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Published: February 8th 2010
It was cold enough here to see my breath this morning. There was thick fog covering the surrounding karsts, and I could hear loud music down the street, but there was little action in view of the guesthouse, which was a charming series of bungalows, each composed of one room and a bathroom. I walked over to the restaurant, clearly affiliated with the guesthouse as they were situated together upon the same driveway. I ordered some coffee from a woman hanging around, and as is the norm around here in smaller towns, received hot water with a ‘3 in 1’ coffee packet dumped in, the packet containing a powdery mix of milk, sugar and coffee. The packets are surprisingly tasty.
I exchanged good morning pleasantries with the man who worked at the Tourist and Caves Office, just across the street, then watched him bring over instant noodles, pick vegetables from the garden behind the restaurant, and fry up his own breakfast. Then he ate in the kitchen with the waitress, and I realized he must be her father and one of the owners. Soon after I spoke with a woman who had introduced herself the previous night as an owner
too.
“Good morning. Does the restaurant here serve food”
“Um. I’m not sure. If you want some rice you can buy some at the market 2 km down the road.”
“Oh, OK. We’ll I don’t think I have enough time right now to walk to the market because I’m taking a cave tour soon. Do you think the restaurant can make me anything?”
“I talked to the seller yesterday and I think maybe she can make fried eggs.”
“What about rice?”
“She might have rice. I’m not so sure.”
“Oh. OK. So this restaurant is not affiliated with your guesthouse then?”
“No, no. It is. This is my guesthouse and restaurant.”
“Uh, OK. Thanks.”
This was my exchange, regarding breakfast, with the hotel owner this morning.
Just afterwards, I asked the surly waitress for rice and she obliged, serving me delicious warm sticky rice.
At 9 AM, Keith and I walked across the street to the Tourist and Cave Office to begin a tour of the caves. We were given a map and an audio guide with headphones. We were able to rent bicycles there, as we were
Prince Souvanaphom
Built after the war in front of his cave (he fought with the Pathet Lao, not the Royalists)told to see all the caves we would need bicycles. There was only one other tourist there, and he was not actually a tourist, but rather a photographer helping his friend, Laup, who is a Tourism Advisor here and a creator of the audio guides. The non-tourist wanted to walk, so the Office gave him a guide and gave us a separate guide. We cycled about 3 minutes, down the quiet dirt roads in town, undisturbed by cars. After a few minutes we reached our first cave, the cave where the original Pathet Lao Prime Minister, Kaysone Phomvihane, lived during the war. In front of the cave where a series of buildings where Kaysone lived after the war ended.
To give some background, during the Vietnam War, Laos was also facing a civil war between the current rulers, the Royalists, and a new Communist party, the Pathet Lao. The Pathet Lao was aided by the North Vietnamese, Cuba and China. The Royalists were aided by the United States, secretly, through the CIA. From 1954, when French Indochinese rule of Southeast Asia ended, the US began pouring money into Laos to prevent the Pathet Lao from taking over the country.
Cave Entrance
There used to be many more trees around the caves, better hiding the entrances As the US was engaged in the Cold War with the Soviet Union, they did not want Laos, Vietnam or any other countries becoming Communist, and siding with their enemy. The US really wanted Laos to act as a buffer between Communist North Vietnam and other countries in the region, to help prevent the spread of Communism. At this time there was just 1 million people living in the country of Laos, almost all farmers.
Originally the Pathet Lao was just another competing party in the capital, Vientiane. For a short time, there'd even been a coalition government between the two sides. But In 1963, after a series of assassinations, the Pathet Lao left Vientiane and moved their headquarters to Vieng Xay. Close to Vietnam, and roughly forty hours by the fastest vehicle from Vientiane, Vieng Xay was a nicely remote spot. As soon as the US learned about this move, they began bombing the Pathet Lao. The US also bombed the Ho Chi Minh trail, the supply route of the North Vietnamese, which ran in and out of Laos along the Vietnamese border, going south from Vieng Xay.
From 1964- 1973, the US dropped one planeload of
The Emergency Room
For chemical bombing bombs on these areas every 8 minutes, every day. In total , the US dropped 2 million tons of bombs on Laos or 2 tons of bombs per person. That total equals more bombs than were dropped on Europe in all of WW2. The US spent 7 billion dollars, or 2 million dollars a day, bombing Laos for these 9 years. Whole villages were destroyed and 100,000 people forced to flee their homes. Because so much of the population lived remotely, nobody ever knew the total number of deaths from these bombings.
The Pathet Lao and the civilians living in the bomb zone, amounting to about 20,000 people, moved in to the many caves surrounding the town of Vieng Xay. The landscape of this town is flat valleys, intermixed with jutting karsts, limestone croppings, looking like rocky mountains, sticking up from the ground. There are thousands of small caves naturally formed within the karsts, so the local people selected the largest ones to move in to, enlarging them with axes or sometimes dynamite.
A young man acted as our tour guide, telling us what button to press to listen to when, with our audio guide, and answering our
House Built After the War
Right in front of a cave, when it was safe to move out questions. The tour took us to ten caves, all within minutes of the town’s central area. It was an incredible tour. Most of the caves were premiered by a decaying home, where an important official had lived after the war had ended. To get to each cave, we walked up dirt or stone steps, and then usually around a stone barrier in to a series of cave rooms, each large enough to stand in, all big rooms, none tiny or claustrophobic.
