Hmong leader Vang Pao dies
Vang, 81, was admitted to Clovis Community Medical Center on Dec. 26. Vang apparently was admitted shortly after making his annual appearance at the Hmong International New Year event at the Fresno Fairgrounds.
Charlie Waters, a friend and veterans advocate in Fresno, said Vang was suffering from pneumonia and an ongoing heart problem.
Vang is revered by many as a father figure and leader who helped bring and settle the Hmong community into American life.
But he also has been controversial — federal authorities in 2007 charged him and 10 others with conspiring to violently overthrow communist Laos. Charges against Vang were dropped in 2009.
Yet the arrest galvanized Hmong Americans who saw Vang as symbolizing the fight for public acknowledgment of the Hmong role in the war and the liberation of those still living in Laotian jungle. The central San Joaquin Valley has one of the largest Hmong populations in the country. Many Hmong — some of whom fought beside American soldiers during the Vietnam War — came here after fleeing Laos.
It was conflict that paved a path to prominence for Vang, viewed by some as a king and others as George Washington of the Hmong.
Born in December 1929 to farmers in a Laotian village, he became a teenage translator for French paratroopers fighting the Japanese in Laos during World War II.
Vang was selected to train at a French officers’ school in Vietnam and became a commissioned officer in the French army. Laotian leaders made Vang a general, even though the Hmong were a small ethnic minority in the country.
In 1961, Vang was recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency to lead a secret army of Hmong soldiers against Laotian communists and their North Vietnamese counterparts using routes through Laos to supply their troops.