by Larry Calloway (c) 2012

In the new Bangkok air terminal a long sculpture on the way to international departures depicts a tug of war, demigods v. devils, in the clean bright primary colors of Theravada Buddhist  temples. This moral chemistry, this dynamic equilibrium of unresolved issues that has gone on since the beginning is a fine Hindu creation myth.

In this story, “Churning the Ocean of Milk,” the Asuras and Devas pull back and forth on a rope hitched around a spindle. (The rope is a mythological snake, the spindle is a sacred mountain, and the winners will get immortality if they last, but we’ll never know.) From the disturbance of the Milky Way came a number of things, depending on the version. The version in my Western eyes as I departed – perhaps finally – was cosmic. It was creation via the slightest first tick of information in the ocean of Zen Emptiness, like Milton’s Satan crossing Chaos and leaving a track from which all organization evolved. The sculpture also is Thailand, where the nightclubs are as famous as the temples (and a whore would never touch a monk) and yellow shirts and red shirts hold staggered demonstrations and democracy alternates with military dictatorship and committees on national reconciliation don’t reconcile. Whatever, the reciprocating engine produces something wonderful like . . . life.

Except for the creationist sculpture, the new airport terminal could be anywhere. It is novel – facades of plate glass and stainless steel under tent tops. It is impressive – 6 million square feet on a steaming plain 20 miles from the city. It is coherent – a single project completed in 2005. But it could be Hong Kong or Beijing or Dubai, equally large. There is a kingdom of airports in the world. You could get stamped in to dozens of nations around it and never leave one. Ram Dass said – and it was a teaching – that every air terminal has posters for somewhere else.

The 600-room Novotel, with a lobby high as a cathedral, was built along with the terminal. I have stayed in this hotel several times to make overnight flight connections. In the city there’s a spread of places to stay: tall luxury hotels on the river Chao Phraya, international franchises at Silom Road, backpacker havens at Khao San Road. But overnighting in the city involves the risk of missing a flight next day due to the uncertainty of Bangkok traffic. Another annoyance is that taxi drivers will pimp a farang traveling alone and wanting only to wake up on time. (“You want see the girls?” “Mai Chai. Pai Holiday Inn, khrab.” “Why not? You like boys?” “Hotel is all, sir.”) For the same reasons, traffic gridlock and pimping taxi drivers, I learned long ago to do my Bangkok sightseeing by boat, the cheap regular daytime public transportation on the Chao Phraya.

On April 10, 2010 I checked in to the Novotel with my longtime traveling partner after two weeks in pure and happy Bhutan. We were directed to take the back way to our room. After the luggage arrived, she went to the jungley pool and I went to the lobby for a newspaper to catch up on the demonstrating red shirts. Returning I headed for the main elevators and was stopped by a hotel security man. “No. No. Other way.” I turned to the stairs. “No. No.” He pointed down a long hall, the way I had come down. “Other way.” I did not understand this, but I complied. In Thailand some things go unexplained, even in the humming modernism of Suvarnabhoumi airport and its hotel.

That evening when we went down, by the back way, for dinner we had an explanation. The restaurant was crowded with men in uniform, officers of the Thai armed forces. They sat at tables in small groups, eating well and talking quietly. They had taken over a wing of the hotel. I supposed it had something to do with the trouble in the city.

The red shirts had been camped downtown for two months and the military government was losing patience. I had seen the beginning of it in March, when I was staying at a wat near Fang, north of Chiang Mai. (Wat translates as “temple,” but the word applies to any religious complex, from the rich royal temple grounds in Bangkok to humble village centers.) On a Friday morning I had watched at the highway as cars and trucks full of protesters waving red flags streamed by. They were on their way to the “Million Man March” in Bangkok. I was in the north, where almost everybody was a red shirt, as opposed to the yellow shirts of Bangkok and the southern resort towns. The only yellow displays I saw in the north were banners at government compounds.

These northerners were ordinary people who worked hard and kept their kids in school, but they were poor by comparison with the Bangkok factory workers and those in the tourist trade. Still, they were Thai, and like the rich southerners they respected the king and the Buddha and sometimes the military. On Sundays in the sala, a spacious pavilion dominated by a single whitefigure of the seated Buddha in tranquil meditation, whole families would gather with food baskets and spend the day, singing the Pali sutras and listening to dharma talks by the young abbot or his senior monks.

