Neng Xiong Ly is consumed by sadness.

It has been five years since the Appleton woman's husband, Houa Ly, was waylaid on the banks of the Mekong River, the border between Thailand and his home country of Laos.

No one has seen him or heard from him since.

Deprived of her husband, Neng Xiong Ly teeters on the edge of poverty. Asked to describe life without her husband, she wept softly.

"I must be the poorest American," she said in her native language.

Houa Ly (pronounced HOO-AH LEE) was 55 when he vanished, a veteran of the U.S. "secret war" in Laos, a Vietnam-era medic who saved the lives of American pilots shot down in the jungle.

His disappearance, still shrouded in mystery, has re-emerged at the center of a political fight on the floor of the U.S. Congress.

With the support of President Bush and the U.S. State Department, the communist government of Laos is seeking the benefits of Normal Trade Relations status.

But a group of 21 congressmen and senators, led by Rep. Mark Green, R- Green Bay, so far has blocked those benefits. Green argues that the country's leaders — who deny any knowledge of Ly — have not come clean.

Even now, Green said, the last of the rebellious Hmong in the jungles of northern Laos are being systematically starved, raped, tortured and killed by Laotian forces and by divisions of Vietnamese soldiers operating in Laos.

"It's brutal, it's repressive and it's barbaric," Green said. "It's hard for Americans to fully comprehend the barbarity and the contempt for human rights that exist in that area."

Yer Ly of St. Paul, Minn., one of five daughters Houa Ly and Neng Xiong raised in the Fox Valley, said she misses her father terribly. Her children miss him.

"He is just the best," she said. "There is no word to say he is this or that. He is just the best."

Worlds apart

Neng Xiong Ly speaks little English. She works nights on a production line for a local manufacturer. Her take-home pay is about $1,000 a month. All but $100 of that is swallowed by the mortgage on their home.

"She is really struggling a lot," said her daughter, Ge, who acted as a translator.

Before they were drawn into the war, Neng Xiong and Houa Ly lived the traditional tribal life of the Hmong people, hunting and gathering and practicing small-scale agriculture in the high plains and mountain jungles of northern Laos.

"Before the war, it was regular days," Neng Xiong Ly said. "Farm, cook, feed the animals."

That life was lost when divisions of North Vietnamese soldiers poured across the northern Lao border in the 1960s. The Hmong, led by the charismatic and prescient Gen. Vang Pao, abandoned the high plains of Xiang Khoang province and established positions in the surrounding mountains where they were armed and funded by the CIA.

As a young man, Houa Ly served as a medic with Pao's freedom fighters. Trained as commandos, they were fabled for their bravery and resourcefulness, for their intimate knowledge of the mountain jungles. When American pilots were shot down, the Hmong would find and rescue them, engage in firefights to protect them.

Hunted by communist forces, these warrior farmers could no longer think in terms of "home."

"Because of the war between America and Vietnam, the Vietnamese were always killing everyone," Neng Xiong Ly said. "There was no safety for the children and the women. They would have to move all the time."

Houa Ly saved the lives of three American pilots during the war and helped dozens of others. His wife and two of his daughters said he did not carry weapons.

"He was not a fighter, he was a nurse," said his youngest daughter, Yer Ly, who lives in St. Paul.

Neng Xiong Ly cooked for soldiers and pilots at Long Cheng, a CIA airbase in the mountains of Xiang Khoang province. A photograph of the base hangs in her living room.

The United States abandoned Laos, and its Hmong allies, in 1973. Two years later, the country fell to the communist Pathet Lao, backed by the North Vietnamese Army. Thousands of Hmong were killed. Others were imprisoned in forced labor camps. Tens of thousands fled for Thailand.

In October 1978, Houa Ly crossed the Mekong with his wife and four daughters. Yer Ly was born in Thailand. She was 8 months old when the family immigrated to the United States. They settled in the Fox Valley.

"We are the people who helped the Americans," Neng Xiong Ly said. "That is why we had to move."

