One of Ours

SARABURI, Thailand — The reward for helping the Americans during the Vietnam War took 29 years to materialize, but for the 15,000 Laotian Hmong in this sun-baked refugee camp, it was a payout beyond their wildest dreams: U.S. citizenship.

"I can't believe we'll be Americans," said Sui Yang, 60, who fought with CIA-backed Hmong guerrillas against the communist Pathet Lao in the mountains of Laos. "We heard rumors for years this was going to happen, but they were always only rumors. Most of us gave up hoping. I thought we were going nowhere."

Yang, a soldier in America's "secret" war in Laos in the 1960s and '70s, rolled up his trousers to show scars from deep bullet wounds. He spoke of U.S. choppers that supplied his guerrilla band in the jungles, and of downed U.S. pilots the Hmong rescued. He remembered his shock when the U.S. abandoned Indochina in 1975, and when Laos fell to the communists...