Ancient mysteries and American bombs: Laos I was going to see ancient mystery monuments around Phonsovan that we know less about than Stonehenge and Mayan pyramids. The bus bumped across central Laos along Route 13. A teenager sat behind me cradling a machine gun. Several public buses have been ambushed on this road, once leaving 13 passengers dead, 12 killed in another. The government blames banditry by Hmong tribesmen while others say the attacks are politically motivated. In 2000, bombs went off in the Laos capital’s bus station and day market. Thirty Hmong rebels were assassinated by the government last week (Bangkok Post). Kid Crackshot and his AK47 behind me were there to protect us. But this violence is tiny compared to the atrocities that Phonsovan district is also renowned for.
Phonsovan is a one street (dusty track) mish mash of a town surrounded by flat grassy plains. The Indian restaurant has pictures of hamburgers and hotdogs on the placemats. There’s a must-visit office of the Mines Advisory Group on the main street. To stop me losing my guest house hotel room key it was wired to a giant bullet casing. In the garden, benches and fencing were bomb casings ½ the size of kayaks.
There are 3 unusual features around Phonsovan: mysterious ancient jars, the Ho Chi Minh Trail and unexploded ordnance (UXO). A group of us hired a jeep and guide to visit three of the jars sites; the other 2 features would be ‘bonuses’. The Plains of Jars are areas of prairie littered with giant ancient jars whose origin and purpose are little understood, like ceramic Easter Island statues. We could only visit 3 of the many jar sites as the others haven’t been cleared of UXO.
The UXO is a daily reminder of how dangerous bombs dropped from airplanes can still wreak havoc 40 years later. During the Vietnam War, much of Laos was carpet-bombed by the U.S., even though Laos didn’t partake in the war. The Americans objected to the transport of arms from North to South Vietnam through Laos along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which is fair enough. To cut this supply route, my guide informed me, “U.S. airplanes dropped 3,000,000 tonnes of bombs on innocent Laotians. Every 8 minutes for 9 years”. To put 1.5 tonnes of explosives per Lao person into perspective, it took only 1.5 tonnes of IRA explosive to obliterate the centre of Manchester in ‘96*. Not fair enough.
*http://www.manchester2002-uk.com/buildings/bombing.html
At each Plain of Jars site we walked on narrow paths defined by a brick every few metres and painted white on the in side to designate ‘area cleared of UXO, so safe to walk on’. The out sides of the bricks were red, ‘area only surficially cleared of UXO, step out at your own risk’. There are hundreds of huge jars at each site of maybe 1000 years old and purpose not fully understood. Maybe they were funeral urns, or made to hold Laolao local rice whisky. Some were carved from sedimentary rock, others made with sand, mud, water and buffalo skin and leaves for binding. They are typically 1.5m to 2m high though range from drum-size to the largest at 2.25m tall and weighing 6 tonnes. That one must have been for a province king.
Big, mysterious jars
Bricks indicating where's safe, and not safe, to walk on
Part of an American bomb crater
Across the jars sites are trench lines dug by Lao people to transport arms or hide from bombs that left craters of 5m diameter and 2-3m deep. Horrifying UXO clearance statistics display: ‘Site 1. 2.4sq km subsurface cleared. UXO destroyed: 127. Scrap pieces found: 31,814”. There’s a desire for the Plain of Jars to be a UNESCO world heritage site but it can’t while hiding 60 UXO per km
2 for as far as the eye can see to all horizons.
Sad statistics
Lunch was at a Hmong tribe village to see Laolao whisky being made. Advertised as a ‘whisky-making village’, the attraction was a gnarly old woman by her wooden house stirring vats of fermenting rice. She puts 8kg of rice into water to soak for 9 hours, then adds 2kg of yeast, boils it up then leaves it to ferment for 2 days. Then she boils it again, now and again chucking under bits of firewood found nearby, and allows the vapours to condense down a strip of wood to make 18 litres of tequila-tasting sweet rice whisky. The first litre off is 90% alcohol and used for cuts and grazes. The rest is diluted down to 40% and sold to tourists like us for $1 a litre. A couple of little kids peeped shyly at us as granny gave us a toothless grin and siphoned off her brew into our plastic water bottles.
