The Wild Blue Yonder Over Laos
Branfman, Fred
The Wild Blue Yonder Over Laos This drawing and those on pages 32 and 33 were done by people from the Plain of Jars, Laos, depicting their life as it was during the bombing of their villages...
...by a 17-year-old man American bombers while he still resided there, or that beginning in 1969 the planes came “like the birds,” as one old man put it, “and the bombs fell like the rain...
...And in South Vietnam, the goal of providing air support for the 550,000 American troops on the ground seemed worthy enough...
...The villagers are just rice farmers...
...Antiaircraft fire is relatively light...
...As The Washington post reported on January 21, 1971, "the united states is now waging a full-dress air war across cambodia [that] now rivals in scope, although not in intensity, the air war in Laos...
...In any case, we risk Vietnamization because we do not have to rely on it...
...But we do have a nuclear umbrella that can protect others...
...We could be a terrible threat to the world if we were to lose that restraint, -Richard Nixon, interview with C. L. Sulzberger, The New York Times, March 10, 1970 The issues raised by the air war go far beyond the personal culpability or motives of American leaders...
...We were very angry...
...has become less bloodthirsty or more chivalrous...
...They didn’t do anything against those pilots...
...closedcircuit TV and radio and giant movie theaters...
...leaders claim that democracy is really a factor in the war...
...Richard Nixon’s first public admission on April 17, 1971, that withdrawal hinges on keeping a noncommunist government explains the reliance on bombing...
...Oh, I used to repeat, "please don't let the palnes come, please don't let the planes come, please don't let planes comes...
...If Khe Sanh and My Lai were the symbols of American ground intervention during the 196Os, the Plain is the symbol of the automated war of the 1970s...
...On a visit to Danang Air Force Base, I was surprised to see sharks’ teeth and mouths painted on the noses of the F4s...
...You fly...
...As long as bombing went on in Vietnam, morale remained high...
...searching for enemy supplies, as in the A Shau valley...
...The Air Force argues strongly that bombing has been most successful...
...Pathet Lao defector, former captain...
...And the Royal Thai army is something of a standing joke in South Vietnam...
...I don’t like it particularly...
...There are thousands of pre-fab structures, quonset huts, trailers, tents, wooden and cement buildings...
...I’ll tell you, it’s exciting to come down the chute with the flak flying all around you...
...But even that’s more exciting than South Vietnam...
...Many of these bombs fall on villages, for, in places like Laos and Cambodia, most villages are located on or near the road...
...American-supported Asian troops were likewise doing little fighting there...
...As Randy Floyd, a Marine pilot who bombed North Vietnam 37 times, puts it, "Anywhere in North Vietnam is basically a free drop zone ...if you didn't find any particular targets you wanted to hit, then normally you'd just drop your bombs wherever you wanted to...
...There was no public reaction, however...
...Virtually no mechanism has been established to monitor strikes, and there are no known instances of disciplinary action being taken against pilots for bombing civilian targets in Pathet Lao zones, although a few have been punished for strikes on friendly villages...
...It just shifted to northern Laos, leading to far greater destruction of villages than occurred in North Vietnam...
...Historians may come to date this era from January 20, 1969...
...But that day truly it did shoot me and wounded me together with my buffalo, which was the source of 100,000 loves and 100,000 worries for me...
...American pilots, freed from the discomforts of the ground war, and rarely seeing the people they kill, tend to raise fewer complaints.' Perhaps most important of all, information about the air war is as ethereal as the atmosphere itself...
...The Nixon Administration has accomplished massive aerial escalation, perhaps more devastating than President Johnson’s troop buildups of 1965, with minimum public notice or concern because the country still thinks it is fighting with the Green Machine-the ground army-of the 1960s...
...Randy Floyd, Mmke corps Pilot The increasing automation of the American military effort in Indochina will have an impact extending far beyond that unhappy region...
...The nerve...
...He also said that most of the casualties were due to anti-personnel bombs dropped in or near the villages, b u t t h a t napalm, fragmentation bombs, and 500-pound bombs were also frequently dropped...
...He was shot by the airplanes...
...and a dozen smaller American-directed bases throughout Indochina for indigenous air forces...
...You hit me on the knee, I hit you on the shin...
...Soldiers...
...Monthly Amrican air sorties have been about 70 per cent lower this year in South Vietnam than they were in 968...
...Pilot: No shit...
...Perhaps when the war began it was primarily a struggle between freedom and communist totalitarianism, as conservatives see it...
...Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of villages have been destroyed...
...It is not surprising that one pilot estimated that only one of ten bombs generally falls anywhere near the target...
...Conversely, they admire the Pathet Lao for standing up to it...
...All available evidence suggests that they falsify the high “truck-kill” ratio...
...Me Ou’s son-in-law, Plain of Jars Domestic pressures generated by the ground war have also played a part in the shift to air...
...The air war, however, provides few such problems...
...The pilot, bomb-loader, and the policymaker have no intention to kill...
...Ninety-five per cent of the guys have no qualms about dropping bombs anywhere...
...The chief U. S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, Telford Taylor, talks of two principles which establish aerial bombardment as a war crime: 1) if the means of bombardment of civilian targets are disproportionate to their military value...
...We are dropping six million pounds of bombs a day, 4,000 pounds every minute...
