The slaying of six hunters in the woods of Wisconsin registered in my mind only dimly as a story when I first read of it earlier in the week, even when the accused killer turned out to be a Hmong whose family had come to America after the war in Indochina. But by Wednesday morning the papers were reporting that the accused killer had given a statement that he had opened fire only after other hunters had, as the New York Times reported, cursed him with racial epithets and that one of them had shot at him. And it turns out that the spokesman for the Laotian community, Cha Vang, is the son of Vang Pao.

Suddenly I found myself leaning forward at the breakfast table and explaining to the children about Vang Pao. I met the legendary, near mythic leader of the anti-communist Laotian hill-tribesmen only once, when he came by for coffee with the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal. It was several years after America had abandoned the war for Indochina. The first Reagan administration was just getting underway, and there had been some talk that America might back a new effort to harass the communist regimes in Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos.

The Hmong were also still trying to get the world to comprehend that the communists actually were using some kind of poison gas to drive them out of the highlands. I remember thinking, when Vang Pao entered the room, that I had rarely met an individual with as remarkable a sense of military dignity and command, though he was not a large man and was wearing a civilian business suit. Vang Pao took his seat with the editors around a coffee table, and he talked quietly of the struggle of his people for their own cause – and America’s – against the communists.

Even today it is one of the most important, least talked about chapters of the Cold War. Backed by the Central Intelligence Agency, the Hmong who inhabited the mountains of Laos and the Montagnards who lived in the central highlands of Vietnam fought the communists in countless small engagements, in small villages or military encampments scattered over thousands of square miles a long way from the television cameras or even the scriveners. They helped disrupt the communist supply line known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Their wives and children stayed with them as they waged their war for years.

Those of us who were lucky enough to spend a night or two or three among these people – as I did with the Montagnards of Vietnam – invariably left with a profound admiration. An American pilot who fought with the Hmong in Laos, Phillip Jennings, remembers their affinity for Americans and their trustworthiness. When they said a runway was secure, he told me this week, you could trust them. This is one reason why so many of us felt America owed them a special obligation once the war was over and argued so passionately for bringing in the refugees. America is lucky to have them.

The man who is being held for the killings in Wisconsin, Chai Soua Vang, is reported to have come to America in 1980 and to have worked as a truck driver. The New York Times quotes WCCO television in Minneapolis as saying that he was trained as a sharpshooter in the California National Guard. The Times reports that Mr. Vang told police that when a group of hunters came upon him and surrounded him, he had walked away, then looked back to find one of the hunters pointing a rifle at him. He said he then dropped to a crouch and was fired on. That is when Mr. Vang is alleged to have started firing.

No doubt the law will sort out the facts of what happened in the north woods of Wisconsin, though the Hmong are worried about revenge for the killings in Wisconsin. On Tuesday, what the Times calls a “group of prominent Hmong-Americans eager to distance their community from the killings and avert a possible backlash” held a news conference in St. Paul, Minn. “We stand before you as representatives of the greater law-abiding Hmong community to unconditionally – unconditionally – condemn these atrocities,” Vang Pao’s son, Cha Vang, said. “What happened in Wisconsin is in now way representative of the Hmong people and what they stand for.”

It’s important that the event not obscure the larger story of the Hmong. Mr. Jennings, remarked to me this week of the sad fact that “so many people today don’t know anything about the Hmong.” The publisher of the Hmong Times, Cheu Lee, told the New York Times that his readers are telling him, “If you write something, write that we are not all bad.” Mr. Lee can assure his readers that nothing can erase the heroism of the Hmong. The fact is that for decades to come there will be Americans who will feel a rush of emotion and the instinct to pay honor whenever a mention is made of the hill-dwellers who fought so heroically for our common cause in the years in Indochina.