The Long Hitch Home

by Jamie Maslin

  Focused initially on areas in the north of the country under the control of the Pathet Lao, the bombing started several months before the regular bombing of North Vietnam.119 It increased in intensity in 1966, and again in 1968 when it reached colossal proportions during the “bombing halt” in North Vietnam, which just saw planes diverted to the decimation of Laos instead.120 “Village after village was leveled, countless people buried alive by high explosives, or burnt alive by napalm and white phosphorous, or riddled by anti-personnel bomb pellets,” wrote American educational advisor in Laos, Fred Branfman.121 “Any sign of life in enemy area is considered military targets,” commented a U.S. pilot; another recalling “When it gets down to people in Laos, whatever moved was shot at; was bombed; was naped [napalmed].”122

  And this is the real story of the bombing of Laos, the unreported bombing of the peasant civilian society in the north of the country, not the version propagated by the U.S. media at the time—and still a surprisingly common textbook orthodoxy—which focused on the more tolerable story of the bombing of the Ho Chi Minh trail in the south (the route by which communist north Vietnam supplied its southern comrades).

  During 1968, Jacques Decornoy, the Southeast Asia correspondent of Le Monde, published extensive eyewitness testimony of the bombing of the north, reporting: “ . . . a world without noise, for surrounding villages have disappeared, the inhabitants themselves living hidden in the mountains . . . it is dangerous to lean out at any time of the night or day because of the ceaseless bombardment that leads to the scientific destruction of areas held by the enemy.”123 The regional capital of Sam Neua district was described as being made up of “motionless ruins and deserted houses” much of which had been “razed to the ground,” the houses and churches of this “population center” “demolished” by high explosives and phosphorous bombs, and the area strewn with fragmentation bombs designed to maximize civilian casualties.124 Decornoy’s reporting revealed the truth behind the United States’ northerly bombing campaign: that it was a war waged against the civilian population. The following year the New York Times finally admitted that “the rebel economy and social fabric” are “the main United States targets now.” Far from condemnatory, this war crime was almost portrayed as sound tactics: “both civilians and soldiers have retreated into the forests and hills and frequently spend most of their daylight hours in caves or tunnels. . . . The bombing, by creating refugees, deprives the Communists of their chief source of food or transport. . . . The population . . . has been declining for several years and the Pathet Lao find it increasingly difficult to fight a “people’s war” with fewer and fewer people.”125

  In 1970, the Hong Kong-based, Far Eastern Economic Review, reported:

  For the past two years the US has carried out one of the most sustained bombing campaigns in history against essentially civilian targets in northeastern Laos . . . Operating from Thai bases and from aircraft carriers, American jets have destroyed the great majority of villages and towns in the northeast. Severe casualties have been inflicted upon the inhabitants . . . Refugees from the Plain of Jars report they were bombed almost daily by American jets last year. They say they spent most of the past two years living in caves or holes.126

  Not that caves were safe refuge from attack. Advanced missiles were deployed to penetrate these natural shelters.127 A direct strike on one killed 473 men, women, and children sheltering inside—the entire population of a village.128

  In 1971, The Guardian of London reported that “. . . although US officials deny it vehemently, ample evidence exists to confirm charges that the Meo villages that do try to find their own way out of the war—even if it is simply by staying neutral and refusing to send their 13-year-olds to fight in the C.I.A. army—are immediately denied American rice and transport, and ultimately bombed by the US Air Force.”129

  The C.I.A.’s use of child soldiers in its war against the Pathet Lao was recalled by Professor of History Alfred McCoy in documentary film, The Most Secret Place on Earth, in which McCoy described a visit he made to a Laotian village as a young journalist: “The local headman . . . said ‘we did a bargain with the C.I.A., we gave them our men, and all we ask is for them to feed us, now Vang Pao [the C.I.A.’s broker] and his men have asked us for the fourteen-year-olds. If we sent the fourteen-year-olds, who will be the men to marry the daughters of the village and produce the next generation of children? We’ll die as a community. So we said no, and they [the C.I.A.] cut off the rice.’”130

