The Plain of Jars

The secret war in Laos provided valuable lessons that we should have learned, had it not been kept secret, valuable because it was characterized by similar failings we see in the current fiasco in Iraq, namely:

It has been estimated that as many as 450,000 civilians in Laos, and 600,000 in Cambodia, lost their lives. Figures for refugees exceed a million. In addition, the widespread use of toxic chemical defoliants created a massive health crisis which naturally fell most heavily on children, nursing mothers, the aged and the already infirm, and which persists to this day.

I will try to lay out the complicated series of events, leading to military involvement and the end result of that involvement, using various quotes from the novel and other sources.

This quote was taken from a US Air Force site, Air Force Magazine Online, June 1999 Vol. 82, No. 6, written by Walter J. Boyne, that insinuates much of what was enumerated above:

The following is a quote from a pilot during the war, an accurate and prophetic description:

Here's another American pilot talking about the joys of napalm:

We owe it to ourselves, as in all human tragedies of violence, to understand how all this came about, so we can avert such atrocities in the future. Because what happened in Laos was kept a secret, and conveniently buried thereafter, we have been denied that opportunity for years. Here's your chance to find out.

Let's start at the beginning:

The foundation of the 20th century conflict was rooted in French colonialism in Indochina. The French first gained influence in the Lao territories through the court of Luang Prabang, where they offered protection against the Chinese maruaders known as the Haw, and furnished a chance of throwing off the yoke of Siamese domination. Through time the French controlled the kingdom, and spread their power over the rest of Laos. Since the French considered Vietnam and Laos as one entity, Indochine, it is easy to see how the nationalist movement against the French in Vietnam, embodied by the Viet Minh, spread to Laos, so that the Pathet Lao was basically an extension of Ho chi Minh's movement. Meanwhile, the royalists, represented by the princely families of Luang Prabang, Vientiane, and Champassak, remained a puppet of the French.

What ensued became known as the First Indochina War, in which French rule was overcome.

1955 The US attempts to buy Laos - buying up truckfuls of kip, the local currency, and burning the banknotes, giving the Royal Lao Government American dollars at a bloated exchange rate. The US government also pays the salaries of the entire Royal Lao Army, making Laos the highest per capita recipient of US aid ever, and without the average taxpayer even aware where their money was going. The State department allows the creation of a secret project (Project 404) to have military officers temporarily resign in order to be assigned as military advisors, but with civilian identities, furtively violating the Geneva accords. Elections are held but the Pathet Lao are excluded. The Vietnamese, in response, start trickling troops into eastern Laos.

1956 to 1958 Prince Souvanna, the neutralist, is elected Prime Minister and attempts to create the coalition specifically mentioned at Geneva. He plans to integrate the Pathet Lao into the Royal Lao Army and hold supplementary elections for them to participate in. Souvanna also visits the communist capitols of Hanoi and Beijing. All this pisses off the U.S. A coalition government is not acceptable, Geneva Convention or no Geneva Convention, says the Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. The US threatens to cut off all the aid that they had previously lavished on Laos. When the Pathet Lao dominate the elections and Souvanna starts giving them a piece of the civil service as well, the American government decides no more 'Mr. Nice Guy'. Because, as President Eisenhower argued, if we don't stop the communists, all the countries in Southeast Asia will fall to them like a stack of dominoes. After that, the CIA starts to get involved.

The CIA were looking for a strongman, that would deal ruthlessly with any opposition, and they felt they found him in Poumi Nosovan, a general in the army.

1960 The CIA rigs elections and their man, Poumi, comes to power. Election balloting was fraudulent, and the results, giving rightist candidates large majorities, were totally unbelievable. But this is also where the US starts looking silly. The State Department and the US ambassador in Laos still support Souvanna, but the Department of Defense and the CIA are behind Poumi. Was this foreign policy, or a football pool?

Ahaa, but the turd has not yet hit the fan until a lowly captain in the army, Kong Le, tired of all this nonsense, rises up out of nowhere and throws a spanner into the works. Together with the paratroopers who were in his command, he takes the capitol, Vientiane, in a bloodless coup, driving out Poumi, who runs to Savannakhet, a town in the south.

