DIEN BIEN PHU, Vietnam -- Tucked neatly away in the northwest corner of Vietnam, the town of Dien Bien Phu holds a tremendous fascination for both the French and the Vietnamese Communists.

It was in this town that, on May 6, 1954, after a 57-day siege, Vietnamese forces finally overwhelmed the French Foreign Legion. That victory -- ending French rule in Indochina forever -- also opened the door to a floodgate of war, genocide and persecution of Christians in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos that continues to this day.

Dien Bien Phu is also the site of a Hmong Christian community, on the run from persecution by the rabidly anti-Christian, Communist government of Vietnam.

"The French are the people of Joan of Arc. The French empire had its faults, but it was Christian-based. They built roads, hospitals and schools," says Nathan Vann, a historian and teacher hailing from the Hmong tribe of northern Vietnam. "What does the new colonialism of Nike and Coca-Cola do for anyone, except take their money?"

One of many tunnels used by the Viet Cong during the Vietnam war.

As he speaks, the sound of Christian hymns fills the air around the church. An armed militia stands watch outside the simple facility near the Laos-Vietnam border, prepared to repel attacks by Communist government forces.

"The Communists fear Christians for the same reasons the Romans, Nazis and even liberals in America do today. We have a long-term view of life. Our allegiance is to God and His Son Jesus Christ -- not to the state. We are not afraid to die for our faith. And we can fight like Christian soldiers if pushed too far," says Vann.

Like the Jews of the World War II era, the Hmong have faced biochemical genocide at the hands of a tyrannical foe. The use of "Yellow Rain," a deadly Soviet-made toxin has been well documented in neighboring Laos by medical and military experts.

Yet the Hmong have had no voice to bring their plight to the world's attention. The Khmer Rouge of Cambodia were exposed in the Hollywood film, "The Killing Fields," and numerous films like "Apocalypse Now," "Full Metal Jacket" and even "Forrest Gump" have educated the American public about the Vietnam War. But the plight of the Hmong has remained a secret.

As for the aforementioned "Yellow Rain," despite overwhelming evidence of both chemical and biological warfare employed against the Hmong, Vann says, "the State Department turned a blind eye to this blatant violation of the Geneva Convention. Furthermore, they didn't even include these genocidal acts in their annual reports. Instead, they invented stories about bee pollen and bee feces as a cover for the Soviet-sponsored biochemical warfare."

As a man might race past a car wreck to cash a paycheck at the bank, the Western transnational financial community has chosen to finance the Marxist Mekong Delta regimes of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia while ignoring the widespread persecution of the Hmong.

"Madeleine Albright recently visited Vietnam to open a new U.S. consulate and endorse a wide-reaching trade accord," adds Vann, who lost his wife and two children during the war against the Communists.

"How can she do this? This woman is only alive because the British gave her Jewish parents refuge from the Nazi regime in Eastern Europe. Yet she has the audacity to embrace these Communists who butcher innocent Christians. Where is the outrage of American and French Christians?"

An old Hmong woman sells handicrafts in a Hanoi market.

The 'Tribulation Force'
The Asian Hmong culture is basically agrarian in nature. The Hmong's traditional religion is focused on animism, shamanism, worship of hard spirit entities and conjured healing. However, the Hmong make up a large portion of Vietnam's seven million ethnic minorities, at least 750,000 of which have converted to evangelical Christianity since 1975. About 300,000 of those are Hmong. Add to this a total of eight million Catholics in Vietnam proper, and you have the makings of a Christian revolution in the works.

However, this rapid rise in Christianity is terrifying to the Communist authorities. Fear of a Hmong right-wing resistance movement and a Christian revolution such as occurred in Communist Romania in 1989 greatly concerns the Vietnamese government. Officials there also fear the "Tribulation Force" -- an alleged stealthy Western Christian mercenary army composed of ex-Green Berets, Delta Force, South African Recces, Kovoet and Civil Cooperation Bureau officials, ex-French Foreign Legion troops, Ghurkas and Christian soldiers from every corner on earth.

"The Tribulation Force is funding and training the resistance movement of the Hmong in Laos, and we believe that they are now active in Northern Vietnam," says Col. Le Min Ho of the Vietnamese People's Army.

"Our greatest fear is that it will enlist the help of Blondie Wong, the Chinese dissident computer hacker," says one Communist official. "With Blondie Wong's computer hacker army in Europe, it could easily disrupt the operations of the foreign companies investing in our country." The government also fears assassination attempts on the part of the Tribulation Force.

All Hmong leaders interviewed by WorldNetDaily vehemently denied that any such "Tribulation Force" exists.

Despite the posturing of the Communist government, the conversion of the Hmong rolls on like a Texas-style revival.

Messiah in a jeep
"The Hmong have been the most fertile group for conversion of all the ethnic minorities," says Baptist missionary Casey Walden of First Baptist Church in Reagan, Texas.

A Young Hmong Girl.

