Let Them Eat Bombs
Everingham, John
Let Them Eat Bombs by John Everingham Author’s Note: From March, 1968, to May, 1972, I made seven treks to the jungled villages of Long Pot District in north central Laos. The district is...
...Crowding Gair Su Yang’s mid-floor fire, nine village headmen gathered on our second day...
...Wealthier families who had shared their grain were next, and by the time McCoy and I arrived there was no rice...
...And as we all waited, bombs could be heard peppering the hills in the distance...
...It had been dropped to the village by USAID supply planes under the guise of providing rice for refugees...
...Old Var Lur, the village’s most respected medium, whom I had often photographed during his incantations, had returned from the forest late one day to feed the pigs and chickens...
...According to Chao Cho, the people of Long Pot never saw the Pathet Lao, who had passed the village and continued south in pursuit of the fleeing soldiers from Long Cheng...
...Early in 1970, Long Cheng demanded men from Tong Ouie to boost the failing Meo forces...
...Long Pot is the name of the district and also the name of the Me0 village serving as district headquarters...
...With the Pathet Lao had come the bombing...
...Long Pot’s families had stripped their homes and fled south to the refugee settlements...
...we lounged on the springy bamboo floor of the headman’s house, raised by stilts from the ground...
...According to Gair Su Yang, the first helicopter landed in Long Pot in 1960...
...He had flown to forward bases and to the Plain of Jars...
...With the exception of nearly stepping on a mine on my return journey (fortunately it had been half-unearthed by the spring rains), I made the trip without trouble...
...The district is located approximately 32 miles to the northwest of Long Cheng, headquarters for General Vang Pa05 Americantrained army, and 30 air miles to the southwest of the now deserted Plain of Jars...
...They had returned to the village with about 10 others to search for lost cattle and buffalo...
...And that’s what the Americans want...
...Every day, T-28 bombers dumped aluminum canisters filled with anti-personnel bomblets into the protective canopy of vegetation...
...Air America” was clearly printed down the side of the silver and blue craft...
...They lost...
...The USAID official coordinating rice deliveries in the Long Pot area worked out of Ban Son, a town 35 miles to the south...
...They said their village headmen had chosen them...
...Tong Ouie, whose headman had been so enraged at the kidnap-drafting of his men, was in cinders...
...Any animals they found would be taken south to the refugee camps, their new homes...
...At Ban Tam Geo, charred two-by-fours stood at attention before a dozen large craters...
...In five days I traveled to 10 of 11 villages in the district...
...Five of these were populated by the Me0 clan, five by the Hill Lao, and one by the people of the Melcong River lowlands...
...The boys’ eyes revealed their fear and demoralization as they talked about the coming helicopter ride and their destination...
...The pilots were American, but a Meo officer climbed out to talk with him...
...There was little meat to be had...
...Why should our people fight and die for the Meo or the Americans...
...All human activity had gone underground or into the security of the forest...
...The normal USAID monthly ration-supplied to everyone who really needed it, according to the American in charge of the program-was 15 kilograms (33 pounds) per person...
...Ash and a few charred poles, a few pieces of metal plate and utensils were all that was left...
...Back in Long Pot village, Gair Su Yang had invited us to “stay as long as you like...
...In the year since I had last been in the area, Lao advances had put them in control of the 30 miles of territory from Moung Soui down to Long Pot’s northern hills...
...Chao Cho and his friends said that most of the bombs were dropped by the propellerdriven T-28s, but, they said, jets bombed on some days, and the big crater in the middle of one cluster of Long Pot’s houses was from a bomb released by a jet...
...Their attitude didn’t help my sense of purpose-still, I had to get there...
...He had seen the war approach until its shadow hung over his own village...
...I refused to send more...
...Over a three-day period I compiled a list of every hungry family in the district...
...It’s the bombs...
...An American-trained Meo medic was helicoptered in to set up a small dispensary for the district...
...His wife and a Hill Lao man were with him...
...There, they said, U. S. soldiers had put them through three months of military training...
...The helicopter rose and swept away toward Moung Soui...
...The houses of Phou Miang had been few and far apart, and this had saved it from complete destruction...
...All three were killed trying to get inside Var Lur’s house...
...All had been destroyed...
...in the direction of Moung Soui...
...Chao Cho told of the bombing of Long Pot...
...The people of Long Pot were afraid to walk even 400 yards from their village...
...For the first four days I was held at gunpoint, kept in jail, and branded a “professional bomb dropper...