Kong Le announces his goals: end the fighting in Laos, stem corruption, and establish a policy of peace and neutrality. His forces are not right or left, but neutralists, like Souvanna. Recalling the experience of the first coalition when the country was temporarily at peace, Kong Le asks for Souvanna to come back as Prime Minister

Not to be upstaged by this little pipsqueak of a captain, the US now starts giving financial and military aid directly to Poumi to take back control, and in Dec 1960 he drives Souvanna and Kong Le out of Vientiane. Kong Le joins the Pathet Lao in the north, and together with them they take over the Plain of Jars. The Vietnamese send in top advisors and heavy artillery. Souvanna goes to Khang Khay, a small town on the Plain of Jars, insisting he is still the legal Prime Minister. Although Britain, France, and officially even the United States, accept Souvanna's government as the legal government of Laos, this does not prevent the United States from broadening its support to Poumi's forces. Figure that out. Oh, but things get even stranger.

At this time, the CIA gets tired of Poumi, who behaves more like a racketeer than a national leader, and they hit on the idea of a secret guerilla army of Hmong, a small hill tribe, to be led by another guy called Vang Pao. Wow, a private army for the CIA, and they only had to pay the soldiers $2.00 a day! Not only that, but they get to have their own private air force to airlift supplies, with the glorious name of Air America! The Hmong are more than willing to fight for the US, thinking that they would be able to carve out a piece of Laos for their own little country as part of the deal, should they win. Meanwhile, the Soviets, not wanting to be left out, also join in, airlifting supplies and arms to Kong Le and the neutralists.

Air America as described by Air Force Magazine Online, June 1999 Vol. 82, No. 6, written by Walter J. Boyne

The relations between the official US military and Air America were often blurred, as assets, including aircraft like the C-130, were transferred in secret when the need arose. Air America eventually employed more than 300 pilots to fly in and out of Thailand and Laos. In 1970 alone, it carried more than 46 million pounds of food to the Laotian people. It also carried arms, spies, radar equipment, and refugees and flew medevac missions. Late in the war, they even dropped "hot soup"--that is, napalm-on enemy positions, rolling barrels out the rear of Caribous

Whenever the Hmong secret army is mentioned by pro- US historians, they also conveniently omit the nationalist fervor driving the Hmong to fight, i.e. the goal of achieving an independent Hmong kingdom, where they would be free from oppression by the majority lowland Lao. (refer to the section on the Hmong lower down the page). The CIA exploited this sentiment, realizing the potential it had for motivation, motivation which the ordinary Laotian lacked. Again from the article by Walter Boyne:

The war was fought largely by surrogates for their own aims, the Laotians proving generally to be peace-loving even when--especially when--in uniform; Royal Laotian armed forces preferred to let the despised Laotian hill people, the Hmong, do the real fighting...As the Hmong casualties rose, the US-sponsored fighting forces were increasingly augmented by Thai "volunteers," whose numbers eventually reached 17,000. These mostly were mercenaries paid with US funds and led by Thai army regular officers and noncommissioned officers. The situation suited the US, which was loath to introduce American ground forces. Air America was keeping some 170,000 Hmong refugees alive with airdrops of rice, a situation that had gone on so long that Hmong children were said to believe that rice was not grown but simply fell from the sky.

In fact, the men in Air America, and even the CIA paramilitaries on the ground, were known as 'Sky Men'

Another excerpt fromThe Plain of Jars

Oops! Halftime! Time to keep score. We now have the State Department abandoning Souvanna and switching to Poumi in Vientiane, who is also the choice of the Defense Department, while the CIA continues to play with Vang Pao and his mountain men. Then there are the Soviets rooting for the former US player Kong Le, the North Vietnamese and the Chinese aiding the Pathet Lao, and the US Ambassador and the rest of the world on Souvanna's side. It' a tie ballgame folks, time for another convention.

1962 - The Second Geneva Convention, which just brings things back the way they were after the first convention, stating the same things they stated right from the start: get everyone's foreign troops out and form a coalition government. An international 'Monopoly' game: Go Home, do not collect $500. Of course this did not apply to the CIA with Air America and their clandestine army, who played by their own rules. It wasn't fun if you couldn't cheat. Nor did it apply to the North Vietnamese with their thousands of troops in northern Lao, who decided they weren't there to play games. But the convention was cordial enough, and appropriate lip service was given out.

