The US wasn’t doing anything to Laos explicitly. The carpet bombing was covert.
I think perhaps you are forgetting that the CIA didn’t recruit every single Hmong person in Laos and somehow keep them safe from its illegal bombing campaign. There were still plenty of non aligned civilians, women and children etc.
Take a look at a map of “Operation Barrel Roll” etc you will see at a glance that most of the 250 million cluster bombs were deployed in the same highland part of Laos where the Hmong predominantly lived. The target was Vietnamese fighters sure but it recklessly affected everyone. Unexploded ordinance is a problem there even to this day.
The US wasn’t doing anything to Laos explicitly. The carpet bombing was covert.
I think perhaps you are forgetting that the CIA didn’t recruit every single Hmong person in Laos and somehow keep them safe from its illegal bombing campaign. There were still plenty of non aligned civilians, women and children etc.
Take a look at a map of “Operation Barrel Roll” etc you will see at a glance that most of the 250 million cluster bombs were deployed in the same highland part of Laos where the Hmong predominantly lived. The target was Vietnamese fighters sure but it recklessly affected everyone. Unexploded ordinance is a problem there even to this day.
Jesus, man, one wonders if the Romans would have been as fucked up as us if they also had B-52s.