  That the U.S. Air Force bombing was targeted at civilians was even admitted to in a Senate report which stated that the purpose of the aerial assault was “to destroy the physical and social infrastructure of Pathet Lao held areas,” noting that “. . . through such things as saturation bombing and the forced evacuation of population from enemy held or threatened areas we have helped to create untold agony for hundreds of thousands of villagers.”131

  “Untold agony” is about as accurate a description as I can think of for a campaign of terror that killed 350,000 human beings in Laos,132 and somewhere in the region of 3 million across the rest of Indochina, employing a dark plethora of “anti personnel” weapons, whose nature could almost have been developed by Satan himself. Imagine, if you will, the horror you’d feel if your young son or daughter, niece or nephew, brother or sister, accidentally spilt boiling water on themselves; imagine then the uncontrollable rage that would consume you if a foreign government deliberately dropped a sticky substance onto them from the sky that generates over ten times that heat and is designed to continue burning under the skin.133 “Napalm is the most terrible pain you can imagine,” said Kim Phuc, the iconic “girl in the photograph,” immortalized screaming naked in the middle of a road in neighboring Vietnam after a napalm attack covered her fragile nine year old body with sticky blobs of fire that vaporized her clothes on contact and tore into her skin and muscle, very nearly killing her. “Water boils at 100 degrees Celsius. Napalm generates temperatures of 800 to 1,200 degrees Celsius.”134 A U.S. pilot, talking about napalm, remarked:

  We sure are pleased with those backroom boys at Dow [Chemical]. The original product wasn’t so hot—if the gooks were quick they could scrape it off. So the boys started adding polystyrene—now it sticks like shit to a blanket. But then if the gooks jumped under water it stopped burning, so they started adding Willie Peter [white phosphorus] so’s to make it burn better. It’ll even burn under water now. And just one drop is enough, it’ll keep on burning right down to the bone so they die anyway from phosphorus poisoning.135

  (For Dow’s other famous contribution to the people of Indochina, this time specifically children, just type “Agent Orange” into Google and hit “Images”).The white phosphorous added to enhance Napalm was also used as a weapon in its own right; effects of which cause victims’ skin to burst into flames when doctors attempt to scrape away dead tissue, and wounds to reignite days afterwards when bandages are removed.136 Other weapons used on civilians by the U.S. in Indochina include a “pellet bomb,” the forerunner of the cluster bomb, which worked by releasing hundreds of plastic dart-like fragments.137 If they didn’t kill immediately, the darts would slowly squirm around inside the body of the man, woman, child, or baby victim, causing agonizing internal injuries; an excruciating, torturous death that could last several days. The intended design advantage of the darts being made of a plastic?—harder to detect under X-ray.138 And then there was the standard cluster bomb, a weapon designed not for tanks or buildings but people. Each bomb bursts into as many as 400 individual bomlets that explode into jagged fragments of steel, creating a blizzard of shrapnel: a lethal airborne blender that tears limbs from bodies and pulps everything in its path. More cluster bombs have been spewed onto Laos than the rest of the world combined; some 260 million in total. Thirty percent of all cluster bombs used by the U.S. on Laos failed to detonate,139 littering the country today with around 80 million lethal sub-munitions,140 which have killed over 20,000 people since the end o
f the war,141 and still claim an average of two new victims every week. Resembling small ball-like metal spheres, children are naturally attracted to them and make up the majority of casualties.142 They are landmines from the sky. Recorded casualties are 98 percent civilian143—the equivalent of a policeman shooting forty-nine innocent bystanders for every supposed criminal hit. As Noam Chomsky has commented “[With] a failure-to-explode rate of 20%–30% according to the manufacturer. . . . The numbers suggest either remarkably poor quality control or a rational policy of murdering civilians by delayed action.”144

