Major Ly Tou Xiong

Apropos of nothing, I was pleased earlier today to run across a photo of my late friend and comrade in arms Major Ly Tou Xiong. I had the pleasure of working with him for a few months at Long Tieng, Laos, in 1972. He was one of General Vang Pao's pilots, and in addition to flying T-28 fighter-bombers, he flew the O-1 aircraft as a forward air controller (FAC). In his capacity as a FAC he was responsible for performing visual reconnaissance and directing airstrikes. After each FAC mission he would debrief with me, and I would include what he reported in my daily intelligence summary. He was smart, tough, and classy, and I enjoyed talking with him. I left Long Tieng in November 1972, and in December 1973 Ly Tou Xiong was killed in action, flying at very low altitude in marginal weather. When my adopted son Yer asked me to name his first son a couple of years ago, I gave him both a Lao name (Phoubane, after a pilot I worked with at Savannakhet) and a Hmong name (Ly Tou Xiong).

There seem to be only two extant photos of him, both rather small images. However, thanks to the T-28 Trojan Foundation's website [http://www.t28trojanfoundation.com/chao-pha-khao.html], I now have a considerably larger version of one of them. It's detailed enough to be enlarged and cropped so that you can see his features as well as his confident posture.

In recent years I've reconnected with a handful of surviving Hmong pilots, and I cherish my connection with them (especially Koua Xiong, who has been like a second father to my son Vong). Knowing these men and working with them was a rare privilege. As I said last April to an auditorium full of students at a Hmong high school in Milwaukee, you literally cannot imagine how brave these guys were, how hard they worked, and how good they were at what they did.