Theravada Buddhism is practiced in Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka. Under the non-democratic regimes of Burma, Laos and Cambodia, the monks in saffron robes are constantly watched, but they are embraced under Thailand’s constitutional (when not suspended) monarchy. Theravada (sometimes translated as wisdom of the elders) differs from the Mahayana (meaning larger vehicle) tradition of China, Japan, Tibet and Vietnam. The Theravada dharma is a back-to-the-sources teaching in the ancient Indian language called Pali. It does not rely upon latter-day sacred texts or venerate bodhisattvas like Avalokitesvara. The Theravada altars are simple venerations of the Buddha.

As Buddhism unites Thailand, politics divides it, north from south, rural from urban, the interests of poor farmers and the immigrants along the Lao border from those of the wealthy royalist families of Bangkok. The north was the solid constituency of Shinawatra Thaksin, the telecom billionaire and  twice-elected prime minister who served from 2001 until he was overthrown in a military coup in 2006. (His younger sister was elected prime minister in 2011.) Thaksin’s party, by various names, provided development money and medical care to the poor and was rewarded by the voters in the northern region called the issan. He went into exile after being charged with corruption by the supreme court under the military government.

Now, in the spring of 2010, the red shirts were demanding an election, promised for four years by the military government. In a strange and gruesome display, they emptied bags of their donated blood at the gates of Government House. There had been confrontations with police and army surrounding the camp at Phan Fa Bridge, but both sides seemed to show restraint.

At the Summer Palace

MEAN STREETS

As we dined among the quiet officers and talked of where we had been and where we were going next, soldiers and police were moving to clear the protesters downtown. The state TV channels were rerunning game shows. An objective report of the clashes that spring by Human Rights Watch, an American group, tells how on the morning of that day, April 10, the military-appointed prime minister had announced an order to clear the protesters. In the afternoon the army, under helicopters spraying tear gas, moved against 5,000 red shirts bearing pointed bamboo sticks at Phan Fa Bridge, which crosses a canal in the neighborhood of government buildings and Khao San Road. The wind shifted, carrying a cloud of tear gas back on the soldiers. They retreated. Protesters approached in the heat and gave the soldiers water, according to a news reporter quoted in the report.

That night at Khao San Road there was shooting – from both sides. The report found that armed men in black had joined the red shirts and were firing live ammunition. The soldiers too were firing, some with rubber bullets, some not. The fighting spilled to other areas including the upscale World shopping mall. An army commander was killed by a grenade. A Reuters photographer died from a gunshot wound in the chest. After two hours of fighting the army retreated. The day ended in a standoff. Human Rights Watch published these numbers for the day: 26 dead including 5 soldiers, 800 wounded including 350 soldiers. According to autopsy reports, most deaths were by high velocity bullets.

We flew away early next morning, knowing nothing and never having left the safe, insular, humming modernity of the airport, a monument to 50 years of incredible development. It was named Suvarnabhumi, “Golden Land,” by King Bhumipol.

On the way south I replayed impressions from three trips through Thailand and Laos, and what shined brightest were those fresh mornings in Luang Prabang, Laos, a United Nations world heritage site. Hundreds of barefoot monks in bright saffron file down the sunny side of the central avenue of the narrow peninsular town at 6 a.m. (Tourists with cameras work the other side.) Townspeople and merchants drop small parcels of food – sticky rice, packaged noodles, cakes and such – into the brass bowls. The monks receive the gifts impassively and walk on. It’s the givers instead who express gratitude, putting their palms together, because they are earning merit under the inexorable law of karma. (In the 2007 protests in Yangoon, Burmese monks turned their begging bowls upside down.)

The meritorious giving takes place everywhere in the Theravada Buddhist countries. Monks walk the beaches at dawn in southern Thai resorts. They appear at shops beside noisy highways or among village stalls in the issan. On some mornings at the wat near Fang I would follow Joi, the bright young monk who had unceremoniously shaved my head and eyebrows for ordination as a novice. He would stand alone with his bowl in the dimly lit early morning market, impassive but thoughtful as shoppers gathering food for the day would drop gifts in his bowl.