...The skies are being filled with American planes as the land is emptied of its foot soldiers...
...It was right out in the open, so we could see it and everything...
...so did the Air Force, Marines, and Navy, the State Department and the CIA, Standard Oil and Gulf...
...As former Ambassador W. H. Sullivan told the U. S. Senate in April, 1971, the area was not related to the security of American ground forces in South Vietnam...
...One pilot explained, “You go up over Laos and it’s just not that satisfying...
...During 1969 about 45 per cent of the people, mostly old people and women, never left their trenches or caves at all...
...Informed sources indicate that this has largely been due to pressure from the CIA, which is heavily involved in targeting American bombing strikes in Laos...
...The war in Indochina today appears to be underFred Branfman was in Laos from March 1967, to February 1971, first with International Voluntary Services, and then as a writer, researching the bombing on his own...
...For if the last few years have shown anything, it is that technological growth has a dynamic of its own, independent of the will of individuals...
...F4 pilot, Danang Air Force Base As such a war continues, ideological, economic, and political considerations assume a secondary role...
...There are no munitions factories or exposed military camps, and arms depots are hidden underground...
...The bombing of civilians is also a result of the fact that pilots cannot easily locate military targets in Laos and Cambodia...
...Most of the pilots just go along and figure, well, it’s a job...
...probably over $10 billion annually, much of the money used for upkeep of air bases devellopment of new aerial technology would be spent even without the air war...
...Did our children cry...
...What the Era of the Blue Machine means is no better illustrated than in portions of Laos controlled by the Pathet Lao...
...I didn't see the sunlight for two years...
...Assistant Secretary of Defense Doolin, Kennedy hearings, May 1970 . . . the United States Air Force contribution was limited to striking at [military targets...
...It is assumed, however, that should fighting flare up again, American squadrons will be returned from their present resting locations in Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan, or the United States-squadrons that can be made operational in three days, ac cording to a Seventh Air Force information officer...
...Charged with controlling Yenereal disease for Udorn’s airmen, Leff was instructed by his hospital commander to get the rate below one case per 1,000 men per day for the month of December, 1969...
...You could say there’s kind of a controversy between us and the grunts on that subject...
...The planes didn’t come to bomb the soldiers, they tried to kill the villagers...
...By June 1, air raids had occurred on 43 days since the first of the year, an average of twice a week...
...At one point, however, the pilots were asked if they got any feedback on people killed in action as a result of their raids...
...Oh, no...
...Our life became like one of animals who search to escape the butchers...
...But private interviews with informed American sources indicate that the bombing of civilian targets in Cambodia is as extensive as in Laos, One of the most heavilybombed areas has been the Plain of Jars, located in northeastern Laos and controlled by the Pathet Lao since 1964...
...When asked, official spokesmen merely deny that civilian targets are bombed, and almost all information is classified beyond public reach...
...This war from the pilot’s standpoint is a very impersonal one, whether or not you believe the goals that the government prescribes for us...
...The people underwent another war: the air war...
...If I lived in another country that wanted to be sure and retain its right to self-determination, I would say: “Thank God that the United States exists at this moment of history...
...And there was the buffalo on top of the small hill at the side of the rice field...
...Clearly, as they say out in cam Ranh Bay, "The name of the game is air...
...and, since there are no tales of atrocities and few pictures of the bombing, domestic reaction to its more questionable moral aspects is muted...
...The grunts came in and reported 25 enemy killed by ground fire...
...As for the other men, do they know all the unimaginable atrocities which can happen here in this war...
...Any corpses below lie far from his consciousness...
...There are few large bridges, factories, or other targets which seem worth hitting...
...One may or may not accept Hanoi Radio claims that civilian targets are constantly struck...
...A bomb landed nearby, killing her father and wounding her mother and two other villagers...
...For the guerrillas the war has become primarily a question of persevering, of developing courage, patience, and near-mystical faith in their troops, of continuing to meet technological developments from the air with increased ingenuity and resourcefulness...
...There are no Calleys or Medinas to accuse...
...But by 1969 the attitude was ‘better to die fighting than hiding in the holes.’ ” In an arena where American-supported ground forces are as lacking in motivation as they are, such sentiments on the other side are a key factor...
...Nang Pha Sii, my daughter-in-law, was in a trench...
...Nang Pha Sii's mother-in-law, Plain of Jars The opportunities the bombing provides for developing and testing sophisticated weaponry is another factor leading to its continuation...
...millions of gallons of fuel on the “fuel farm...
...In formation officer: Well, you know those college kids...
...going such a transformation...
...Although he refused, Leff later found it common practice elsewhere for rates to be finagled...
...Our village was filled with bomb craters, the land made barren, I grieved very much to see my village in ruins, my animals vanished, my crops destroyed...
...the uncovering of supply complexes in the A Shau Valley in May, 197 1 ; significant guerrilla advances in southern Laos during the same month...
...One of its far-reaching ramifications is the change it is bringing to the psychology of warfare...
...As the men in the room began to chuckle, one pilot explained: “You’ve hit on a rather sore point, you know...
...four to six aircraft carriers operating in and out of the Gulf of Tonkin, with some 10-20,000 personnel...
...And then there are the planes constantly taxiing, taking off, flying, landing-sleek, squat, giant, tiny, silver, camouflage-green...
