Vang Pao’s Last Battle

Word is now being awaited in respect of whether Vang Pao, the hero of the struggle against the communist conquest of Laos, will be able to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. The general’s last battle, so to speak, was brought to our attention by Josh Gerstein, who has been covering the story for Politico and who wrote about Vang Pao for The New York Sun. He sent a dispatch from the Bee, which is issued at Fresno, California, near where Vang Pao died Thursday at the age of 81. Apparently an exception to the usual rules that govern Arlington would have to be made. There have been quite a number of exceptions, we gather, and if ever there were a worthy candidate it would be this extraordinary figure who, in league with the Central Intelligence Agency, carried on one of the most heroic chapters of a war that is too little remembered.

It happens that we met Vang Pao only once, back when your editor was at the Wall Street Journal and the general came in for a meeting with the editorial board. By then years into his exile, the general was wearing a business suit. He spoke little, if any, English, as we recall the meeting. The details are dim. What is not dim, indeed is vivid, is what a commanding figure he was. He just had a quiet way of conducting himself with memorable force and dignity. Modesty isn’t quite the right word. The people around him just seemed to want to give him deference and he them. The astonishing nature of his personality led, after he left the Journal’s editorial room, to a conversation among several of the editors present about the chemistry of leadership.

Whatever the chemistry was, Vang Pao had it — and also had a relationship with his own people that must have been, at least in terms of affection, like what George Washington had with Americans. Except that the Hmong lost their battle and their homeland, and Vang Pao spent the latter decades of his life in exile here in America. Thousands of Hmong followed him here, and it hasn’t been an easy time for their community (Clint Eastwood offered but one glimpse of it in Gran Torino). The short memory of their heroism is one of the reasons these columns grew so animated when, in 2007, Vang Pao was arrested by federal authorities and actually put in prison to await trial on charges that he had a role in a plot to attack Laos. Our own view was that if the U.S. government wanted to know whether a communist headquarters in Laos should be attacked, the way to determine it would be to ask Vang Pao. Eventually, America dropped its charges against Vang Pao. Bringing them had clearly been an error of judgment. He would have, as we said at the time, towered over any courtroom into which he was brought.

All the more reason for the authorities to look favorably on the proposal to make a place for Vang Pao at Arlington. His followers began coming to America in 1976, and today there are more than 200,000 Hmong in America, according to an account on Wikipedia. They make up barely more than half a percentage point of the American population. It is hard to imagine any community of strivers for whom the honor of a burial in Arlington would mean more. It is also hard to imagine more than a few whose burial at Arlington would add greater glory to the already sacred ground. It would not be unreasonable, if necessary, for Presidents Obama and Bush and the leadership of Congress to get involved in the Arlington decision. It would go a long way toward righting a historical record that will need to be understood by Americans for generations to come.