Joi was from a village of people who had escaped Burma. They are Palaung, a million-member ethic minority that was virtually at war with the Burmese army. Most refugees, from Cambodia and Laos as well as from Burma, go officially unrecognized by Thailand, so they have no country and, therefore, no actual workable rights (I follow Hannah Arendt on this point) . It seemed to me that this young man’s only protection was the universal Thai respect for his saffron robe. He had just received his high school diploma, was fluent in English and Thai and aspired to learn Chinese so he could teach in the region, which has communities of earlier refugees, nationalists from China.

Joi was preoccupied. If he left the order, replacing his robe with civilian clothes, he would be vulnerable. But it was the only way to enter the private college in Chiang Mai and pursue courses in Chinese. If he continued as a monk, he would receive a free Buddhist education but the foreign language study would be limited to English. I learned later by Facebook that he chose Chinese.

A small regional NGO called the Blood Foundation operates day-care schools for children of Burmese refugees, many of whom work in the orange groves in the Fang area. One evening we arrived by pickup at Joi’s village in the mountains on the border where army outposts of both Burma and Thailand face each other across a no-man’s land of barbed wire. The Burmese army could watch every move in the village and once shelled it after some sort of altercation, but the people were carrying on with their lives without fear. They sat in family circles eating the evening meal in porous bamboo houses.

The abbot at the wat was Dr. Apisit (PhD from a Buddhist University), a gentle and compassionate young man who kept two beloved monkeys as pets. His remarks to me at my ordination forewarned that the four weeks were not going to be a

holiday.Besides accepting the universal Buddhist precepts and seeking refuge in the Buddha, dharma and sangha, I also pledged to take no food after noon, sleep on a hard bench, wear nothing decorative and avoid trivial conversation. Dressed in white and without hair or eyebrows, I had trouble recognizing myself in digital photos. Which was the point. All this, the abbot counseled, was intended to aid the practice: vipassana meditation.

The village and neighborhood wats are schools for boys whose families choose traditional Buddhist education, often because they cannot afford any other. They live simply and (allowing for their nature as boys) quietly. They sweep the grounds thoughtfully. They chant mornings and evenings in their sanctuaries.  

But mere monastic quietude does not define the fullness of Theravada Buddhism, at least in Thailand. Dr. Apsit carried a cell phone and was in the process of buying farmland around the wat for expansion – a retreat center for Westerners, a hospital. The director of the wat school one evening invited me and another in white (who took the vows but because of her gender  could not become a novice monk) to come with him in his small pickup to an event marking the completion of renovation work at a wat down the highway. As we approached it I was surprised that he had trouble finding a place to park.

Inside the gates, the old wat was – excuse the cliché – rocking! There was a rock band playing. There was a stage where Thai “lady boys” sang like girls. There were dance groups in colorful ethnic costumes. The lights were so bright the power kept going out. There were lines of delicious food vendors. (Ignoring them was a test of my vows). And then came the parade of “money trees.” Coughing up a donation is nothing compared with the work that goes into these ornate constructions by community groups, businesses and families. The focus of these gifts is the leaves: crisp new Thai 100-bhat bills (as valued locally as $20 bills here)

I had seen a similar celebration, wealthier but no less communal, at my favorite town in Thailand: Nakhorn Pathom near Bangkok, the site of a 427-foot stupa built in the late 19^thCentury by Mongkut, the beloved king who had spent most of his adult life as a monk. A standing golden Buddha with his right hand raised in peace surveys a busy commercial center. Here the celebration included a parade of school bands and cheerleaders and lovely queens and dignitaries in new Japanese cars

Nakorn Pathom

assembled in Thailand. The fiesta (and I use the Spanish-Catholic word deliberately) in Nakhorn Pathom celebrated Loi Kratong, the full moon in November. All full moon days are Buddhist holidays, but this one is special in Thailand because of the tradition of floating little wish lights on water. Elsewhere, on the southern beaches, and on the other hand, full moon holidays bring orgiastic revels by young Western tourists. The churning of the ocean perseveres.

GRIM REMINDER

What you see leaving Bangkok, more than the freeways and flats of sterile rooftops and fields of orderly vehicles, is the river Chao Phraya, reminder perhaps that in Southeast Asia the rivers were the ways and the way. Similarly, on leaving Luang Prabang you see the Mekong at a confluence with a river called Nam Ou. My partner in her internet wandering discovered a courageous little place called Riverside Lodge by a small Lao town with a costly Chinese-donated bridge across the river Nam Ou about four hours by bus from Luang Prabang. We went.

