Everyone has heard about the Vietnam war, but what do you know about the secret war waged by America in Laos?

The 1954 Geneva Convention established Laos as neutral. This was recognised at the time by the USA, yet in 1955, the CIA created a special programs to replace French support of the Royal Laos Army against the communist Pathet Lao. The US kept their hands clean using CIA trained local Hmong tribesmen fighting against the Pathet Lao. This escalated and with the start of the Second Indochina war (The American Vietnam war ) America took the opportunity to run bombing raids on Laos under the shadow of what was happening in Vietnam.

The bombing raids were targeted against the Ho Chi Minh trail which supplied the Viet Cong in South Vietnam and against the Pathet Lao headquarters up at Viang Xay. Aid packages, food and weapons were dropped to the royalists and with hundreds of thousands of bombing sorties run, per population, Laos is the most heavily bombed country in history. Take into account the area of Laos bombed and you are looking at over 3 tonnes of bombs dropped per person.

As I’m not a writer, have a read over the Wikipedia’s version of the aftermath of the war.

After the American withdrawal from Vietnam (1975) the war was openly considered a geopolitical disaster. The botched operation in Laos was barely mentioned, as people attempted to keep Vietnam in the past. With the citizens’ help, the American troops were able to come home from “Nam”. The 30,000-plus Hmong who assisted the Americans were not so lucky. Considered a group of “traitors” by their government as well as the Communist Viet Cong, the former Hmong soldiers and their descendants began being exterminated. They fled into the mountains as many of them were hunted down and killed. Reports of the Hmong people being mutilated, raped, and tortured continue as recently as February 2007. The international community has done little to nothing to assist the families of those who helped the Americans during the Vietnam War.

Wikipedia – The Secret War

Over thirty years after the conflict unexploded Bombs remain a huge problem in Laos. There are many land mines but the biggest problem are the countless “bombies” that litter the country. Bombies are the small bombs that make up a cluster bomb. I’d always wondered why there was such a fuss made over cluster bombs. Why are they considered so bad and why is the Geneva Convention so concerned with banning them?

Having spent a day in Phonsavan I can now say why. Cluster bombs are anti personnel weapons. They are design to kill many troops in one go. A single B52 bomber could carry thirty cluster bombs, each bomb over a metre in length. At a predetermined height the bomb casing splits open releasing over 600 “bombies”. These small tennis ball sized bombs then fall to the ground spinning due to attached fins. Depending on design these bombies, once reaching a certain rpm / total number of revolutions a fuse will trigger, exploding the bombie sending out 300 plus ball bearings at ballistic speeds. A single ball bearing at that speed is more than enough to kill a man. If you can begin to consider the sort of damage a single cluster bomb can do, now consider this. Between 10 and 30% of the bombies fail to explode and lie un-detonated in the ground. These often buried slightly under the surface are left to be found and often triggered indiscriminately by whoever discovers them in years to come. Our tour guide in Viang Xay, for example, uncovered one in his garden back in 2004.

Bomb craters litter the ground in and around the Plain of Jars (zoom right in on the my google maps page near the Phonsavan marker and you can see them. They look like golf sand bunkers). People live in constant threat of discovering unexploded bombs (their biggest fears live with their children – the bombies look like toys and hundreds of children have died and been injured playing with them). Agriculture and social and economic development remain affected to this day due to the unexploded ordnance. Consider the extra work involved in ploughing a field or laying a new road with the risk of unexploded bombs all around.

Both a Laos goverment organisation (UXO Lao) and NGO’s from the UK and Australia are working to help the problem of unexploded ordanance (see MAG, yet these bombs will pose problems for many years to come. Many criticise the lack of American involvement, however they say their offers of charity are turned down. That said there is American involvement in Laos, searching for MIA pilots (over 2000 planes were shot down by Russian supplied anti aircraft guns), in which some describe as part of a big cover up. A secret Military city with an airstrip big enough to serve B52s is still off limits to locals and tourists alike. It is said that many American GIs who landed here were told they’d landed in Thailand and travelled overland to fight in Vietnam. Many of these only ever saw Laos, yet believed that they’d served in Thailand and Vietnam.

What was committed by the United States in Laos is considered by many as a grave war crime. Yet so few people know about it (even US senators of the time claim they had no idea) and no one has ever been held responsible. It even remains very much a taboo subject in Laos itself. Schools gloss over the history and many seem oblivious to the past (accept those who live in constant threat of death by bombie). Cynics say this is because there is US money coming in to the right people in power in Laos to cover this up.

All of the above comes from what I picked up from speaking with people in Phonsavan and Viang Xay, visiting historic sights (such as the Pathet Laos cave headquarters in Viang Xay), a British documentary we saw in our guesthouse in Phonsavan, the history section of my Rough Guide and of course Wikipedia. Believe what you will, but even if only half of it is true, I find what went on here quite sickening. Especially when it essentially comes down to differing political opinions of a few powerful men. What could such indiscriminate bombing ever achieve? What good would anti personnel bombs do against the heavy trucks and armament moving along the Ho Chi Minh Trail? How can the death and suffering of so many peasant locals (during and after the war) possibly be justified by America’s containment policy?

Having got that off my chest, I can explain that in actual fact the main reason we went to Phonsavan in the first place was to see the Plain of Jars. Several historic sites littered with ancient large sandstone jars. Impressive in a Stone Henge kind of way, but as I discovered at school I’m much more of a modern history man (Much to the chagrin of my mother… “That’s not history, that happened while I was growing up”).

The tour we did in Phonsavan was excellent. Opting not to visit three “Jar” sites we instead went to see many of the bomb craters, a local village with many useful items built from cluster bomb casings, took a trek to a waterfall for lunch and finished off at the largest “Jar site” for sunset. This standard tour was transformed by our animated tour guide. Possibly the best guide I’ve ever had. Clearly with a political agenda (his grandfather went crazy in a “re-education camp” after the war in which he was in the employ of the CIA) he filled us in with many details and theories. Lots of food for thought, and the basis of this post. Even at the end of the day he still had the gaze of all of us locked on as he talked about Laos’ past. An extra nice touch was that our transport for the tour was a 1972 CIA jeep.

After Phonsavan we moved on to the Pathet Lao Caves in Viang Xay which proved to be even more interesting than I’d imagined from our Rough Guide (helped once again by a good tour guide who’s English was not so good yet who made a concerted effort, dictionary in hand, to answer our constant and complex questions). The caves set in Limestone casts provided natural shelter from the bombs. Each of the Pathet Lao leaders had their own caves from where they worked and there was also a huge communal cave which house the local population. Many of which had to farm at night if they were to survive the aerial onslaught.

Other highlights of my time in North East Laos were the long remote mountain bus rides and meeting so many other travellers. One person who deserves a mention, for among other things his interest and tact in extracting as much information from our guides, was Jonathan. A BBC journalist (sshhhh, don’t tell anyone) taking a sabbatical and travelling around the world. Another one of the inspiring characters I’ve met on this trip.

Want to know more? I do, so I’m looking out for these books:

• The Ravens: Pilots of the Secret War in Laos – Christopher Robins
• Shooting at the Moon – Roger Warner
• Tragedy in Paradise – Charles Weldon