A fateful trip

Houa Ly had traveled to Thailand once before, around 1987, to visit a sister who would later immigrate to the Fox Cities. His return trip in 1999 was a break from work as a machine operator with Wisconsin Tissue Mills.

"He said it had been a long time," Neng Xiong said. "He said he needed a vacation."

At 6:30 a.m. May 7, 1999, Neng Xiong received a call from the U.S. embassy in Thailand. She was told her husband had been killed near the Laos border.

"They just told me my husband went over the border to Laos and that somebody had taken him," she said.

She fainted. A half-hour later, she called Yer Ly in St. Paul. She said she had no reason to live. On her end, Yer Ly couldn't speak, couldn't breathe. She fell to the floor, clutching the phone.

Various unconfirmed reports about what happened to Houa Ly have emerged from congressional and private inquiries.

He had traveled to Thailand with a relative, Neng Lee. They met two other Hmong-Americans, Michael and Hue Vang of California, on the trip. The four were at a water festival in Chiang Kong, Thailand, on the western bank of the Mekong. In Indochina, the New Year is celebrated for a week in mid-April.

In Chiang Kong, the group was approached by a man who identified himself as the police chief from Ban Houayxay in Laos, just across the river. He said the police were allowing people into the country without visas to celebrate the festival.

Neng Lee and Hue Vang walked away to shop in Chiang Khong. When they returned, Ly and Michael Vang were gone. Witnesses said they were seen being forced into a boat that sped across the river into Laos.

An Associated Press story published in Asian Week in 2000 contained a similar version of the disappearance. A Hmong investigator was told by sources that Ly and Michael Vang, and two Hmong from Thailand, accepted the invitation to cross the river. Once in Laos, they were arrested. The Thailand Hmong escaped back across the river to tell the story.

Some news stories have referred to speculation that Ly and Michael Vang were in Indochina to provide assistance to Hmong rebels in northern Laos.

Green said he never has seen or heard any evidence to support this.

Hmong veterans in the Fox Cities said this theory makes no sense. While some Hmong send money to relatives in Laos, there is nothing two men could do for bands of Hmong hunted by divisions of troops deep in the interior.

'We won't give up'

Six months after word of Houa Ly's disappearance, Green arranged a meeting in his office with Neng Xiong Ly, Yer Ly, another of the sisters and three representatives from the State Department. He also arranged a press conference for the Ly family and for other families of people missing in Laos.

State Department officials have conducted two on-site investigations in Laos, but were largely at the mercy of Laos officials, who at first delayed the effort and then placed restrictions on it. U.S. officials have learned nothing, said Green and family members.

Five years ago, State Department officials said finding Houa Ly and Michael Vang was a top priority.

Yer Ly no longer believes that. She fears that her father, a man who risked his life to save Americans in the jungles of Laos, will be forgotten.

Apart from Green, who has steadfastly pushed for a stronger effort, no one from the government calls anymore. No one will answer her questions.

"What I think is that he is an Asian-American citizen," she said, "and so it is not a top priority for them."

Green suspects Laotian officials were involved. At the very least, he said, they impeded the investigation. Although the State Department, pushing for Normal Trade Relations, now gives Laos better marks, its staff was dissatisfied in November 1999, reporting the Lao government "has been slow to respond to our requests for access to the area and has tried to place restrictions on our investigators."

That was when it mattered, Green said. That was before the trail grew cold.

Still, Green said he would continue to press the U.S. government, and the United Nations, to learn the fates of Ly and Vang.

He, too, has suggested the United States would be putting greater pressure on Laos if the missing citizens were native-born Americans.

"This has been a great sadness for me," Green said. "We won't give up, as long as the families don't give up."

Neng Xiong Ly said she was deeply grateful to Green and to his chief of staff, Chris Tuttle.

"I want to thank them from the bottom of my heart," she said. "They are the only two Americans who went out of their way to help."

Yer Ly thinks her father is still alive, locked away in a prison camp. Her only evidence comes from her heart.

"I don't have anything to prove my father is alive," she said. "It is a gut feeling that I have, that my mother has, that my whole family has.

"When someone you love … when they pass away … it is a different feeling. We don't have that feeling."