It was a line of bamboo cottages on stilts on the north bank of the wide river. It was built three years before by a Dutch man and his Japanese wife. Meals and drinks were served in the open-air lobby where upside-down geckos and who knows what else liked to skitter. Against a wall by way of decoration was a painted bomb casing, it’s nameplate corroded beyond recognition. It was, or had been, an American cluster bomb. Grim reminder.

But the wonder and inspiration of the place was the river. It’s a live river, still unpolluted, full of fish, used fully a joyfully by the people who live along it. At the Riverside Inn we could hear the children at play down in the river. They all know how to swim and how to laugh. The long-ago bombs did not destroy the culture of Laos (or for that matter, Vietnam).

We hired one of the narrow boats for a day. The boatman, skilled at sandbar dodging and rapid running, took us up river about three hours to the point where it becomes unnavigable. There was a Lao village, where children and their mothers sat in the afternoon shade under their houses. They stared at us, impassive. One boy came up to me and stared. “Sabai-di,” I said. He did not respond. Then he ran away. Tourism is not very heavily developed along the upper Nam Ou.

We had spent a lot of time by rivers in Borneo – the Sarawak, the Kinabanatang, the Danum – but this was the prize, unexpected. It was a broad river about the size of the damned Clark Fork in Montana, except it was unthreatened right then. People live along it and use it as they have for centuries. There is a highway to the village and the bridge, but the river is the connection.

I went walking up the river trail that passed our cottage. As soon as I rounded the bend, the motors of the town (150 houses at most) went silent. I could hear the random sounds of the  narrow wooden boats, clunks like when you pick up a guitar. A lone boatman came by singing something in a language and a tonic scale that I didn’t understand. Singing! Sing anywhere in a North American city except in your car with the windows closed and people will look down, embarrassed to see you, poor lost soul. It was so calming and spiritual that I just stood on the narrow trail in the fresh wet greenery and breathed.

Then I passed some workers at a limestone outcrop. Short men in T-shirts and sandals. One of them gave me the universal sign for an explosion and pointed to the outcrop. I thought, “Oh, they’ve been blasting here.” But what he was saying was, “We are about to blast here.” I walked on 100 yards and turned in time to see rocks lifting silent and slowly and turning like something from Stanley Kubrick. Birds flew from the trees. Then, BLAM! The explosion was more than sound. It was impact.

In the next half hour they blasted four more times, sudden and out of context. My illusion was shattered. It must have been that way in the war. Peace murdered. The bomb in the lobby came to mind. Grim reminder.

Writers have a problem. They talk to themselves too much, and in so doing they forget the here and now. And on that narrow trail by the river there was a problem that I forgot. It was not the blasting (although dreamy writers are good candidates for walking into explosions). It was a tiny thing that I didn’t discover until dinner.

“There’s something really sticky on the floor,” I said. “Have you noticed?” We were barefoot, but hers weren’t sticking to the boards. I looked under the table – too dark to see. I crossed my feet to avoid the sticky sensation — almost a Superglue effect. “Sticky rice?” she suggested.

When we finished dinner and walked into the light, she said, “Your feet are bloody.” I looked down. Blood smeared to the ankles of both bare feet. The left cuff of my nylon pants was soaked. I was puzzled because I felt nothing.

“You’ve been leeched,” she said.

I cleaned up in the shower and found the single source of the blood, where the leech had penetrated a vein on the top of my left foot. It had drunk its fill and left, but the anticoagulant that is part of their arsenal, along with a pain deadener, kept the blood flowing. A bandage stopped it, and I was fine.

Gave my blood in Laos, I thought. And again the grim reminder against the wall came to mind.

(C)text and photos by LARRY CALLOWAY

The first thing I noticed from the door of the Pan Am 707 at the old airport in Bangkok that day before the rainy season in May 1963 was Air America. A C47 or some other transport with that logo was parked in plain sight. We knew it was the CIA’s airline and we knew its headquarters probably was the American base at Udorn Thani up north (where somebody said all the prostitutes had gone). We knew there was a war beginning in Indochina. But all this was none of our business. We were young volunteers in President John F. Kennedy’s Peace Corps.

