As Veterans’ Day approached the thought hit me: Maybe someday there will be a memorial to the global war on terror. Not just to the casualties of the war in Iraq, or Afghanistan or — who knows? — Iran. But to the shadow warriors, the CIA agents and the special forces troops now engaged in clandestine pursuit of al Qaeda throughout the Middle East, and in places like Pakistan or the Philippines and elsewhere around the world.

How will their deaths be remembered?

If history is any guide, their stories — and sacrifices — may be far less recognized than their rank-and-file uniformed brethren.

That’s what happened to many of those who died fighting as part of the CIA’s secret army in Laos, a tiny, jungle-laced corner of Southeast Asia that was a sideshow to the main action in neighboring Vietnam in the 1960s and ’70s. Among the more than 58,000 names on the Vietnam War Memorial are those of hundreds of soldiers who died not in Vietnam, but in Laos and Cambodia. Those who were with the CIA aren’t on the wall at all: They get anonymous stars at agency headquarters in Langley, Va.

The communist North Vietnamese used Laos to move troops and supplies south into battle against U.S. forces. Americans dubbed it the Ho Chi Minh Trail, after the founder of the Vietnamese revolution.

The Air Force bombing of Laos, from bases in Thailand and elsewhere, was wrapped in secrecy. Pilots also had secret units on the ground to guide them to their targets in Laos and North Vietnam.

And since we weren’t officially fighting in Laos, the CIA organized an army of local Hmong tribesman to raid the trail and rescue U.S. pilots.

The locals, former French subjects, called it l’armee clandestine.

More than 80 airmen were killed in action in Laos, and 379 are listed as missing, according to figures kept by Eugene Rossel, who arrived in Vientiane, the capital of Laos, as an Air Force communications officer in August 1969.

Possibly hundreds more U.S. Army Special Forces, Navy SEALs and Marine Force Recon personnel died there, according to various histories and reports on the secret war.

But an exact accounting will never be known.

Jan C. Scruggs, the legendary Vietnam veteran who nearly single-handedly raised the money for the memorial, calls reports that many of the soldiers who died in Laos are not recorded on the wall an “urban myth.”

“As far as I know, everybody killed in Laos is on the wall,” Scruggs said in an interview Nov. 10.

But Scruggs also says he has no quarrel with the conclusion of historian William Blum, that “Americans who were killed in Laos were reported to have died in Vietnam.”

Jack Platt, a retired CIA officer who ran foreign intelligence operations in Vientiane, said “there continue to be in some circles ‘official public denials’ that American military units ever set foot or fought fights in Laos.”

U.S. Special Forces teams conducted secret reconnaissance missions on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and sometimes other military units wandered across the thickly forested border in the heat of combat, he said.

“American Army deaths in Laos were as true as the fact that there was more than one case of hot pursuit by regular Army units that crossed into Laos — by accident, not design,” said Platt.

Despite years of press reports about U.S. activity in Laos — including the CIA’s not-very-secret Air America transport planes — the Pentagon until around 1970 refused to concede its personnel were fighting, bombing and dying in Laos.

Eugene Rossel was one of them. But his orders didn’t say that.

“Officially I was assigned to Project 404, part of JUSMAG,” he said, meaning the Joint U.S. Military Assistance Command in Thailand,.

“I arrived in Vientiane in my Air Force uniform, with my Air Force ID. I changed into civilian clothes and was issued a civilian ID.”

Rossel, who now works for an Internet technology company in Chino, Calif., said the Air Force had five secret air operations centers scattered around Laos, each with about 25 U.S. personnel.

The CIA had untold hundreds more people attacking the Ho Chi Minh Trail — to little effect, as it turned out: More traffic was moving down the trail, which was widened to highway proportions by war’s end, than a decade earlier, despite having 2 million tons of ordnance dropped on it.

“Bombing logs released in 1998 show an average of one planeload every eight minutes for nine years,” according to Daniel Lovering, writing for Johns Hopkins University’s International reporting Project in May 2000.

Not long after the war, the victorious Vietnamese recognized its importance by turning it into a national park and tourist attraction.

In contrast, only a bronze plaque on a two-foot tall granite stump in Arlington National Cemetery specifically recognizes the American sacrifices in the secret war.

It reads:

DEDICATED TO THE U.S. SECRET ARMY IN LAOS 1961-1973.

IN MEMORY OF THE HMONG AND LAO COMBAT VETERANS AND THEIR AMERICAN ADVISORS WHO SERVED FREEDOM’S CAUSE IN SOUTHEAST ASIA. THEIR PATRIOTIC VALOR AND LOYALTY IN THE DEFENSE OF LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY WILL NEVER BE FORGOTTEN.

Chu Wu begs to differ.

A descendant of those Hmong warriors, Wu says few Americans realize their role as secret troops for the CIA.

“Half of my family was part of the CIA’s recruits,” he said by phone from St. Paul, Minn., where he’s trying to raise money for a Hmong memorial.

One day in 1968, he recounted, his 23-year-old cousin Neng Vue went on a CIA -led mission to rescue a downed U.S. pilot.

He never returned. Twelve Hmong tribesmen were on that mission, he said, and only three escaped alive.

“They fought in countless battles against North Vietnamese forces and were in the end left to their fates,” wrote Walter J. Boyne in a 1999 issue of Air Force Magazine. “Originally numbering about 300,000 people, living high on mountain ridges and subsisting by means of slash-and-burn agricultural techniques, the Hmong suffered some 30,000 casualties, mostly young fighting men.”

Wu says the exact number killed will never be known.

“Because it’s classified, we have to estimate the numbers.”

That fate may await the unknown soldiers of the global war against terrorism.

The CIA agents who made the ultimate sacrifice will get their anonymous star on the honor roll carved on a headquarters wall.

But relatives of the military men and women killed in secret pursuit of al Qaeda will have to wait to see whether those sacrifices will ever be recognized more publicly.

Their epitaph, however, is already written. Only the location needs to be updated.

“We were pilots, mechanics, navigators, weathermen, drivers, security police and cooks,” says a Web site honoring those killed in the secret wars of Southeast Asia.

“We were on or over the front line, on bases you saw on TV, and some that few people even knew existed. We fought the war you heard about and the war you didn’t. We didn’t look for glory or ask for medals. We were called and we went.

“A lot of us,” it notes, “didn’t return.”

First posted Nov. 10, 2006 8:06 p.m.