The Secret War

By Tom

Vieng Xai, Laos

Tomorrow Julia and I head for the Vietnam border on our way to Hanoi.  While we’re excited to move into Vietnam and to explore a new country, we are sad to leave Laos.  The entire country of Laos has less than 7 million people, compared to Vietnam’s population of more than 80 million, so it will clearly be a big change of pace.  We’ve felt safer and more welcome traveling here than in any country we’ve visited so far.  The people are warm and friendly and they do their best to help you using their limited English-language skills.  They don’t try to cheat or scam you; in fact sometimes it’s a little sad bargaining with people who frequently start the bidding so low.

Our guide on the trek with a buddy of his from the village 

 Laos is one of the twenty poorest nations in the world.  While we were in Luang Prabang, we bought a bunch of children’s books from an NGO that distributes books to children in rural villages called Big Brother Mouse.  The Lao children who are lucky enough to learn to read in school do so with a chalkboard and few of them have ever flipped through a book before, let alone owned one.  According to the Big Brother Mouse, many of the children don’t know how to turn the pages of their new book and are amazed to learn they can do it over and over.  We bought several of the duel English/Laos language books and have given them out to children over the last several weeks.   The children all giggle and squirm when they are presented with the new book, and reading to them, even in English, always attracts a crowd.  It has been one of the most satisfying parts of our visit here.

Reading a Big Brother Mouse book to the curious and excited children

Julia does her best using English to read a book written in Lao to children who speak Hmong 

During our last day in Laos, Julia and I took a tour of the caves along the Vietnam border that the Lao people hid in during the bombing raids.  Laos is the most heavily bombed country in history.  For nine years from 1964 to 1973, the United States dropped a B-52 load of bombs on Laos on average every 8 minutes, totaling 260 million bombs.  That works out to 542 pounds of bombs for every man, woman, and child in the country at the time.  The United States dropped more bombs on Laos than all of the bombs dropped in Europe in World War II.

A little girl peers out from behind a door in the Hmong village

It’s estimated that about a third of the 260 million bombs did not explode and are still out in the countryside.  These bombs, called unexploded ordinance or UXO, still blow the legs off farmers or kill children playing in the forest four decades after the war has ended.  In fact, an average of one person a day is killed in Laos from UXO, most of whom are children.  The results of the war are still visible among the older generation; we witnessed an old man with missing legs hobbling through a village and the guy driving a boat was missing an arm.  Our guide for the cave tour witnessed his parents and grandparents blown to pieces by bombs and he showed us scars on his legs from shrapnel.  Pieces of bombs are using in building homes and furniture as scrap metal.    

Julia and I with the Hmong chief (next to me) and some of his family

Rice farmers harvesting in their fields

           The friendly smiles of the Lao people contrast with the image of the people of Southeast Asia as ruthless commies that the U.S. government portrayed in the 60’s and 70’s.  Over 80 % of Lao are subsistence farmers, though that percentage was much higher forty years ago.  Most of them had no idea why the bombs were dropping from the sky and quite a few didn’t even know who was trying to kill them.  (In fact, most people in the U.S. didn't even know this was happening). To come face to face with these people, simple rice farmers and poor children who have never owned a book, and to hear what our government did to them is heartbreaking.  In the end, Laos did fall to communism and like most experiments in extreme socialism, it fizzled out over a couple of decades.  To hear the Lao people describe it now, it sounds like it was more of a civil rights movement for the equality of minority peoples than an economic revolution.  This is what our government was so afraid of.  This is why we tried to kill them all. 

Building with bombs -the ever resourceful Lao people