Forty-five years later stepping off an Asia Air jet I noticed the steel-channeled concrete at Udorn airport is still in good shape. Built for the heavy B52 bombers, I thought. “Work horses.” But Indochina was at peace now, except for border skirmishes, and I was finding my way to Laos, where we could not go back then.

I was searching for something gone. It was 1963 Bangkok, charming and safe, before the traffic and the trafficking, when commerce followed water not concrete. The best houses were teak, which came down the river in logs lashed into rafts. Jim Thompson the silk merchant lived by a calm canal in an assembly of old teak houses displaying his collection of antique art. It was admired by all — literary guests (W. Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward), diplomats, colleagues from the spy agency that was called the OSS in the war. The central palace of the manly King Bhumibol and lovely Queen Sirikit was surrounded by quiet temples where an occasional tourist took Kodachrome photos of monks in saffron robes or captured the irony of a Coca Cola sign beside an ancient Chinese devil.

The embassies were on a shaded avenue called Wireless because they all had radios (short wave), and you could get there by pedicab. The ambassador and other important Americans ate in the same steak house, and the main attraction for lesser Americans was, besides the bars with fascinating girls, a café called “Pie.” Americans at home knew songs from “The King and I” about Anna and the King of Siam (the old name for Thailand), and Thai silk was high fashion. “The Bridge On The River Kwai” about prisoners of Japan in the war swept the Academy Awards and Pan Am and Air America parked together as if they were birds of the same feather.

Both are now extinct. And Jim Thompson disappeared in 1967 never to be found, and his house is now a museum on a side street where the national stadium roars, and the king is hospitalized in his eighties, and Bangkok is vulnerable to catastrophic flooding because the natural drainage and canals are paved over.

BROTHERS AND COUSINS

Air America was created in 1959 to support covert operations in Laos, a landlocked country of no more than 3 million people then, caught between Vietnam and Thailand. Our man in Laos was Phoumi Nosavan, a diminutive general of the Royal Lao Army who became prime minister in a CIA-backed coup in December 1959, two months after death ended the 55-year reign of beloved King Sisavang. Phoumi was a close friend of Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat, his cousin and mentor, who ruled Thailand under martial law with the apparent consent of King Bhumibol. Sarit was ruthless and corrupt. But he had American friends like the Dulles brothers (Secretary of State John Foster and CIA director Allen).

Our backup in the war against communism was Vang Pao, a leader among Hmong hill tribesmen. The hostility between the communists of Laos and the Hmong minority was not only due to the Marxist enmity toward traditional cultures (and religion). The Hmongs, long ago driven out of China, had been on the side of the French in the anti-colonial revolution. American intelligence agents who remained in Thailand after the defeat of Japan helped organize the Hmong and other ethnic minorities in an alliance with the Royal Lao Army against the Pathet Lao, counterpart of the Viet Cong. John Foster Dulles called Laos a “bastion of the free world.”

During the 1960 American election campaign (Kennedy vs. Nixon) a former Royal Lao officer named Kong Le, who now sympathized with the Pathet Lao, occupied Vientiane. What alarmed the Dulles brothers was evidence that he was getting support from the Soviet Union. On inauguration day, President Dwight D. Eisenhower told Kennedy he faced war in Laos. Both men must have known the risk at hand because, unlike the nuclear sword rattlers, they knew war and were informed about Indochina. Early in his administration Eisenhower had authorized disguised American transport planes to supply the French army in its last stand at Dien Ben Phu in North Vietnam, and Kennedy had visited Indochina twice as a congressman before the defeat of the French in 1954.

Laos was far from the minds of most Americans, then as now, and so when the new president addressed the nation two months after his inauguration, he used maps showing the landlocked kingdom’s long border with Vietnam to illustrate his thesis that, in his words, “The security of all Southeast Asia will be endangered if Laos loses its neutral independence.” (He mispronounced Laos, perhaps intentionally.) In June 1961 in Vienna Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev declared Laos neutral, a sentiment that was signed and sealed in Geneva a year later.

