For nine years, the United States conducted one of the biggest bombing campaigns in the history
of the world, against a country pretty much no American had any idea they were fighting.
The country they were targeting is not one you’ve heard a lot about: it’s not Japan,
or Korea, or Vietnam, or Iraq. It’s a country that is totally unknown to the vast majority of people.
This is the story of Laos.
Laos is located right here, in inland Southeast Asia – north of Cambodia, and west of Vietnam.
Historically, of all these countries, Laos was the poorest,
the least populated, and the least influential.
Since the end of the nineteenth century, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos had been French possessions,
grouped together as “French Indochina.” But the decades after the Second World War
saw a liberation struggle against European colonialism.
“The year is 1954. The once mighty French colonial empire in Southeast Asia is doomed.”
So along with Cambodia and Vietnam, Laos became an independent nation.
But, like its two sister countries, Laos was split:
between royalists and conservatives on the one hand, and communist rebels – the “Pathet
Lao” – on the other. So, along with the rest of Indochina, the country entered a civil war.
On its own, the war would probably not have been so bad.
The first years of the conflict, in fact, were marked by relative calm.
But when larger and more important Vietnam descended into civil war in the 1960s,
and attracted international involvement, Laos became a proxy front in a much bigger conflict.
The royalists governed a strip of land in the west, supported by American forces
based in Thailand. The Pathet Lao, which ruled the north and the east,
was propped up by its stronger ally, communist North Vietnam.
This had less to do with interest in Laos itself than with a question of military logistics.
For its supply lines, North Vietnam depended on a series of roads that the U.S. called
the “Ho Chi Minh trail.” And a big part of that trail ran through eastern Laos.
And destroying the Ho Chi Minh trail was one of America’s top aims in order to defeat North
Vietnam. As Secretary of State Dean Rusk said, “Laos was only the wart on the hog.”
So the U.S. planned a military campaign to destroy the Ho Chi Minh trail and defeat
the Pathet Lao who were protecting it. They called it “Operation Barrel Roll.”
But there was something important. It would have to remain top secret. No mention of it
was ever to be made to the public, not even to the United States Senate. It was called
“the secret war,” and it was primarily operated not by the military, but by the CIA.
On the ground, the U.S. would supply a warlord army composed of the country’s ethnic minorities.
“The war involved more than just Laotians: these tribesmen,
royalists and fiercely anti-communist, were often called the Secret Army because they were supplied,
paid and organized entirely by money and officials from America’s Central Intelligence Agency.”
The Secret Army was supplied by a commercial airline called
“Air America” — in reality, a CIA front.
The warlords used Air America to smuggle opium into Vietnam in order to fund their operations.
And from above, American planes would attack at all hours of the day.
“Washington never admitted the scale of the bombing, nor admitted
film coverage of it. The only footage released showed rice distribution to the refugees.”
The scale of the bombing was enormous.
Just look at this graphic created by Mother Jones.
From 1964 to 1973, the United States dropped more than two million tons of bombs on Laos. The U.S.
dropped more bombs just on Laos than it dropped during the entirety of the Second World War,
on both Germany and Japan. A bomb was dropped an average of every eight minutes, twenty four hours
a day, for nine years. The country would be bombed as much as 300 times a day.
The Plain of Jars in northern Laos – so called because of its ancient
megalithic rock structures – became the most intensely bombed place on earth.
In 1960, the Plain of Jars had a population of a hundred and fifty thousand people; by 1970, just
9,000 were left. Of the 83,000 water buffalo in the province, 50,000 were killed by the bombings.
To the peasants and tribespeople of Laos, the bombing campaign was like something out
of a nightmare. One villager said: “The planes came like birds and the bombs fell like rain.”
Soon northern and eastern Laos looked like the surface of the moon, totally barren, pitch black.
One U.S. Air Force officer said: “There just aren’t any villages in northern Laos any more.”
Of the roughly ten thousand villages in the country, thirty five hundred were
held by the Pathet Lao; of these, the majority were obliterated by bombing.
It was not until the early 1970s that Americans learned just how extensive
the U.S. bombing of Laos had been. The CIA had kept it such a close secret that even
leading senators were shocked to find out that America had been bombing for years.
In the meantime, an entire nation had been bombed to the dust.
But the surprising thing was that nobody in America really cared. The bombing was
not what got Richard Nixon in trouble. Nobody in the military or the CIA lost their jobs.
Laos was an afterthought.
And in 1975, after the bombing ended, the Pathet Lao managed to sweep to victory,
causing their rivals to flee to Thailand and America.
But the legacy of the bombing remained powerful. Because 30 percent of the bombs
had never gone off. So the landscape of Laos was still covered with unexploded munitions,
which would detonate and kill people when touched.
In the decades since the bombing ended,
thousands of Laotians have been permanently disfigured by bombs.
There were so many bombs lying around that some restaurants used them as decorations.
Schools put up warnings so that children would know to avoid unexploded bombs.
Kids even earned money by dismantling bomb scraps.
Since the 1970s, about twenty thousand Laotians have been killed by unexploded
bombs, often while farming. A massacre in slow motion.
About a quarter of villages in Laos still have unexploded munitions.
40 percent of those killed were children.
Laos was once called the “Land of a Million Elephants.”
Now it’s the Land of a Million Unexploded Bombs.
In 2016, the U.S. government finally admitted what it had done in Laos.
Still, what America did in Laos remains obscure.
It’s not taught in schools in America. It is totally forgotten.
And the destruction in Laos didn’t teach the American
government any lessons about how to treat other countries in the future.
“Our two governments will continue to have differences.
That’s true with many nations. As we do around the world, the US will continue to
speak up on behalf of what we consider universal human rights, including the
rights of the people of Laos to express yourselves freely and decide your own future.”
In the 1960s and ‘70s, Laotians had wanted to determine their own future, among themselves—to
determine what type of country they would be. American bombing was designed to stop that.
And that pattern of force never really stopped. In the decades after, the American strategy of
overwhelming air power would be used all over the world. A strategy of “shock and awe.”
And each time, the worst consequences would be borne not by the fighters on any side,
but by innocent people who did nothing to deserve what came to them.