Harvesting Pa Chay's Wheat: The Hmong & America's Secret War in Laos

In Harvesting Pa Chay's Wheat, Keith Quincy exposes, with damning clarity, what has been long excluded from the official record of America's military involvement in Southeast Asia: the secret war in Laos and its tragic consequences for the Hmong people and their culture. Exploited for the geographical location of their ancestral lands by the French, Americans, Vietnamese, and Chinese and callously manipulated by the same groups because of the nonaggressive, agrarian structure of their tribal units, by the early 1980s virtually the entire Hmong society had fled to Thailand and the United States, making them a people, a culture, a whole way of being, in exile. Keith Quincy's landmark work shows us the how and why of this terrible outcome, lest we forget that when the fighting stops the devastations of war go on.