So in May of 1963, as I stepped into tropical heat for the first time in my life, the American setup against North Vietnam in Indochina was this: two Buddhist kingdoms run by cousins, (Thailand and Laos) a Buddhist kingdom run by a neutral prince (Sihanouk in Cambodia), and an anti-Buddhist Catholic autocracy run by brothers (Diem and Nhu in South Vietnam). But it was a fragile setup, a row of dominoes. Hanoi was reinforcing the North Vietnam Army troops that had never left Laos despite the Geneva accord. Kennedy authorized the CIA to arm and train 20,000 Hmong guerrillas. To facilitate this the CIA was building a secret city, Long Tien, south of the Plain of Jars and had scraped airstrips, code named Lima sites, for STOL aircraft on a dozen mountains surrounding the plain.

By the end of that year everything had gone to hell. A full scale war was beginning in Laos. Sarit was dead of cirrhosis, Phoumi was cowering, Diem and Nhu were dead in a coup gone violent, and John F. Kennedy was gone, assassinated in Dallas.

As I crossed the bridge over the wide Mekong to Vientiane 45 years later, the setup was: Vietnam unified, Cambodia and Laos under its control, all three nominally communist, and Thailand again ruled (temporarily) by the military with the consent of the same king.

The Lao border bureaucrats were not necessarily friendly. The only words the officer had for me as he took my passport, photo and money at the gate and slammed shut the small tinted window were: “Sit and wait.” Which I did, for about half an hour, at the end of the bridge. Eventually another opaque window opened. My name was called, and a hand thrust forth my passport, which I snatched before the window slammed. When I looked at my elaborate visa glued to a full page I appreciated how long it took behind those dark windows to create it.

In Vientiane, a poor but modernized city, I first saw the famous Buddhist temple pictured on the visa. Next was the arch of

A Gift From The USA, Diverted

victory, where I climbed man flights of stairs to see what I could see. The story is that the huge monument was made from cement donated by USAID for construction of jet runways and diverted. Young monks on the street practiced their English with me. I saw the new and glittering the 1,500-seat cultural hall, a gift of China. I ate in a French restaurant nearby and wondered if China made such gifts to Vietnam, its historic enemy.

Transportation was by tuk tuk, a motorized rickshaw named in both Thailand and Laos for the sound it makes. While there were no automobile taxis in the capital of Laos, Nong Khai on the other side of the river was all cars. Thailand is a relatively rich country. Laos is poor. They can understand each other’s dialects – sawadee is hello in Thailand, sabaidee is hello in Laos. They practice Theravada Buddhism in both countries. The main difference is the modernization made possible by Western investment — that and, from a longer perspective, the line of remarkably adept Thai kings who looked West. Bhumibol, born in Boston when his father was studying medicine at Harvard, toured the United States in the Sixties to promote the war in English.

The tuk tuk took me to a sad little temple called Haw Pah Kaew, which is Wat Pra Kaew in Thai. Same name, translated as the temple of the Emerald Buddha. The solid jade Buddha sits in Bangkok high on its throne surrounded by security devices, constantly watched. It is a Thai national icon. Yet, it spent more than two centuries in Laos. It was plundered from this same

A Gift From The PRC

Lao temple, restored by the French, by the invading Thais in 1778. Two Buddhist kingdoms: economically apart, close at heart.

The CIA exploited the antipathy from the start in the war against communism in Southeast Asia. By 1960, according to University of Georgia historian William H. Leary, the CIA had trained 400 Thai police officers in helicopter response to communist insurgencies, and we provided the helicopters. Sarit sent the elite unit to help Phoumi in Laos. While the war was commanded by William Sullivan, the U.S. ambassador in Vientiane, most of the air operations came out of Thailand.

There is little information about the secret war in Laos accessible to journalists like me. (Leary’s authoritative history of Air America is sanctioned by its appearance on the CIA web site.) But due to a recent posthumous medal of honor and tireless research of the American POW-MIA group, one emblematic story can be told.

LIMA 85

Early in the Vietnam War the CIA supported a sophisticated  navigational radar station called Lima 85 on a sheer 5,600-foot mountain in northern Laos. From 1967 to early 1968 it controlled one-fourth of the bombing of targets in and around Hanoi, about 120 miles east. The installation, with its rotating crews of American technicians flown in from Thailand by Air America, was top secret and, of course, in violation of the Geneva accord.