...Conversation for the first several hours, as is usually the case, was rather dry and technical...
...But the bombing never stopped...
...All this suggests that however many trucks are being destroyed from the air, communist forces are suffering few serious supply problems...
...Various press reports suggest that the same kind of bombing is going on in guerrilla-controlled zones of Cambodia...
...The CIA has its own photoreconnaissance team, reconnaissance aircraft, and ground observers in Pathet Lao zones...
...We have to eliminate them...
...Laotians of all political stripes are opposed to the bombing because it caused hardship to their fellow Laotians against whom they bear no enmity, and because they believe it widened the war...
...a Stinger pilot -whose machine can put a bullet every square foot in an area the size of a football field-stares ahead into the inky darkness, periodically firing when two pips on his computer coincide...
...laserguided bombs and TV-guided missiles have been loosed on buffalo, trucks, rice storehouses, homes, and peasants alike...
...the most industrialized constantly devastating the land and food supplies of some of the most rural...
...They have equipment, too, like the SAMs up North...
...If they stayed up high, they couldn’t hit us...
...Miles of roads stretch as far as the eye can see (an airman, perhaps apocryphally, is said to have measured the roads on Korat Air Force Base and found that there were enough for a two-lane highway to Peking and back...
...We are not bent on conquest or on threatening others...
...Plane losses in Laos have averaged four a month for the last year, for example, compared to 20 a month in North Vietnam during 1965-1 968...
...Such problems were illustrated in a long interview with several F4 pilots at Danang in November, 1970...
...I can assure you that my words are those of a devoted pacifist...
...The Vietnam ground war costs more in money and in lives...
...Let’s face it, we just attacked the fuckers...
...But all informed American sources say that uprotective reaction" strikes are going far beyond enemy missile sites, During these escalations, there has been a significant decrease of U. S. air activity within South Vietnam, both because of the slowdown in ground aircraft have been transferred to the Vietnamese Air Force...
...We plastered the place, napalm, 500-pounders, the works...
...Assigned to guard one corner of Long Binh base, its major accomplishment to date has been mastering the complexities of the black market...
...This is the moral force behind our position...
...guerrilla forces to come to power in Indochina...
...jet planes came daily and destroyed all stationary structures...
...Tens of thousands of peasants have been killed and wounded, hundreds of thousands have been driven underground- The Plain of Jars, formerly a thriving society of some 50,000 Peaple, has been leveled and emptied of its inhabitants...
...He interviewed thousands of refugees who lived under the bombs, plus many American officials and pilots...
...If you hit me on the foot, I should slug you with a club and put you out of commission...
...former Ambassador W. H. Sullivan, Symington hearings, fall 1969 The pilots’ indifference to the air campaign in Laos and Cambodia is a major factor in the constant strikes against villages...
...Sometimes you get shot down, but you don’t see any of the explosions...
...the most prosperous regularly destroying the homes and belongings of some of the poorest...
...With the inexorable development of American air technology, Indochina is already becoming Orwell's battlefield...
...What does it mean, after all, when the strongest of the species is systematically killing and maiming some of the weakest...
...No, let me go, they destroyed my village,” they would say...
...The planes came and dropped a flare that night and then they shot up my rice field...
...takes place on the vague frontiers whose whereabouts the average man can only guess at...
...The change in the Laos air war from a limited number of prop bombers dropping 500-pound bombs outside of populated areas to hundreds of jet and B52 bombers using laser and TV-guided missiles does not appear to be the result of a series of carefully planned decisions...
...The main concerns, from the American side, are technical in nature: developing sensors which will allow instantaneous, automatic, and pinpoint bombing of enemy guerrillas...
...There wasn't a night when we thought we'd live until morning...
...The war in Laos has always been for essentially political ends...
...The general attitude around here is ‘let’s keep the war going, it’s dying.’ ” . . . our air activities are governed by strict Rules of Engagement and Operations Authorities designed to minimize civilian casualties...
...by a 29-year-old man I wak out with my young relative who had been a novice monk...
...by a man, age unknown That day, I had gone very early to harrow the rice field, but then there was the plane bombing...
...The villagers lived in trenches and holes or in caves...
...See, you can still feel many pellets in Khamphong’s legs and back...
...Can you imagine...
...The training emphasis for pilots is still on the techniques of aerial combat, the need to establish “air superiority...
...Pilot: Our 500-pound nape cannisters are newer, they have a better dispersal pattern than the older I , 000-pounders...
...Perhaps unaware of this, Americans who watch the war have not yet learned to look up in the air...
...My very hardest job is to give out medals of honor...
...The air war also involves a change in the tactics of battle...
...Numerous towns and villages have already been decimated...
...Giant computers, seismic and acoustic sensors, infra-red devices, and ANAPQ108 radar (designed to see through trees) have been tracking squat Soviet-built trucks or farmers trying to grow rice at night...
...While most people believe that bringing the troops home is synonymous with getting out of Vietnam, ground troops are becoming irrelevant to the war effort...
...KC135 super-tankers at 20,000...
...George Chapelier, a Belgian U. N. advisor, has described what occurred: “. . . in 1969...
...The major success claimed for the bombing by the Pentagon is that it destroys seven of eight trucks moving down the Ho Chi Minh Trail...
