Fly Until You Die

Chia Youyee Vang recovers a piece of the Secret War that almost no one has written down: the Hmong men from northern Laos recruited into a covert pilot training program run by the US Air Force. She builds the account from oral history, interviewing surviving pilots and their families, and lets their testimony carry the narrative rather than the declassified record. That method is the book's argument, since the official archive was never designed to hold these men in the first place. For a catalog whose history shelf is dominated by American accounts of the war, this is a corrective written by a Hmong American historian working from Hmong sources. Read it alongside Harvesting Pa Chay's Wheat for the general history it sits inside. For university readers, veterans' families, and anyone who assumed the Hmong role in the war was confined to the ground.