...Tong Ouie is a village of Hill Lao people about an hour’s walk from Long Pot village...
...The pigs outside fended for themselves and became thin...
...A few days earlier, they had returned by helicopter from Long Cheng...
...We have only 60 men left in the village, and we need them here...
...Every village north of here has been bombed,” Gair Su Yang had told me, and it seemed true...
...Many more than Gair Su Yang’s figure of 11 bombs had been dropped among the houses...
...In his 60 years he could not remember such poverty in the village...
...Early in January, a Western traveler had somehow managed to return from a frightening trip to Phou Khoun, about 10 miles northeast of Long Pot...
...We won’t fight...
...Eventually I was sent to a small, jungle camp 20 miles west of the Plain of Jars and held for two weeks while my story and credentials were checked...
...But such distinctions are obscured in khaki...
...But, said Gair Su Yang, if the Pathet Lao were to come to his village the people would not fight...
...It was after dinner...
...I sent many and they got killed...
...Long Pot’s men were then given rank in irregular battalion 209...
...Faced with a CIA-army expansion, the Pathet Lao moved slowly onto the offensive...
...I later presented the findings to the refugee relief division of USAID in Vientiane...
...He apologized that the festivities would not be as gay as in past years...
...Then this year they said I must send all our 14-year-olds...
...Another helicopter would arrive that afternoon, they said, and take them off to Moung Soui district, about 30 miles to the northeast, where the Pathet Lao were in the midst of attacking and taking the town...
...Those from the nine others, including Gair Su Yang and his people, had fled south to the refugee centers...
...And they went...
...It next spread to three villages of refugee Hill Lao who had deserted their huts during the Pathet Lao occupation of the northern part of the district and had come to camp at Long Pot village...
...One of the original promises the CIA had made to Vang Pao in 1960 was to air-drop rice to feed the families of every soldier in the new army, Gair Su Yang said...
...Every village north of here has been bombed...
...Helicopters had recently landed 30 irregulars and 30 Royal Lao army soldiers in Long Pot...
...The headman recounted the story bitterly: he had first refused to send a single man up to Long Pot village to fill out the district’s quota...
...These were probably U. S. Special Forces, whom it was common to see in small up-country towns of Laos until 1968-69...
...The new road put Long Pot only a half-day walk from motor transport...
...Fourteen is too young to be a soldier, and we need them here in the village...
...The camp was near Muong Soui, the destination of the boy soldiers I had watched helicoptered out of Long Pot in 1970...
...We will slip out the back way and go to the refugee camps...
...Of the 60 I had to send to the army in 1970, 12 were dead by the end of the year...
...he wore no shoes...
...When I was still thought to be a pilot, angry villagers yelled at me that American and Royal Lao air force bombers had been dropping explosives on them since 1967...
...May, 1972 “Nobody lives there,” said the Royal Lao soldiers as I looked eastward from Route 13 towards Long Pot District...
...Soldiers were dying faster than Tong Ouie village near Long Pot in December, 1971 Tong Ouie in May, 1972 they could be trained...
...People from one village, Par Kheng, were living in caves...
...The last rice was dropped to the village in February...
...February 1972 I made my way by motorboat and sampan into Pak Sah village, 17 miles southeast of the royal capital, Luang Prabang...
...There were tears in his eyes and I noted that his hair, barely specked with gray when I had first met him in 1968, was now a silver color...
...From here to Moung Soui, from here to the Plain of Jars...
...The “American soldiers” he spoke of were actually CIA-trained Meo...
...And a constant supply of American rice for two years had destroyed many of the villagers’ incentive to plant any themselves...
...In Ban Nam Phak, a Hill Lao village and the biggest settlement in the district, 14 people had been killed by CBUs, according to Chao Cho...
...Atop a grassy hillock they tossed ceremonial cloth balls with boys from distant villages, part of the mass cdurtship game of swapping partners, compliments, and songs...
...Now,” said Gair Su Yang, “the Pathet Lao won’t be able to just walk into the village and take it...
...they would send no more men to the army...
...Demands from Long Cheng became more persistent and more threatening...
...I had come to get photographs of its predicament...
...They send more and more men against the Pathet Lao each year and they all get killed...
...Men, women, and children slashed, burned, and planted to reap harvests of rice, corn, and, of course, the opium poppy...
...In three swift trips, 20 village boys were gone...
...Gair Su Yang said officials from Long Cheng had radioed and threatened, “no men, no rice...