Granny pouring us whisky
Driving to jar site 3 the hill slopes are scarred with bottle-shaped patches of non-vegetated earth. They aren’t odd-shaped bomb marks but swallow traps. A couple of swallows are tied down flapping in the dust, attracting a flock to land to investigate the commotion. Hiding people swiftly yank ropes and a big net flips over the birds. 100-200 whole swallows are then put in a jar to ferment for a fortnight before being barbecued.
Going to the jars we walked along a rickety bamboo bridge then along the narrow walls keeping the paddy fields water in, persuading the guide to take us to the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which he agreed for another $4 (day’s wage) from each of us. On the way we stopped off at a snack store and I asked the guide which dimension of the ‘Number 1’ condoms was the 52mm proudly boasted on the box referring to. He assumed it was the diameter as he was sure the length is 10cm. Is that not about the size and shape of a cigarette box!
Bamboo bridge and water collection
The Ho Chi Minh Trail wasn’t a sign-posted and paved highway as the American lass was disappointed by. Rather it is a few metre-wide dusty tracks anastomosing around wooden houses in and between Hmong villages. The cute kids who nervously followed us don’t speak Lao, just Hmong language, my, “Jaw sabaidee bor?” as foreign to them as it was to me a month ago. Houses and chicken coops were on stilts of 500lb and 2000lb bomb casings. Land-dividers are rows of bomb cases nearly as tall as I. Black pigs snuffled about, chickens pecked at fine gravel under discarded bombs. It is this network of narrow foot- and bicycle-trails and these people the U.S. tried to block by dropping twice as many bombs as were dropped on Nazi Germany.
Part of the Ho Chi Minh Trail
Garden wall, woman for scale
Stilt houses utilising B-52 bomber ‘gifts’
The U.S.’s targets during the bombing wouldn’t have been much different to these
A risky but necessary cash-earner for these people is scrap-metal collection, for which they receive $1 for 7kg. But until the men or kids bend down to pick up the chunk of U.S. iron they don’t know whether its explosive charge is still live. One easier source of income was a WWII Russian tank used here by the Vietnamese and now stripped down to the bare hulk that’s too heavy to carry away.
In those 8 years of U.S. bombing, countless Lao people died. Survivors of the never-ending bombardment lived in caves, trenches or under trees. At the detriment to their health they were very careful to trap in every puff of give-away cooking smoke, for days at a time. Who can blame poverty-stricken villagers with little knowledge of the outside world from accepting money to carry a parcel a few kilometres to the next village? Especially as its contents are to be used against those who, for some reason unknown to them, are destroying their kin and ancestors’ homes and land from a cowardly safe 10km above. Yes, we know all about the Vietnam War, they’ve glorified their part through the Hollywood ‘U.S. world-beater’ propoganda machine. But how many people know of the U.S.’s attempted destruction of the Lao population for daring to do paid jobs, and its effort to destroy communism in a land where sharing the labour and the harvest is necessary to survive.
The U.S. dropped bombs weighing up to 2000lb (1100kg) each on wooden shacks and rice fields. They dropped more bombs on Laos than were dropped in World War II. But why am I harping on about this 40 years later, especially as the Laotian character is so laid-back it would personify, “Forgive and forget” better than any other nation?
The issue is that not all those dropped bombs exploded on impact. Many are still active and ticking by just under the grass, waiting for a playing child or grazing cow or field-ploughing parent. The results continue to devastate communities by destroying limbs, livestock and loved-ones every day. And is the U.S assisting in cleaning up their mess that’s maiming and killing innocents 2 generations later? After spending $9 million a day dropping the bombs, it now donates $1 million a year for clean up#. #http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2003-12-11-laos-bombs_x.htm
Where land cannot be cultivated or used to build schools or clinics or attract tourists, how can people who earn less than $2 a day improve their quality of life? That is the UXO problem.
Thankfully, there are agencies working on clearing the UXO, e.g. UXO LAOS, NZAID and MAG, the Mines Advisory Group:
http://www.magclearsmines.org/
http://www.magclearsmines.org/news.php?s=2&p=1039
At the current rate of bomb searching and safe disposal, it’ll only take another century or so to make this land safe to live on again.
- Facts, figures and dates I haven’t referenced came from our local guide.
Part of an American bomb crater
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