...The issue of guilt is becoming meaningless, conscience irrelevant...
...B52s at 30,000...
...This is more American ordnance than was absorbed by both the European and Pacific theaters during World War II, plus the Korean war...
...Let me do it, they killed my mother...
...But all of these rules and regulations don’t mean shit when you have a guy in an aircraft...
...And more important, U.S...
...The past and present American ambassadors to Laos, for example, both speak frequently-and no doubt sincerely-of their deep admiration for its people...
...A logistics network stretching through 18 major air bases in the Pacific back to 112 in the United States provides the men and planes necessary to keep the bombs falling...
...The Air Force itself is still modeled after this tradition...
...Neither has shown any noticeable discomfort as they wander through Laotian refugee camps, chatting and smiling with people against whom they had earlier approved bombing raids...
...Population estimates for these zones begin at one million...
...We still think in terms of World War I1 movies: blue-eyed, blond-haired young men soaring into the sky to defend God and country against the heathen Kraut or Jap...
...from essay by 35-year-old woman refugee from Plain of Jars The questions raised in this, the third year of the Era of the Blue Machine, really have less to do with men than Man...
...But war is not a pretty thing...
...Discussion focused on the capabilities of different aircraft and kinds of ordnance, weapons-delivery systems, and navigational problems...
...Psychologically, therefore, they do not...
...All refugees and defectors say the guerrilla soldiers avoided -the villages, neither bivouacking in them nor storing arms and ammunition in them...
...I just stayed in my cave...
...The bombing continues...
...They don’t like [it...
...After an expenditure of over $100 billion, the U. S. economic motives have diminished, too...
...The Laos pattern has been repeated in Cambodia...
...Such haggling over body counts does not, of course, satisfy the pilots’ competitive urges...
...Arnie Leff, an Air Force doctor at Udorn Base in Thailand, achieved some local fame during the great Gonorrhea Crisis in the fall of 1969...
...Pilot: Well, it seems pretty ridiculous to me that people can be so emotional about how you kill people...
...George Wilson, The Washington Post, April, 1971 Another factor leading to low Air Force morale has been the military ineffectiveness of the bombing...
...You can look back and see ’em, but you don’t see any of the blood or any of the flesh...
...There are no American units to support...
...With the communist capture of the Bolovens Plateau in May of this year, the Royal Lao government now controls little more than the major towns...
...There are five such installations in South Vietnam, with some 40,000 American airmen...
...It’s good for morale,” a pilot explained proudly...
...American leaders are more products of this process than its conscious manipulators, more the Man in the Grey Flannel Suit-or sometimes the Mad Hatterthan Big Brother...
...The jets bombed while she was in the house...
...The U. S. public is generally unaware of the massive bombing in Laos, for example...
...But for me, I had reached the hole already...
...We did it at Cherbourg, didn’t we...
...The bombing of North Vietnam has also resumed...
...I thought, "I am only a village rice farmer, the airplane will not shoot me...
...When you go down in Laos, you don’t face a very bright future,” an F4 pilot said, “and frankly, I’m just not going to risk my ass for a goddamned truck...
...This gives the enemy the advantage...
...EC130 command and control aircraft at 35,000...
...They were too afraid...
...Charles Schultze, former director of the Bureau of the Budget, estimates that costs above normal upkeep of bases and production of aircraft are $2-3 billion for 1972...
...They have no regard for human life...
...They learned another form of civilization: the holes...
...The Plain of Jars is today a deserted wasteland...
...F4 pilot, Danang, November 28,1970 Despite the inefficiency of the bombing, there is little likelihood that it will be halted...
...The Washington Post, May 23, 19 71 Hundreds of case histories of bombing casualties have been recorded on film and tape in the refugee camps...
...Sure, some of the villages get bombed, there’s no other way to fight a war out here, for God’s sake...
...This may later be true of the other countries as well, making one wonder whether technology can keep up with the growing opposition to the U. S. in Vietnam, if we will resort to even more effective bombs to keep down more strengthened wills...
...But that is precisely the point...
...They’re dying that they can’t test their stuff out,” explained one happy pilot at Danang Air Force Base last November...
...pilots pull levers from thousands of feet up, not triggers at human forms 100 yards away...
...But even if you found an example in which it was proven conclusively that houses were bombed, so what...
...by a man, age unknown by Fred Branfman War is no longer the desperate annihilating struggle that it was...
...You go out, fly your mission, you come back to your air-conditioned hooch and drink beer or whatever...
...Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Dennis J. Doolin has testified to Congress that in Laos “all United States operations, including our air operations, are controlled by the U. S. ambassador...
...and SR71 reconnaissance aircraft at 70,000 feet...
...But, alas, the rate was still 1.5...
...On the one hand, they spend a good deal of time discussing the technical details of their work and take it quite seriously...
...The air war, however, drains the sea...
...Air Force magazine, May 1971 Only as one drives past the paddy fields and samlor drivers onto an American air base in Indochina does one begin to appreciate just how awesome a military force the Blue Machine is...
...Why not...
...No less an authority than former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, after all, revealed in the fall of 1968 that bombing raids on the Ho Chi Minh Trail had reduced the flow of men and supplies by no more than 10-1 5 per cent...
