That's an easy one. With the French, we were unfairly taxed. That was OUR fight.
With the Vietnam civil conflict, it didn't involve us. We were used as pawns for a strategic purpose; slowing down and harassing caravan along the Ho Chi Minh trail. It WASN'T our fight.
They weren't interested in the lands that Hmong lived on. Don't give me that crap! Those weren't even our lands! That was Laos soil so save me the sensationalize d propaganda. IT WASN'T OUR FIGHT AND EVERYONE AROUND US KNEW IT EXCEPT US.
I disagree. It did involve us.
We were not invited to vietnam or laos or thailand, but we showed up like uninvited guests. Now, you can say what you will about the leaders of those countries, but at the end of the day, they tolerated us and allowed us to settle. That in itself deserved some show of gratitude on our part.
Secondly, hmong leadership, since the days of first being raised to governmental positions, were already working with and under the ruling party, french or lao. GVP was just another hmong leader in that line of tradition. There's lots of pictures in the website i linked of the lao king and lao princes and lao ministers coming to Long Cheng to congratulate, reward and praise GVP on his successes.
The issue and misperception, among lao and hmong, is that hmong operated as a separate entity with a separate agenda. That's completely false. That perception comes from our own success and the failures of the lao. For example:
In 1872, hordes of Chinese red flag, yellow flag and multicolor flag troops invaded the northern part of Laos. The French leaders contacted the Hmong and recruited them to fight against the invaders. The successful operation increased French confidence in the Hmong.In almost all operations in laos, the hmong were to have the supporting role and the lao the main role because of numbers, since the lao vastly outnumbered us. As it turned out, the lao failed pretty consistently and the hmong would end up shouldering the load the lao were supposed to be doing. That brought the hmong into the spotlight and fuels those misconceptions of separatism.