governments. They feared retaliation and punishment for siding with the United States during the Vietnam War. One veteran of the war stated that he still had family hiding in the trees of Laos as recently as 2010. Kia Mai Vang 's, who was interviewed by Nancy Pasternack, said her mother remembers her "grandfather carrying her for a month through the forest" to escape punishment from the Vietnamese government after the war (Pasternack 2). The struggle for the Hmong’s after the Vietnam War was dreadful. They were left to survive in a country they just fought against, with no alliances to help.

The Vietnam War was an international conflict that encompassed and extended towards many regions of the world such as France, the USSR, the United States, etc. Lasting for 20 years from 1955 to 1975, there lied a significant amount of time for internal relationships existing between Vietnam and other foreign countries. The by-product, as a result, were Amerasian which is a racial term used to identify the offsprings born in Asia, but fathered by a foreign man usually during the War. I chose to focus on Amerasians existing in Vietnam specifically because I am of Vietnamese descent myself and have an extensive amount of background knowledge regarding the country. However, after 1975 when the war ended, American soldiers fled back to the United