...each new improvement was put into action...
...We dug day and night, the planes bombed day and night...
...Pilots who cannot locate any targets are discouraged from wasting their bombs by dumping them at sea or in unoccupied forest...
...Very few differentiate where the hell they bomb...
...Old people “often could not hear well or could not run fast enough,” one chief of a Plain of Jars sub-district explained...
...acres of hospitals, commissaries, canteens, nightclubs, restaurants, swimming pools, barracks, gasoline pumps, garages, buses, trucks, jeeps, radios, radar installations, warehouses, offices, and hangars...
...That’s about as close to war as we get...
...The relatively significant number of military targets, the heavy antiaircraft fire in North Vietnam satisfied the pilots’ need for a challenge...
...It is perhaps the only solution for an Administration that wants to keep from losing wars abroad and elections at home...
...What’s so bad about nape anyway...
...the conduct of war...
...Guerrillas in Indochina, it is argued, are an implacable force bent on military victory, and whatever we do to make it more difficult for them is justifiable...
...F4, F100, F105, A7, B57 jet bombers, jet reconnaissance, EC47 and EC119 electronic aircraft at 10,000...
...And those few Americans who do know Laotians or Cambodians express little but warmth and affection for them...
...In rural theaters such as Laos or Cambodia, any means of bombardment would be disproportionateenemy stores and soldiers are not located in the villages...
...Actually, the opposite seems to be true...
...A typical example was given by the pilot who exploded, “One day we went in over a North Vietnamese military camp on top of a mountain...
...The biggest problem I had was to restrain my men’s enthusiasm...
...American F4 pilot, Saigon, November 14, 1970 The image of the Air Force that most Americans grew up with was embodied in the fighter pilot...
...This has led to increasing frustration with their role in the last two-and-a-half years...
...I’m as liberal, as much for peace as anyone else...
...It’s a war, and the civilians have to suffer...
...Together with Air Force personnel, CIA representatives participate in weekly meetings at Udorn Air Force Base in Thailand to draw up target listings...
...And barring the unlikely event of the superstate itself being vanquished, its policymakers are hardly likely to admit to-let alone convict themselves of-war crimes...
...And they’ll make a damn good booby trap out of a coupie of boards and some nails...
...When asked why, refugees explain that the children like to “play around” too much and get caught in the open and, confused with terror, do not make it to the holes...
...In Laos at least you get some antiaircraft fire...
...it was the policy not to attack populated areas...
...Interviews with Pathet Lao defectors indicate that far from breaking the enemy’s will, the bombing strengthened it...
...But when the time comes, I’m prepared to do it...
...The pilots grew gradually more and more indignant as they told personal anecdotes of having been “robbed” of “kills...
...These installations are, of course, but a small part of the Blue Machine...
...The others would go out and do their work if they didn’t hear the planes coming...
...Moralists may wonder why an Ambassador Godley continues overseeing bombing strikes in Laos while a Lieutenant Calley languishes in jail...
...They blame Souvanna Phouma’s government in part for permitting it...
...I know we had kills, you could see people running all over the place, buildings burning, There was no way for there to be no KIA...
...The guerrillas move through the forest at night in small groups...
...Do you realize this is the only place in the world right now where you can drop live bombs...
...applying new and better forms of ordnance...
...casualties are minimal from the air...
...The influx of more than 30,000 refugees from heavily bombed areas during 1970 has made the bombing common knowledge in Americansupported zones...
...The air war in Laos has been going on for several years, a concurrent experiment with the land war in Vietnam...
...As one F4 pilot said, “Bombing the North really keeps morale up...
...She was burned alive...
...But do you know what happened...
...If a guerrilla is a fish among the sea of the people, the objective of the land war is to remove the fish...
...But they’re shrewd, good tacticians...
...Before, maybe only 20-30 per cent of the young men would volunteer to join the Pathet Lao army,” explains one defector...
...and guarding the major bases and towns...
...This is not to say that...
...Newsmen have not been permitted to go out on bombing raids over Laos, although they can go over South Vietnam...
...In August, 1969, the jets bombed...
...from essay by teenage refugee, Laos The bombing of Laos has doubled, erasing whatever restrictions on striking Civilian targets that formerly existed...
...The guerrillas now control from 60 to 70 per cent of Cambodia...
...They have usually not been allowed to interview the American air attache in Vientiane or the pilots bombing Laos from Thailand...
...My way of killing people is better than their way...
...The air war is still relatively new there, and as a result, refugees who have lived for long periods of time in guerrilla areas have not yet come into friendly regions...
...As their raping, looting and indiscriminate shelling of towns has shown in Cambodia, they have yet to master the most elemental rules of ground warfare in Indochina...
...It caused us to have no rice to eat...
...The pilot who doesn’t get rid of his ordnance somehow,” a pilot says, “is a rare exception,” So they end up striking the only thing they can see from the air-villages...
...Were we afraid of the planes...
...getting hand-held lasers into use instead of ineffective aircraft-directed beams...
...Neither experiment has been successful in stopping guerrilla forces, but at least the air war has a possibility for surviving the domestic politics while at the same time delaying communist takeovers in Indochina...
...Heavy bombing of civilian targets has, of course, occurred during other wars, and in the Vietnam war before 1969...