Each cave had an emergency room, equipped with two air-tight doors and an oxygen pump to pump oxygen in and out, in the event of a chemical bombing. The audio tour provided extensive information on the players, the caves, and the events of the war, in a very professional manner, spoken by a British voice-over man. There was a massive cave that looked just like a big theater, and used for Friday night movies, and another high-ceiling cave, 1 mile from end to end, for entire troops of soldiers meetings. There were tiny roomed caves for children’s bedrooms and big caves for the hospital, which had three wards. There were schools, printing presses, and a radio system connecting
many of the caves, especially those of the top commanders, as well as another station broadcasting to all the people. Supposedly the radio equipment was donated by the former Czar of Russia. If so, it would have been ancient.
For 9 long years, local life moved to within the caves. The cooking had to be done at night, under cover of darkness. If the US surveillance planes saw anything, light or color, they would send in a plane to bomb. The locals had to kill all of their white and red chickens because a captured US bomber told them he had been trained to search for these chickens, and to bomb where he saw them.
People farmed outside for a few hours at night, when the moon allowed it. Food supplies were brought in from the Vietnamese border, from Vietnam, China and Mongolia, by foot and by truck. Sometimes, elephants were used to carry goods through the jungle. Cuban and Vietnamese doctors were sent in to assist. Children of wealthy families, particularly Pathet Lao officials, were sent out of the country to study in Vietnam and China. Due to immense support from other Communist countries, nobody starved, despite
food sometimes being scarce. The locals got used to this harsh life.
Anti-aircraft gunners were set upon the tops of mountains and the US bomber planes were sometimes shot down. As the bombing was kept secret from the American people, these downed Americans, if they could not be rescued, were never acknowledged in the US media.
Any Lao local who refused to join the Pathet Lao had some sort of bomb hung around their neck. The prisoner was forced to walk towards the enemy, either the Royalist army or Vang Pao’s army. (Vang Pao was the head of the Lao Hmong forces who were trained by and fought alongside the CIA.) The prisoner’s family was forced to walk next to them. If the prisoner stopped walking, according to the audio guide, the bomb exploded, killing them and their whole family.
The bombing of Laos was conducted by Air America, a private air company operating throughout Southeast Asia, whose motto was ‘Anything, Anytime, Anywhere, Professionally’. This company, secretly funded by the CIA, had 400 planes operating in Laos. Their air bases were in Udon Thani, Thailand and Long Chen, Laos.
One month after a ceasefire was signed
between the US and Vietnam in January of 1973, a ceasefire was signed between the Royal Lao government and the Pathet Lao. People nervously moved out of the caves and began repairing their damaged homes or building new homes.
Vieng Xay became the capital of the Pathet Lao’s Liberated Zone, as Vientiane was still in the hands of the Royalists. It took two more years of strife between the two sides before the Pathet Lao supremely took over the country. In 1975, the Pathet Lao declared Laos the Lao Peoples Democratic Republic, and the Royalists not captured and taken to re-education camps, or sentenced to prison, fled to Thailand. Many of these refugees spent years in squalid camps on the Thai border before being approved to send on to the US, Australia or France. The US had promised to evacuate many of them if the war was lost, but instead left 10,000 of them standing on a field waiting for planes that never came, evacuating only a few hundred of those people that had aided them.
In 2008, an International Accord was signed in Oslo by 92 nations, agreeing not to use, produce, stockpile or sell cluster bombs,
the type of bombs the US used in Laos, that cause a large amount of human damage and are prone to landing unexploded, staying active indefinitely. In Laos, one person is hurt or killed everyday by unexploded cluster bombs dropped here during the war. The accord also commits member states to help those countries contaminated by cluster bombs to clear their land and to care for victims. The government of Laos played a major role in campaigning for the ban. The US was one of the few major countries that did not sign the ban. Although, the US has allotted 5 million dollars towards bomb clearance in Laos in 2010, (thanks in large part to the campaigning of a US organization called Legacies of War).
Today in Vieng Xay, as in most places in Laos, there is quiet and peacefulness. There are few cars, very few tourists and slow development. The creation of these audio tours as well as the efficient set-up for tourists to come and visit the caves, the tour guides, the lighting and easy access to the caves, is a huge step in bringing tourist dollars to the area. As the writer of the Laos edition
of a major guide book, Keith has the god-like power to bring money to this area. If he writes in the book that it is worth coming to this town, for the fascinating tour, to see the remnants from the war, the caves where people lived, plus the beautiful landscape and the laid-back atmosphere, people will come. It’s an impressive power to have.
Biking around this town now, every child, teenager, woman and man is truly excited to see a foreigner. Some yell hello, others smile shyly and become ecstatic when I say hello, and others just stare with interest. It’s an ironic feeling, this sort of welcome, while knowing what my country did to these people. But it’s thirty-seven years later, and not only is there no anti-foreigner feeling around town, the people are actually delighted at my appearance. It’s a remarkable sense of forgiveness and ability to move on, despite the past still affecting the present of these people.
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