  The classic collective rationale for the protracted attack unleashed by the U.S. on Laos, Vietnam and Indochina’s other victim of a “secret” bombing campaign, Cambodia, is, of course, “fighting communism.” An interesting definition that implies much. Never is it expressed as fighting for capitalism—the unspoken assumption being that if you’re fighting against something then whatever that something is must inherently be bad and therefore resisted. Perhaps a more accurate description would be fighting to impose capitalism, as neutralism, the historical record shows, was simply not good enough. And with the C.I.A. sponsoring coups, stuffing ballot boxes, using child soldiers and drug running in Laos, any pretense at “spreading freedom and democracy” is a farce. As historian Michael Parenti has noted, “when faced with a choice between democracy without capitalism or capitalism without democracy, Western elites unhesitatingly embrace the latter.”

  The specter of a much overworked doomsday scenario, the “Domino Theory,” served then, and still does now, as a convenient simplified justification for the killing of more than three million humans across Indochina; its premise being, whereby when one country fell to communism, so too would another, and then another, engulfing Asia and far beyond. According to President Eisenhower, who first articulated the theory, even Australia and New Zealand might tumble in an unstoppable chain reaction.145 But of course Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos did fall to communism, and what happened? Did the rest of Asia and Australasia topple like dominoes into the fold of the red menace? In a word: no. In fact, if it wasn’t for the C.I.A.’s meddling, then a neutral coalition government would have successfully been established in Laos in 1958.146 However, if you want an example of a truly devastating, although rarely acknowledged, domino effect within the region, then look no further than neutral Cambodia. Declassified documents from the C.I.A.’s Directorate of Operations reveal that were it not for the death and destruction caused by the U.S. bombardment of Cambodia, which killed half a million people147—over ten times the number killed in the Luftwaffe’s Blitz of Britain during World War II—then Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge might never have come to power in the first place,148 sparing Cambodia Year Zero, the Killing Fields, and all the unthinkable terror that followed, in which one in five Cambodians died at the hands of Asia’s Hitler. (For more on this, see the superb but heart-wrenching documentary: Year Zero, the Silent Death of Cambodia; viewable online at: http://vimeo.com/17634265). And while on the subject of Cambodia, it’s worth mentioning, for it’s a rarely told hidden history, that when Vietnam liberated Cambodia from the nightmare of Pol Pot on Christmas Day 1978, the United States, Britain, and China began funding, arming, and training the Khmer Rouge in exile in Thailand,149 their troops receiving training from Britain’s special forces, the S.A.S., under Margaret Thatcher’s government,150 including “the use of improvised explosive devices, booby traps and the manufacture and use of time-delay devices.”151 The reason?—Pol Pot was the enemy of their enemy, the Vietnamese. (Despite China originally backing the North Vietnamese against the U.S., Cold War geopolitics saw the U.S. forging a strategic alliance with China as a counterweight to the Soviets after the fall of Saigon, using China as a surrogate to support Pol Pot against Vietnam—China’s historic foe.)

  In many respects the bombing of Laos served as a blueprint for how the West would wage war in the decades to come. The majority of the fighting was conducted by aerial bombardment against a defenseless enemy with no air force, who would rarely, if ever, get to see who was trying to kill them. They might catch fleeting glimpses of jets screaming past overhead but almost never get to look their attacker in the eye. It was a situation that suited the Americans just fine. “[The Laos operation] is something of which we can be proud as Americans. It has involved virtually no American casualties. What we are getting for our money there . . . is, I think, to use the old phrase, very cost effective,” stated the U.S. Secretary of State, U. Alexis Johnson.152