...In the last phase, bombings were aimed at the systematic destruction of the material basis of the civilian society...
...To this day, only one junior Foreign Service officer has been assigned to check proffered target listings...
...At this writing, communist guerrillas are the only force in Indochina who believe they know what they are fighting for...
...The war kept up with the advances...
...Now the cabinet is in deep discussion of a series of proposals by General Henri Navarre, commander in chief in Indochina, that the war be increasingly turned over to the Vietnamese themselves, permitting France to reduce the burden on its manpower and economy...
...You’re not supposed to talk about it to the press...
...Some 25,000 refugees were removed...
...The Lon No1 army, although its soldiers’ courage is often admirable, has made little headway, even with ARVN help...
...I’m not saying we were right...
...A hospital superior ordered him to lower the figures anyway...
...five in Thailand, with 25,000 airmen...
...The command’s area of responsibility covers roughly 40 per cent of the earth’s surface-an area with a population of more than one-billion people living under the flags of 27 nations...
...taking out refugees, as on the Plain of Jars...
...The most dramatic example of what freedom an air war allows the government occurred in November, 1968, when criticism of the wellpublicized bombing of North Vietnam had reached its peak...
...It was just part of ongoing technological development...
...This appears to be more a reflection of what some of us call the “Leff Syndrome,” however, than reality...
...The human spirit seems to be triumphing...
...But in each of these cases, the bombing powers have also deployed large numbers of ground troops, with the bombing seen as a support effort...
...refugee from the Plain of Jars Many Americans believe that the pattern of the war fought on the ground in Vietnam will spread to the other countries...
...They suggest that they are produced to justify more money from Congress, and more weapons development...
...The attack or bombardment, by whatever means, of towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings which are undefended is prohibited...
...You’re not in contact with it...
...In a guerrilla war, the civilians are going to pay a price...
...But my friend did not get back to the hole in time...
...All say that the vast majority of the casualties from the bombing were civilian and not military, as the soldiers were out in the forest and could not be found...
...Each one of the refugees interviewed from both northern and southern Laos said that his village was either partially or totally destroyed by In the first year of the airplanes, we still went to thresh rice in the rice field...
...If they came down low, we could shoot them down...
...They are composed of 3-4,000 tiny villages, each consisting of a few dozen bamboo homes, a pagoda, rice storehouses, a few hundred head of water buffalo, cows, pigs, chickens, and ducks, and inhabited by some of the poorest, most gentle, rice farmers in Southeast Asia...
...Information officer: Hey, you’re not supposed to talk about the napalm...
...Although the number of bases has decreased by four in 1970, Pacific Air Force installations still stretch from Hawaii to Thailand...
...The Royal Lao Army and CIAdirected Armee Clandestine in Laos are even weaker...
...Largely because of its direction of the Armee Clandestine, an indigenous paramilitary force, the CIA, sources say, has consistently placed inhabited villages on the target list in an attempt to weaken the Pathet Lao...
...In September, 1969, CIAsupported Meo troops went in and took out the remnants of what remained...
...In any event, more than 350,000 tons of bombs-200,000 pounds every hour-will be dropped before the end of the year...
...Nobody really understood what the Pathet Lao meant by ‘American imperialism’ before the planes came...
...This is my daughter, Khamphong...
...Pilots tend to get restless without a challenge...
...She’s three years old...
...As one F4 pilot put it, “Targeting for air war North was done by Washington...
...While a foot soldier can support just so much new technology on his back, the air war provides a vessel to be filled with all the gadgetry of the nuclear age...
...When looking at the face of my innocent child, I could not stop crying for his future...
...Subsequent events seem to bear this analysis out: communist successes against the South Vietnamese invasion in February 1971...
...refugee from Plain of Jars For the last two-and-a-half years, bombing has been the heart of U. S. policy...
...Life, August 3, 1953 The bombing of villages results most fundamentally from a 25-yearlong American refusal to allow...
...But the airplanes came and dropped bombs of napalm, burning our rice...
...The bombing has undoubtedly aided them in achieving a political victory...
...That’s part of the attraction of being a pilot...
...They make fuses out of them...
...And bombing strikes in Laos, for which the ambassador bears responsibility, are killing unarmed and unresisting civilians as a matter of course...
...S. air power-several thousand feet above the grunts, climbing away from any American agony...
...Incensed, Leff asks, “If they’d change gonorrhea rates, what else would they falsify...
...War has now progressed to a point where youZe going to bomb civilian targets and that’s it...
...Neither the people, nor their congressmen, even knew it had happened...
...There is little doubt, however, that American policymakers also share the responsibility...
...And though they try to compensate by striving to win the “Gunfighter of the Month” award-based on percentage of bombs dropped in the target area-it hardly suffices...
...Although its cost is considerable...
...More than two million tons of ordnance have been dropped, $5-1 0 billion spent...
...Their failures in Laos, and their loss of 54 posts in the “pacified” Mekong Delta during the first four months of 1971, have surprised few old Indochina hands...
...You hit me on the foot, I hit you on the ankle...
...When you have to bomb trucks one by one, you’re going to kill hundreds and hundreds of civilians,” one pilot says...
...What did I think about...
...Hafner, Deputy Director, USAIDILaos, January 4, I9 71 All refugees talk about the bombing...
