Plain of tears
After the Secret War, a lesson in grace.
Dear Readers:
The post below recounts one of the most memorable things I’ve experienced in all my years in Southeast Asia, with the war in Vietnam and Laos as a backdrop. The book I’m working on is about Saola, and also about the context within which Saola has been threatened and the efforts to save it continue. This tale is part of that story.
A premium promised to some donors of the crowd-funding campaign for the book was free access to all content on this site, such as draft chapters of the Saola book. This now kicks in, and only those supporters or paid subscribers can see the full content of this draft chapter, below. So I encourage and welcome the rest of you to upgrade to a paid subscription! Your support to this Saola book project would be most helpful, and appreciated.
I may still occasionally post some free content (and all posts up until now will remain fully available for free), but henceforth the full view of draft chapters will be available only to paid subscribers and those first crowd-funding supporters.
And now, back to Laos…
Plain of tears
April 17, 1973 marked my fifteenth birthday, and another event of much greater significance yet little more noted in the world: the last US bombing mission over Laos. That last sortie essentially marked the end of a nine-year, so-called "Secret War" in Laos, which the US military considered a “sideshow” to the main war next door in Vietnam. It nonetheless rendered Laos the most-bombed country per capita in history. Quite the sideshow. A country about the size of the UK or the US state of Oregon, with a population then of just 3 million, the US unleashed a greater tonnage of bombs on Laos than was dropped on all countries of Europe during World War II. One planeload of bombs, on average, every eight minutes, 24/7 for the nine years from 1964 to April 1973.
That last sortie on April 17th was not a coda of success in the Secret War, but the culmination of its failure. The whole mess was finally over, or nearly so. At the same time, across Laos's border to the east,