The Hmong (also known as the Meo, or Miao), formerly came from the highlands of southern China, where they had lived for almost two thousand years, tending to their rice paddies in upland valleys, independent of Chinese politics and society. This independence was threatened, however, when the Emperor's court resolved to seize their fertile lands, and to subdue the tribespeople to Peking's authority. Military efforts against the Hmong were nevertheless unsuccessful, so in 1775, the Chinese court invited the Hmong king and his advisors to come to Peking and make peace. Upon their arrival, the members of the Hmong delegation were publicly tortured and executed. There followed a campaign of subjugation against all of the Hmong peoples, and by the beginning of the nineteenth century many had fled into the mountains of Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand.

Ever since then, the Hmong who had left their homeland have dreamed of having their own kingdom, where they would no longer be oppressed. This dream was kept alive by the difficult conditions they encountered in the new countries they settled in. The lands they arrived in were already occupied, and thus there was nowhere to go except to the tops of the hills and mountains. Paddy farming was not possible in such places, so they adapted themselves to a life of hunting and forest gathering, and clearing and burning the jungle to grow upland crops.

Over the years, there came into being a popular folktale that was soon passed down from one generation to the next. It told of an ancient warrior named Sin Sai, who had defended the first peoples of the earth against evil giants. Once this great undertaking had been accomplished, the legendary hero told the people to stay on top of the mountains to avoid any other evil giants that may come to harm them in the future. He promised that if that should happen, he would come down from the sky with an army of invincible soldiers to help them, and lead them to form a kingdom of their own, where they would be safe and live in peace forever. Then he disappeared in a flash of fire.

This vision of a Hmong Zion had first become an armed movement during the time of the French. The French, finding nothing in Laos that would help pay the costs of administrating her, copied what the British were doing in India, namely, producing opium for export to China to finance their colonial activities. Since the Hmong already grew a little opium for their own medicinal uses, it was inevitable that the French would get the idea of exacting a tax from them - two kilograms of opium per head, for each man, woman and child - to be collected by the authorities, usually lowland Lao officials working in the colonial government. This was a tall order, since you need at least an acre of poppies to produce one kilo of opium. For a family with five kids that meant cultivating fourteen acres of poppies in addition to your food crops! It required an extensive effort that amounted to slave labor. Eventually, however, it became a lucrative endeavor, and contributed greatly to the hill people's subsistence. Nonetheless, the two-kilo tax was quite exorbitant.

There was also the forced conscription of corvee labor to build such things as roads, a mandatory service that was demanded of all the Lao peoples and another issue that incensed the Hmong. The resentment of many of them grew, and in 1917, someone called Baa Chai announced that he was in contact with former Hmong kings, including Sin Sai, and proclaimed himself the first Chao Fa, a Prince of the Sky. For four years, he led a revolt against the French until the rebellion was eventually crushed in 1920.

In 1961, the CIA approached Vang Pao, a Hmong, who at that time was a Major in the regular Royal Lao Army. They had a proposition for him - to lead his own army of Hmong tribesmen in Xieng Khouang, Military Region II. He would work directly with the CIA, and not via the Royal Lao Army commanders. Vang Pao set about recruiting those Hmong who had not yet joined the Pathet Lao. They were easily swayed, flabbergasted, yet elated, that the most powerful nation on earth, the United States of America, had come to them, the Hmong, a little known hill-tribe, and had asked them to fight alongside them. The invincible army had at last materialized, and the Chao Fa legend was being transformed into living reality. Xieng Khouang was to be a Hmong nation.

And so it was no surprise that the Hmong called their CIA paramilitary advisors 'Sky Men'. The psy-ops people at CIA Udon appreciated the value of this mythical aura around their operatives, and actively encouraged it. The fact that Air America planes dropped supplies from the sky only reinforced this conviction.

Just like the French, the CIA used opium to finance their 'secret army'. By that time, the fragile economy of the Hmong had become dependent on opium as a cash crop. So helping them sell it was a way of paying them as well. Air America, the CIA airline, would fly it out. Some of the opium was sent to Saigon where it was processed into No 4 grade heroin - 99% pure. Unscrupulous South Vietnamese, including government officials and military officers, sold this heroin to American GI's - the very same soldiers who were sent to the other side of the world to protect them, and many of these boys came home with a monkey on their back.