...They ’re just primitive little jungle fighters, sure...
...It’s really great to have them tell you afterwards, ‘We’d have been overrun if you hadn’t come.’ I really like working with people...
...And they use a lot of the stuff we discard, like tin cans...
...And bombing villages just hasn’t been the same thing...
...The fighting...
...It has paralyzed the civilian populations, Vietnam is not the future of Laos, but Laos may be the future of the war all over Indochina...
...But by 1969, 90 per cent and more wanted to join...
...to get some clothing for herself and the children...
...All indications are that the American ambassador has approved strikes against civilian targets in Pathet Lao zones...
...He then went on to explain that the pilots felt that the foot soldiers were taking credit for aerially-inflicted casualties...
...And since the targets that are traceable, such as trucks, are of minor importance, pilots tend not to risk bombing from lower altitudes...
...And without anybody really understanding or caring, thousands of Indochinese villages were destroyed in the process...
...We rely on the bombs...
...A bomb hit the hole and people died inside it...
...Ideological and political questions have long since dimmed in importance, since most people within Indochina have already decided what side they are on...
...It is Ho Chi Minh himself who is said to have remarked to a graduating class of sappers, the elite units of the North Vietnamese army, “You are our answers to the B52s...
...Each day, news came about such and such a village being bombed, more and more deaths and wounded...
...And in the holes in the forest still we had no rice to eat...
...The whole problem comes from Kennedy’s ‘flexible response’ idea...
...George Orwell, 1984 Conventional land warfare, George Orwell predicted, would inevitably give way to automated war as military technology developed...
...But today, with South Vietnam being run by its American-imposed Curtis LeMays, few U.S...
...In countries such as Laos, the act of automated war itself is the war crime...
...Several thousand refugees, several hundred defectors, and Western observers who have visited these zones all report constant bombing of towns and villages and widespread destruction...
...With the switch to bombing Laos and Cambodia, the raison d’etre of the Air Force seems to have disappeared...
...by a 33-year-old man One day the airplanes came to drop the bombs and shoot the rockets so that my village burned...
...Nothing was left standing...
...The ARVN, whatever its improvement in the last five years, remains riddled with corruption, elitism, and poorly motivated conscripts...
...photo interpreters see bomb craters and destroyed “enemy structures,” not headless children or napalmed grandmothers...
...a belief in technology covered the horrors, much as a belief in religion protected the Inquisition...
...Antiaircraft positions are not located there, either...
...or perhaps it was a conflict between American imperialism and national liberation, as the left claims...
...The communists have made it clear they are not planning to take over the major towns militarily...
...The Wild Blue Yonder Over Laos This drawing and those on pages 32 and 33 were done by people from the Plain of Jars, Laos, depicting their life as it was during the bombing of their villages by American planes...
...Later on, the pilot added one of the standard comments heard on Air Force bases in Indochina: “It may sound trite, but it’s the only war we’ve got...
...By the admission of American officials closely associated with the war there, Laos has been the most heavily bombed country in the history of aerial warfare...
...President Johnson halted the bombing, a move still regarded by the antiwar forces as one of the few important victories of the peace movement...
...Williamson, USAID refugee relief chiex Vientiane, February 2, 1971 While American officials concede that villages are frequently bombed, they tend to attribute this to Air Force “stupidity,” “confusion,” or “overkill...
...They knew they'd be bombed...
...If I asked for volunteers, all my men would argue to be the first chosen...
...Every man likes to feel that he’s an adventurer...
...Each day, across the forests and ditches, we sought only to escape from the bombs...
...Why do the men in this world not love each other, not live together in peace, not build happiness in development and progress...
...All you’re doing is bombing roads and inanimate objects...
...and 2) if bombing is carried out against civilians in reprisal for military acts over which they have no control...
...I’m trained to kill people...
...I was fishing in a stream with all seven of my children on February 28, 1969...
...The Russians are going nuts over what we’re learning out here...
...Oh, yes, and we did also...
...AlE, A26, T26 prop bombers, AC47, AC54, AC 1 19, AC 130 gunships, flare ships, rescue and gunship helicopters at 5,000 feet...
...Me Ou was 59 when she died on February 20, 1969...
...As Robert Shaplen has written in Foreign Affairs, an American goal has been to “destroy the social and economic fabric in Pathet Lao areas,” in an attempt to weaken the communists’ stronger ground army by depriving it of indigenous food supplies, disrupting communications, killing off potential recruits or porters, demoralizing the civilian population, and causing a refugee flow to friendly zones...
...The real war has taken off...
...Six of my seven children were hit...
...Trying his best, the good doctor lectured, charted, and examined...
...Thousands of American and Asian personnel drive, scurry, loll about: pilots, radio operators, mechanics, bomb-loaders, fuse-installers, “fuel farmers,” gas-pump operators, drivers, electricians, carpenters, janitors, doctors, medical orderlies, lawyers, chaplains, cooks, MPs, guards, loaders, stackers, waiters, “hooch-girls,” secretaries, clerks, information officers, launderers, photo interpreters, gunners, navigators, men wearing the uniforms of the Air Force, Navy, Marines, Army, Air America, Continental Air Service, and Pan American and Northwest airlines...
...From higher up, especially in the monsoon season, the bombing takes place without the pilot ever seeing the ground below...