...People from two of the 11 villages had fled north into Pathet Lao territory...
...The Pathet Lao had the Vang Pao-CIA army against the wall...
...They had erected fortificatians 400 yards outside the village limits...
...The Pathet Lao government was satisfied that I probably was a photo-journalist...
...Gair Su Yang was more apprehensive than ever...
...A companion and myself traveled up Route 13 by motorcycle and walked the rest of the way to Long Pot village...
...They would only come back to live in Long Pot, said Chao Cho, if the war finished and there were no more planes dropping bombs...
...They unanimously passed a resolution to buy what rice they could afford and then to go hungry if necessary...
...When bombs haven’t blown the houses up they have burned them down...
...Like Long Pot, Pak Sah was perched on the brink of the free-fire zone blanketing Pathet Lao territory...
...Within a week of McCoy’s complaints to the U. S. Embassy, Long Pot was again receiving airdrops of rice...
...Craters were wide and shallow, indicating the bombs had been mounted with twoyardlong rods to make them explode above the ground...
...Five minutes’ walk outside Pak Sah I found myself face to face with two Pathet Lao soldiers...
...Every village...
...The village’s ruins had been deserted more than four months, but in that one remaining house I found Gair Su Yang’s wife and his second son, Chao Cho...
...District Chief Gair Su Yang was at the center of the gathering handing out new U. S. army uniforms, pep-talking his recruits...
...The T-28s would saturate as much forest as possible with their six-canister loads and return to home base for more...
...The village itself had subsequently been razed clean...
...The hungry Hill Lao refugees would not return to their villages and rice fields, a two-hour walk to the north, even though the Pathet Lao had withdrawn...
...They guaranteed that the tribesman would not fall under the control of either faction of lowland Lao then girding for civil war...
...And since Long Pot-despite its unwillingness-was supplying boys for the army, USAID planes dropped the half-filled bags (to keep them from breaking) to the village every month...
...They’ll have to clear out the soldiers first...
...The thought of bombs raining on a man’s family would keep him fighting when nothing else would...
...The cries of small children scampering on the rust-colored clay mingled with the grunts and squeals of fat pigs rooting in the underbrush...
...In local usage, soldiers from Long Cheng are often called, or call themselves, “American soldiers...
...The families with men already sent to the army depended upon continuation of American-dropped rice...
...I was shown to the home of the district chief...
...When I first arrived, I saw clusters of thatch and bamboo houses gripping the sides of a man-scraped ridge...
...To keep away the bombs we must keep away the Pathet Lao...
...With the rods on their noses the bombs spread their shrapnel over a greater distance - t hey b e c am e anti-personnel bombs...
...But Gair Su Yang refused again, he said...
...He shaped the biggest crater he could manage with his arms, then swooped them low to simulate an attacking plane...
...A similar trip in August proved impossible when Meo soldiers fired at us with automatic rifles...
...Once an attack by three T-28s found the camp at which I was being held...
...A few people at Long Pot village assured me that the 11th had also been razed...
...December, 197 1 It was mid-December, Meo Lunar New Year, when I last saw Gair Su Yang in Long Pot...
...One of the problems that the people of Long Pot had in accepting the deal was that they were not sure who Vang Pao was...
...Nobody had heard of any Pathet Lao being killed by the bombing...
...In hiding, they became desperate for rice, but continued radio calls to Long Cheng brought the same response: “no men, no rice...
...In 1968, Long Pot was made up of slightly less than 2,000 people living in 11 separate villages...
...What I found, however, more than matched the worst predictions and reports of Long Pot’s fate...
...It was a peaceful scene...
...Let Them Eat Bombs by John Everingham Author’s Note: From March, 1968, to May, 1972, I made seven treks to the jungled villages of Long Pot District in north central Laos...
...Eleven bombs exploded in the village and one that did not go off is still there...
...They stamped their feet, chanted, and spoke defiantly against Vang Pao and the Americans in Long Cheng...
...He was desperate...
...It had not, however, gone to war...
...Long Pot had been militarized in defense of “Meoland” nearly eight years when I first visited...
...He said that American officials had made a pact with Vang Pao, promising to build for the Meo their own army and independent state in the mountains...
...Many families had no other means of support since their men had been drafted...
...In February, while still detained by the Pathet Lao, I had been told by an officer named Khamsing, who had only recently returned from Long Pot, that the district was under Pathet Lao control but that the village had been bombed to “black stumps and scorched earth...