"The reasons are twofold. First, they have suffered tremendous persecution. Second, their traditional culture speaks of a returning Messiah who will deliver them from their oppression. The mythology led the Hmong to visualize a man in a military uniform driving up in a Jeep, rather than a Messiah descending from the clouds.

"Sometimes we evangelize the Hmong via short wave radio. I even saw several villages convert to Christianity at a crusade. Someday in the near future we may need a revival tent so big it will have to be made by aliens from outer space," Walden says with obvious pleasure.

"Christianity has brought tangible gains to our people," adds Vann. "They don't get drunk or smoke opium. Fighting and stealing are on the downside. Husbands are devoting themselves to their wives and children. Animism requires animal sacrifice, which is wasteful. The Communist government would like to see us drunk, lazy and unorganized -- but the exact opposite is happening."

The response to all this from the government has been to send machine gun-toting anti-Christian squads to the hills of northern Vietnam to try and force the Hmong to renounce their faith.

Communist Party officials questioned by WorldNetDaily admit that only a handful of the 300,000 have renounced their faith. Yet many Hmong have been forced to flee to the central highlands of Vietnam to avoid death and persecution at the hands of the Communist government soldiers -- a thousand-kilometer trek filled with danger.

Recent flooding in Vietnam has slowed anti-Christian government operations in the northern Highlands.

"It is as though God is using water to judge evil and protect us, as He did with Moses on the trek out of Egypt, and with Noah and the flood," says Vann.

But the government keeps trying. According to official Communist Party radio, TV and print media, foreign missionaries are persona non grata. For example, in a recent broadcast the government claimed, "Our minority peoples and the Hmong tribe from time immemorial have never had this Christian religion. It is the deception of bad people who want the Hmong to believe, to lure them into bad ideas, to bring people together and fight against our regime."

A Junk in Halong Bay in Vietnam.

Terrible revenge
Most U.S. Vietnam war veterans had no idea who the Hmong were during their time in country. After all, the Hmong were fighting a secret war in Laos, unknown to the American public. Yet today, more and more vets are gratefully acknowledging the role the Hmong played on the American side of the war.

Bob Anderson, a Vietnam veteran who works with the Hmong refugee population in Minnesota, says, "For many years, the Hmong people fought at our request with incredible bravery and tenacity, greatly slowing the advance of the North Vietnamese into Laos and South Vietnam. They sacrificed thousands of their lives in deadly missions that ultimately saved thousands of American lives.

"The U.S. got them into war against our enemies, trained them, urged them to fight, depended on their bravery -- then broke our promises to them as we pulled out without doing anything to protect them against the terrible revenge that was promised, and has been delivered."

So, while the Hmong fed and cooked for American soldiers, buried the dead and watched their backs, the U.S. military-political complex has turned its back on them.

Jack Austin Smith, a retired chief master sergeant with 27 years of military service, also laments the betrayal of the Hmong.

"The main American battleground was in the southern end of South Vietnam. In order for the North Vietnamese forces to fight us there, it was necessary for their supplies and troops to go through Laos and Cambodia on the Ho Chi Min Trail. Laos was controlled by a pro-Communist government at that time. Therefore, America was not allowed to have any forces on the ground, although we were allowed to bomb and attack North Vietnamese troops with our aerial forces," says Smith.

"About 99 percent of the combat forces on the ground were Hmong irregulars who were persuaded by Americans to forget about being neutral, and to fight the North Vietnamese regulars -- not relatively poorly trained Viet Cong guerrilla forces. We supplied air cover, but every combat trooper knows aircraft can't take and hold ground. We depended on the Hmong to do this -- without modern arms, without medical help.

Ho Chi Min monument in Hanoi.

"After the fall of Saigon, we pulled out of Southeast Asia and left the Hmong to continue the fight without air support. When we left, the Hmong had to fight both the pro-Communist Laotians and the North Vietnamese. They could not fight tanks, heavy artillery and aircraft with rifles. A great many Hmong were slaughtered in their villages. Many were slaughtered at airfields where they waited for evacuation planes that never came. Out of an estimated 300,000 pre-war Hmong population, less than 200,000 made it to safety. Most of the survivors are in Australia, France and the U.S.," says Smith

"The Hmong gave up literally everything for us -- their country, their homes, their peaceful way of life, most of their families, everything that we would cherish. We promised them our continued support -- and then we bugged out."

While America wrestles with "intervention fatigue" in places like East Timor, it appears the Hmong, like the Kurds and black South Sudanese Christians, will have to rely on a higher power to survive the current onslaught of the Vietnamese Communist regime.

Yet Vann is hopeful. "There is no doubt that we're going to have our own homeland -- as will the Kurds and Sudanese Christians," he says.

"And nothing, I mean nothing on this earth, is going to stop it. The Book of Revelation asks all believers, Who is able to fight the Beast, the Antichrist? I say, simply, 'We Hmong are.' If the Communists want a war, we'll give them a war they won't believe."

Anthony C. LoBaido is a roving international correspondent for WorldNetDaily and Dispatches. For more in-depth reports by Anthony LoBaido, subscribe to Dispatches, WorldNetDaily's special monthly insider magazine.