...Human beings, whose parents cherished them, died from the explosions of the bombs...
...Navigators plot bombing raids on coordinates, not villages...
...But the war of the 1970s is that of the Blue Machine-U...
...In it, war is waged primarily through the aerial bombardment of populated areas...
...DOW, Honeywell, and Lockheed did their part...
...Oh, they didn't come near the villages...
...On the Plain, once Laos’ most prosperous area, there were no American ground combat troops...
...Pacific Air Forces has justly earned the title “Guardians of the Pacific...
...Since Nixon took office, and as ground troops have been withdrawn, more than 2.4 million tons of bombs, by Pentagon estimate, have been dropped on Indochina...
...Some critics see an element of cynicism in continued Air Force claims of success...
...His leg was broken and he died, for always...
...Suddenly jets came and dropped anti-personnel bombs all around...
...She was killed, sheilding her year-old baby with her body...
...It is certainly clear that the American embassy has taken few steps to enforce the Rules of Engagement (military rules of warfare that prohibit attacks on civilians...
...You see flak at night...
...On the other hand, as one pilot says, “Pilots are more immature than most civilians their age...
...They are presently living in refugee camps around the capital city of Vientiane...
...As one pilot who has bombed in both northern and southern Laos explains it, “Sure, we’re supposed to follow the Rules of Engagement, like not bombing within 500 meters of an active village...
...It can be kept far from public and congressional consciousness...
...Pathet Lao zones encompass an area the size of New York state, or about two-thirds of the country...
...I’ll be frank...
...the ongoing communist military success in Cambodia despite the closing of Sihanoukville port...
...It was a cold day and she decided to leave the trench about 3 p.m...
...conversation at Danang Air Force Base, November 1970 The pilots themselves tend to be an odd combination of hot rodder and technocrat...
...At this writing, Asian troops are essentially playing a supplemental role: serving as live bait to lure the enemy out into the open for the bombers, as in the February, 1971, Laotian invasion...
...There were no soldiers nearby...
...never a morning we thought we'd survive until night...
...Article 25, Hague Convention on Land Warfare, 1907 The issue of war crimes is reduced to absurdity...
...For Asian ground armies alone will hardly accomplish what 5 50,000 American troops could not...
...I had gone home to get some belongings in the houses together with my friend...
...The American people will not continue to pay the price that has already come to $100 billion spent, 50,000 dead, 300,000 wounded-nor will the troops, who are now in grassy-headed revolt...
...The war in Indochina today has become primarily one of technology versus the human spirit...
...On the contrary...
...In the Era of the Blue Machine, war is gradually becoming a technical exercise, bereft of malice or rancor, an elemental expression of the art of killing...
...They sort of like to play cowboys and Indians...
...This is seen as giving us important advantages over our adversaries...
...The Pathet and North Vietnamese are a plague...
...Each day for the last several years, hundreds of millions of dollars of the world’s most sophisticated aircraft have been hovering over these villages: OlE, 02, and OVlO spotter planes at 2,000 feet...
...The lieutenant, after all, was convicted for killing unarmed and unresisting civilians...
...As one pilot explained, “Bombing for troops in combat is the most satisfying...
...Nixon Administration officials, as did those in the Johnson and Kennedy Administrations, say that never before has such care been taken to spare civilians in bombing raids...
...A significantly high number of casualties are children and old people...
...The momentum was more powerful than the people within it...
...All they did was shoot their M16s into the corpses and then claim they’d killed them...
...It is not only that few of the Laotian or Cambodian peasants presently living under the bombing have no idea what an American is, why the United States is bombing them-it is also that few of the Americans involved in the air war have ever seen a Laotian or Cambodian...
...A lot of people in the States underestimate what we ’re up against...
...It is a warfare of limited aims...
...Men are increasingly freed from the hatred, doubts, greed, or rationalizations that killing usually entails...
...The F4 and F105 jets, which have done most of the bombing in Indochina, are designed as fighters, not bombers...
...But when we did decide to bomb them, we should have kicked the shit out of them...
...The pilots have fought few aerial duels in Indochina, however...
...They only farmed at night...
...While there may be some truth in this, there seems no doubt that Air Force personnel are by and large sincere in their belief that bombing has been effective, not because it has cut off supply lines, but because it has made the enemy “pay a price” for his conquests...
...But it doesn’t work...
...The Era of the Blue Machine has arrived...
...The roar of the bombs and the noise of the planes frightened me terribly...
...But in a physical sense war involves very small numbers of people, mostly highly trained specialists...
...Pretty soon they >re going to put poor Dow Chemical out of business...
...and the most technically advanced using their most sophisticated weaponry against a people who pose the most marginal of challenge to their interests?’’ In a nuclear age such questions are of more than passing concern...
...Most Air Force personnel I interviewed tended to minimize the importance of the reductions in Vietnam itself...
...At that, I went to look at the buffalo but then I saw that it had already died at the top of the hill...
...Even where it admits limited failure, as for example in the inability of the bombing of North Vietnam to halt the flow of supplies into the South, it ascribes this to improper constraints placed on it by civilians...
...And finally, of course, the ordnance...
...Who then thinks about the affection and love their parents felt for them...
Vol. 3 • July 1971 • No. 5