...Many had been flown to Long Cheng for three to four months’ training by U. S. soldiers...
...Nevertheless, unmarried girls adorned themselves with richly colored tunics and trousers, and with finely crafted silver rings around their necks...
...After that, Chao Cho, said, the whole of Ban Nam Phak fled into the forest and joined the Pathet Lao...
...March, 1968 It was a three-day walk to Long Pot village from the nearest motor road...
...He was a short, vigorous man in his late fifties, with a high forehead and the melancholy dignity of a senior statesman...
...The officer painted a picture of future prosperity for the Meo...
...there is plenty of rice...
...Very near us here...
...The Pathet Lao offensive had swept south, by-passing the village to get at the military garrison from Long Cheng...
...Until then, they would live in refugee camps with the rest of the Meo people, who, according to the official American explanation, “are denied their homes by the presence of the Pathet Lao...
...He is currently reporting from Laos, where he has been for the past three years of a helicopter-load of soldiers descending upon Long Pot forced him to accept involvement in the war venture...
...August, 1971 Seven hours slogging through the mud along wet-season tracks brought Alfred McCoy and myself into Long Pot and to Gair Su Yang’s guest bed...
...Gair Su Yang spoke about the fear breaking out in his own village...
...So is Vang Pao...
...I was guiding McCoy, another American writer, to the village to study the CIA’S role in the opium trade...
...It was the time of the year for Pathet Lao guerrillas to attack the Vang Pao army outposts...
...But Gair Su Yang’s voice was flecked with anger and did nothing to ease the funereal atmosphere...
...They did not know which tracks were mined...
...They were accompanied by what my guide called “the bomb that burns everything...
...Near here the villages were bombed, too...
...None ever saw home again-except for one...
...The M-1s were used for shooting squirrels and birds...
...The Americans are crazy...
...Thereafter CIA “civilians” were used to train Vang Pao’s army...
...I took my chances, striking off on one of the approaches I knew best...
...Though a large portion of the province had chosen to leave for the U. S.-run refugee camps, many had opted to remain...
...That had been the first village bombed, apparently before the inhabitants had had time to evacuate...
...The headman described carefully how the soldiers offered him a new chance to choose four men for his quota of conscripts...
...To find who was responsible back in Long Cheng, I asked the radio operator in Long Pot...
...According to Gair Su Yang, the officer then became angry and threatened that Vang Pao and the Americans considered those not friends to be enemies, and “enemy villages would be attacked and captured by Vang Pao’s men...
...American soldiers” had arrived in his village soon after he failed to send the men to Long Pot’s helicopter pad...
...While they were in the village a T-28 spotted them, attacked, and dropped cluster bombs (CBUs...
...Opium was the main cash crop, which from 1960 onwards had been bought by Meo soldiers and transported both by pony caravan and American-piloted Air America helicopters from Long Cheng...
...Hunger first hit the families whose men had been drafted...
...The bomb blasts, though 15 to 20 miles away, shook the hill under our feet and shattered the young soldiers’ nerve...
...The villagers at Phou Miang fought to keep the Pathet Lao away...
...The six-foot containers would open as they fell and spew out more than 100 grenade-sized ball-bearing filled bomblets which spread over a sizeable area...
...Many people have died...
...Soldiers, civilians, and I jammed our bodies into one of the ever-present tunnel shelters and escaped with our lives...
...I saw nine different communities making a living in the shelter of the deep jungle...
...We ate bland corn meal grown to feed the livestock...
...They found it queer that I should even stop and ask about Long Pot...
...The outrage weighed heavy in him as he told his story...
...As Gair Su Yang recounted it, the village of Phou Miang, about 10 miles north of Long Pot, lay destroyed by bombs...
...October, 1970 During the summer of 1969, the Bureau of Public Roads, Laos Division (an arm of USAID), opened war-abandoned Route 13 linking theadministrative capital of Vientiane with the royal capital at Luang Prabang...
...If he would not, they would seize whomever they could find...
...Yet on my return to the village in October, people were still without sufficient food...
...Early next morning, I ran out from breakfast in Gair Su Yang’s house as a helicopter finally whoopwhooped in to land...
...For any village, Gair Su Yang said, falling behind Pathet Lao lines would mean devastation from the sky...
...There are huge craters in the villages...
...The Pathet Lao had the 30 Long Cheng irregulars and 30 Royal Lao regulars on the run within an hour...