  For the Laotians it wasn’t so cost effective. Hundreds of thousands of sentient, feeling human beings with lives of value died, many more were maimed forever, and Laos became a nation of nomads; refugees whose houses, villages and arable land was destroyed, forcing a wretched existence onto untold numbers who were reduced to begging or scavenging like animals for scraps of food. With Laos suffering such evil horrors, it is astonishing that this epic crime is not common knowledge, remembered globally with a vow to never forget. Had mainland America been attacked by a foreign power that riddled American toddlers with dart-like pellets, burnt American grandmothers alive with napalm and white phosphorous in front of their families, shredded pregnant American women with fragmentation devises, buried loving American fathers whole with 500-pound bombs, razed American communities to the ground, and callously bled the country and left it to die, then the screams of victims would echo through generations around the world. And rightly so. That the slaughter in Laos does not, speaks volumes of our inherent racism in the West. A world of worthy and unworthy victims exists, where we know much about the crimes of others but next to nothing of our own, and where the blood of an American is deemed infinitely more valuable than that of a Laotian. And what, I wonder, would be the reaction if the foreign power responsible for this hypothetical U.S. carnage, justified the worst of its atrocities with the flippant rationale that it gave them something to do? Think I’m exaggerating this final piece of moral equivalence? Not so. During Fred Branfman’s work with refugees in Laos he was puzzled by one fact in particular:

  All the refugees said the worst bombing occurred from the end of 1968 until the summer of 1969. They were bombed daily, every village was leveled, thousands were murdered and maimed. But I knew from U.S. Embassy friends that there were no more than a few thousand North Vietnamese troops in Laos at the time, and that there was no military reason for the sudden and brutal increase in U.S. bombing. Why, then, had this aerial holocaust occurred? And then, to my everlasting horror, I found out. At Senator Fulbright’s hearing, he asked Deputy Chief of Mission Monteagle Stearns why the bombing of northern Laos had so intensified after Lyndon Johnson’s bombing halt over North Vietnam. Stearns answered simply: “Well, we had all those planes sitting around and couldn’t just let them stay there with nothing to do.” 154

  Such callous emotional detachment to killing is, in an individual, a clinical indicator of a psychopath. What then does this say of us collectively in the West that so deafening a silence endures surrounding our own atrocities, and instead we are endlessly drilled in the false religion of American and Western virtue?

  “We destroyed a civilization,” stated Alfred McCoy, author of The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, “We wiped it off the face of the planet . . . we incinerated, we atomized human remains in this air war, and what happened in the end? We lost.”153 Following the defeat and ousting of the U.S. from Vietnam, the Pathet Lao took control of Laos. As the U.S. Air Force shut down its radio station, it broadcast a farewell message: “Good-bye and see you next war.”155

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Pleasure Island

  Stray chickens, ducks, geese, even cows tottered along a poorly surfaced single-lane strip of road just outside of Vientiane. This was the highway heading north. A lift with two uniformed on-duty policeman got me here, and after a good deal of walking past the last remnants of housing, interspersed with green fields, I was picked up by a white SUV splattered with dried and flaky, bright orange mud.

 
; Behind the wheel sat Stefan, a rugged German engineer who had lived in the country for the last few years with his Laotian wife, from whom he was recently separated. Stefan was a personable chap with excellent English, which proved something of a treat. We chatted with gusto from the get-go, with Stefan telling me much about his experiences and personal take on the country.

  “Laotians have different priorities to us,” he said. “Unless it’s for food or alcohol, they’re difficult to motivate. When building a house I became frustrated by the quality and speed of work so got rid of the workers and went to another village to hire my own team. I was instructing and intended to work too, but whenever they saw me try to lift something they would come running over. Laotians have no concept of a boss, particularly a foreigner, or farang as they call us, actually working themselves.”

  Suddenly a cow strode across the highway, forcing Stefan to hit the brakes. Taking its time, the creature nonchalantly drifted across to the other side.

  “Does anybody own those?” I asked.

  “Ah, now there’s an interesting thing. It used to be the law that if you hit a cow, you had to compensate the farmer. Then the law was changed to the farmer having to compensate the motorist for damage, and suddenly no one owned the cow. You could ask about all day and nobody would admit to it being theirs!”