"Every day we saw six or seven bodies floating on the Mekong. Every night the communists would bang on doors and take people away. We never heard of these people again. My wife and I, like many other Laotians, fled to Thailand when the communists came into power. They would have killed us otherwise. You see, I had fought for the Americans against the communists during the secret war."
I met Phonesavanh while on an eight hour bus journey from Vientaine, the capital of Laos, to Tha Khek, a small town in the centre of Laos. I was going trekking, while Phonesavanh, who had just arrived from Georgia (US), was visiting his mother.
"My mother is dying so I came back to see her. This is my first visit to Laos in 30 years. Now the government allows us to enter Laos and we do not risk being imprisoned and killed anymore. The Lao government wants to show the rest of the world how liberal it is."
Turbulance in the region started in 1961 when the CIA recruited Hmong Royal Lao Army General Vang Pao during the Vietnam war. General Vang Pao formed an army from troops which were made up of Lao Hmong fighters.
In return, the Americans provided arms, training and food to the Lao Hmong ethnic group. Hence, what is known as the 'secret war' began.
The war was secret because it breached the 1954 and the 1962 Geneva Agreements - that Laos was to remain neutral of foreign military intervention.
Ex-General Vang Pao lamented how "we lost about 35,000 people helping the US during the war. Many thousands were injured, many disabled. We suffered all these human losses. We helped America. We disrupted the Ho Chi Minh trail for them. We rescued downed US pilots along the border of Laos and Vietnam. We helped protect their radar site at Phou Pha Thi. The US owes us. They are indebted to us. But they left the mess for the UN to clean up."
From 1964 to 1973, the US dropped more than two million tons of bombs over Laos during 580,000 missions. The bombing was an effort to destroy North Vietnamese supply lines along the Ho Chi Minh trail which passed along the Laos Vietnam border. Their aim was also to fend off the Pathet Lao (the Lao communists) and the North Vietnamese army, who had taken control of the eastern provinces.
Each cluster bomb casing scattered several hundred tennis-ball-sized bomblets in over 5,000-square-metre areas. About 260 million cluster bomblets fell over Laos.
However, up to 30 per cent of the bomblets did not detonate on impact, leaving as many as 86 million unexploded.
When the Americans pulled out of the Vietnam War in 1975, the Laos Communist Pathet Lao took over the government. General Vang Pao was ordered to leave Laos and is now living in California. The US government stopped its support to the Hmong troops that it helped to train. Approximately 200,000 Hmong managed to escape, and eventually were taken in by America, while as many as 15,000 fled to the jungle.
The new Communist regime in Laos immediately started hunting down the Hmong, turning them from heroes into traitors overnight.
Thousands were ambushed, massacred and drowned in the Mekong River. Many were sent to harsh concentration camps known as 'Seminar Camps', where they were 're-educated'; that is, tortured, raped, put into forced labour, and starved to death. The US activity was secret, so there was no press coverage in the world of what was happening in Laos at that time.
The plight of the Hmong people continues to this very day. At least 7,000 are still hiding in the mountains and jungles of Laos. They live in hopeless and desperate circumstances. They have been isolated from the rest of the world for three decades and are living on the run, constantly hunted down by the army.
They can only stay in one place for a few weeks at a time - and sometimes even less. Thus, they cannot grow crops so they survive on a plant root which is a kind of dry potato.
To find this root they have to dig down five metres and walk for up to three hours, risking meeting soldiers who would shoot them on sight. The weapons the Hmong use to defend themselves date to the era of the Vietnam War - and some even to World War II. They have no medicine, hardly any food or clothes, and no education.
According to Amnesty International, the killing of a group of five Hmong children on May 19, 2004 - the aftermath of which was captured on video - was one of the few attacks to reach the international community.
In another reported attack in April 2006, 17 children were among the 26 people killed while foraging for food. Survivors said around 15 to 20 soldiers had ambushed them with rocket-propelled grenades.
Amnesty has called for an end to the Hmong plight - but the PDR continues to ignore this plea.
Confucius once said: "It takes 10 years to grow a tree, but it takes a 100 years to establish the identity of a people."
It would seem that it takes less than this to destroy a people forgotten by the rest of the world.