...But there was a more basic problem-though Gair Su Yang did not inform me of it until sometime later: “If we joined the alliance, the Pathet Lao would have become our enemy and would have threatened our village...
...Several mothers were crying as they fussed over their soldier-boys...
...He claimed he had taken a photograph of a huge mushroom cloud rising from behind a hill after three planes had attacked a village that soldiers along the road had called “Long Pot...
...Caught behind Pathet Lao lines and fearful of the bombing that was sure to come, Long Pot’s families fled to the forest...
...People in Long Pot were receiving only five kilograms (1 1 pounds), even though a “concerned” USAID officer in Ban Son had personally listened to the pleas of Gair Su Yang...
...The rains were over and the tracks dry...
...The rice was stacked bag-on-bag in one corner of the house...
...My second attempt to reach the site went without incident...
...Boys clambered aboard...
...Americans,” he said, “are the bosses...
...In March, the Pathet Lao entered the northern part of the district...
...As we arrived, 20 teenage boys in U. S. army uniforms, dragging M-1 carbines and rifles often too big for them, paced through mock-military maneuvers, periodically diving to the ground in a half-hearted manner that would have gotten them killed if bullets had really been flying...
...I wandered alone over the scorched hilltop where Gair Su Yang’s home had stood...
...I entered Luang Prabang with a personal appreciation of the terror in Gair Su Yang’s voice as he tried to describe the zone of destruction he feared would envelop Long Pot...
...the planes leveled their village anyway...
...During my 29 days with the Pathet Lao I saw not a single village standing in the open...
...They had come fully armed from Tam Son military garrison 10 miles to the east...
...The Hill Lao are a less prosperous, less colorful race who share the mountains with the Meo...
...Gair Su Yang wore loose black pants of traditional Meo cut and a U. S. military fatigue jacket...
...Many families could not even offer a pig for sacrifice and feasting...
...What remained of the army was clinging to perhaps a fourth of the territory it had held in the mid-sixties, and as it continued to pull back, American aircraft evacuated the civilians to the foot...
...District Chief Gair Su Yang had regularly traveled to Long Cheng for conferences with both American and Meo officers...
...The officer spoke of an alliance between the Americans and a Meo colonel of the Royal Lao Army named Vang Pao...
...I was finally sent back on the same route along which I had been marched into the “liberated zone...
...Meo officers, he said, pass orders over the radio, though sometimes he had to wait for decisions until these officers conferred with Americans...
...It hardly promised to remain long...
...He had no choice, he said bitterly, and told how four of the miserable young soldiers I had seen helicoptered off to Moung Soui were his own boys...
...And then the planes will bomb us.’’ Rice denial, he said, was only one means, and not the most effective, that the Americans had to push his people to fight the Pathet Lao...
...Nothing was done...
...All they had to do was become anti-communist, helping the Americans to fight the Pathet Lao revolutionaries controlling sections of Laos’ northern provinces...
...Last year they wanted only 15-year-olds...
...McCoy’s book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, is being published this month by Harper and Row.] Pathet Lao guerrilla bands were in the hills north of the village, waiting out the end of the rains...
...October, 1971 After our August trip to Long Pot, McCoy had complained to USAID officials in Vientiane that Long Pot’s rice supply had been cut off...
...Long Pot must send more men...
...His body was returned for burial 12 months later...
...By the end of 1960, every man in Long ‘Pot village had received an M-1 rifle or carbine...
...Arrested and then marched to the east, I spent the next 29 days in “liberated territory...
...Any person outside when the bomblet went off had little chance of escaping alive...
...We couldn’t do anything,” Gair Su Yang later contended, pointing out that only fear John Everingham is a reporter for Dispatch News Service International...
...Villagers fled to the forest to avoid the bombing...
...Phou Miang was bombed this year...
...It stood like a tombstone in memory of Long Pot’s death, though with most of its walls blown away...
...lucky charms were stuffed into baggy pockets...
...No, said every boy I asked, they didn’t want to go to fight the Pathet Lao...
...With the war threatening to burst through their gates, tribesmen and families were fearful...
...I told him that Long Pot would not join Vang Pao and the Americans...
...Fear motivates as well as hunger...
...I met him a few months later and he said that he personally reviewed each decision to drop or not drop rice...
...hills...
...A single house somehow remained erect on the most prominent hill...
...they must go...
...The village was finished off with napalm, fragmentation bombs, and more CBUs the following few days, Chao Cho said...
Vol. 4 • September 1972 • No. 7