Helping the Hmong market their opium was not the only aid the US offered. Through the work of USAID, the United States Agency for International Development, food relief was airlifted to the families who had to be relocated to US controlled areas, since the men were busy fighting and could not farm.

The Hmong army formed by the CIA took the brunt of it. In the beginning, the secret army was used for guerilla activities such as intelligence, sabotage, and ambushing supply lines. As the war intensified, they were used more and more as a conventional infantry, fighting set piece battles. This was because the Royal Lao Army of the right-wing politicians, under such people as Poumi Nosavan, gave an abysmal performance on the battlefield. The Royalist soldiers, mostly village youths forcibly conscripted, did not want to fight. Many of the high-ranking officers were nothing more than corrupt warlords, and even withheld the salaries of the troops in their command. The Pathet Lao knew this, and often sent messages to the Royal Lao soldiers, warning them that they were approaching, and advised them to flee the area, which they graciously did. In turn, the Royal Lao guards at the US controlled refugee camps would allow the Pathet Lao to come in and visit their relatives, turning a blind eye to their presence. It was as if no one really wanted to fight and kill each other, only that they were forced to by the powers that be.

On the other hand, the Hmong under Vang Pao had something to fight for, namely, their millennial goal of having their own kingdom in Xieng Khouang. They fought bravely, but with their World War Two M1-carbines given to them by the CIA, they were no match for the Pathet Lao and thousands of battle-hardened North Vietnamese troops carrying AK-47's, and supported by Soviet-made tanks. Towards the end, children under the age of fifteen constituted the bulk of the Hmong fighting force. It was as if the American strategists had used them as cannon fodder, while counting on the air war to achieve victory.

The Secret Army of Vang Pao fought for twelve years, and during that time their dream slowly deteriorated into a nightmare. So many youths were lost that families could only send their little boys to go out and fight, and those that refused were denied food drops. Towards the end of the war, when Sam Thong fell and Long Chieng came under siege, exodus after exodus of human misery poured out of the war zone, knowing the end was at hand. Thirty percent of the fleeing died as they made their way south. This was a suffering beyond all the tribulations they had ever known, greater than the hardships their ancestors had experienced leaving China.

When the US pulled out in 1973 in accordance with the peace agreement, there followed an ominous lull in the fighting. Vang Pao also agreed to disband his army. Go home, he told his soldiers, and they did so, stockpiling their weapons for the inevitable encounter. A few unauthorized skirmishes only increased the tension. So when the Pathet Lao sent troops to secure Sala Pu Koun, the Hmong took up arms to help the Royalists to defend it, it being the access route to the Plain of Jars.

They had no choice, suicidal as it was, but to keep fighting. They would not lay down their weapons, dreading the retribution they would face if they surrendered. Vang Pao's forces were predictably routed, and not long after, Long Chieng was about to be overrun. The US offered to airlift Vang Pao to Thailand, and he in turn requested help in airlifting five thousand of his people to safety. The CIA at Udon, who considered such a demand to be irrational, met this appeal with astonishment and scorn. Only four or so planes were sent. Thousands of Hmong, carrying baskets full of their belongings, battered suitcases, cardboard boxes tied up in strings, babies in their arms, mobbed the planes. It was like a scene out of Titanic, fighting for the lifeboats, with soldiers shooting into the air, people being thrown out of overloaded planes, the last of which slammed its doors and escaped into the air. Vang Pao had already been whisked away and choppered out.

The thousands who were abandoned began their long march to try and get to the Mekong and cross into Thailand, but were met by communist troops at the Hin Heup Bridge and were forcefully dispersed. Many hid in the jungles with arms and formed resistance forces. Thousands of others who made it out of the country ended up in refugee camps in Thailand, where additional resistance operations could be clandestinely sent across the river under the blind eye of the Thai military responsible for the camps.

Without Vang Pao and his top advisors, the resistance fighters required new leaders, and so they turned to the Chao Fa. The Chao Fa resistance established Pu Bia as a base, and the Lao Liberation Army and Vietnamese troops carried out bloody punitive operations against them in the late seventies. These battles scattered the Chao Fa but did not eradicate them. And while they posed no real threat to the government, they were a menace to the populace, ambushing vehicles and killing anyone who crossed their path.