North Vietnam communists attacked it on Jan. 12, 1968, dropping mortars from holes in the bellies of two Russian biplanes as two others circled high above. One of the mortar planes crashed into a ridge and the other was shot down by a CIA sharpshooter with a rifle in an unarmed Air America helicopter. The raid was ridiculed as something out of “World War I.”

Comedy became tragedy two months later. Several thousand North Vietnamese troops on the night of March 10 attacked along the 12-mile perimeter of the mountain while a specially trained team of 35 armed climbers assaulted the summit. Of the 19 men at the radar base that night only eight survived the surprise attack to be loaded onto evacuation helicopters at first light. And one of these died a few hours later.

He was Richard Etchberger, an Air Force master sergeant working under civilian cover, who chose to be the last man rescued from a high ledge. He loaded three wounded comrades into rescue slings before he was hit by a sniper’s bullet and was pulled aboard the evacuation helicopter. On Sept. 3, 2010, President Obama presented the Medal of Honor, authorized by a special act of Congress, to Etchberger’s family. The 42-year lapse had to do with the “deniability” (a word associated with White House deception in the sixties) of the 12-year CIA war in Laos. His three sons had grown up believing their father died somewhere in Vietnam.

Americans were not the only casualties at Lima 85. The dead on the ground below included at least 45 members of an elite force of 700 Hmong and Thai soldiers under Vang Pao. He was commissioned by the CIA to defend the mountain along its 12-mile base perimeter long enough to enable destruction and evacuation of the radar site above. Outnumbered nearly 10-to-1 by the attackers, according to communist reports now available, Vang Pao fought and retreated as planned.

The strategy would have worked except for a miscalculation by the CIA and Ambassador Sullivan. Air surveillance and infra-red photography made him aware weeks earlier that the communists were preparing to attack, but he did not recognize that the ground maneuver was a diversion. As Vang Pao held off the conventional forces, the special forces swiftly ascended the cliffs and assaulted the summit. Sullivan wrote in a cable to Washington, “It appears we may have pushed our luck one day too long.”

Most of this story comes from American POW-MIA volunteers with access to documents that were not available until 1997, when the U.S. first officially acknowledged the secret war. (limasite85.us) At that time a small monument was installed at Arlington with the legend: “Dedicated to the U.S. Secret Army in the Kingdom of Laos, 1961-1973.” About 35,000 Hmong soldiers died in the secret war. As Vang Pao put it, they either had to fight or leave the country. I compare them with the dispossessed Cherokees in Georgia who fought for the Yankees in the civil war.

Thousands of Hmong people left Laos in 1975, at the end of what some historians have begun calling The Second Indochina War, taking refuge in sordid camps along the Thai border. Slowly, Congress allowed some of the refugees to immigrate to the U.S. Most settled in California, Wisconsin and Minnesota. The Census estimates about 250,000 Hmongs and their descendants live in the U.S. But few Americans even know their name.

AN INTEREST IN DRUGS

Two movies, Clint Eastwood’s “Gran Torino” and Hollywood’s “Air America,” refer to the Hmong people. Eastwood’s 2008 feature film is a compassionate story of a Korean War veteran coming to terms with his new Hmong neighbors. “Air America” (1990) is a macho buddy comedy with lots of trick flying and a plot that indulges Hollywood’s unusual interest in drugs and conspiracy. Air America’s cool, fearless, drinking and whoring pilots fly opium from the fields of an ethnic general in return for his fight against the communists, and the opium in turn is processed in a heroin lab run by a corrupt CIA agent. The screen play was adapted from a 1979 book by Christopher Robbins, “Air America,” that in turn relied upon a 1972 study by Alfred W. McCoy, “The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia.” McCoy charged that Air America pilots flew opium to Long Tien for Vang Pao.

Historian Leary relates all this in his history and concludes: “My nearly two decades of research indicate that Air America was not involved in the drug trade.” Still, he acknowledges, the CIA knew about it but did little until drug-use became a problem for the U.S. armed forces in Vietnam. (The sale of drugs to soldiers is a theme in the 2008 Hollywood film “An America Hero.”) Leary’s history makes the case that the secret war in Laos could not have been sustained without Air America. It was serious work. And, deadly. About 100 Air America personnel lost their lives in Laos.

William E. Colby, CIA chief under Richard Nixon, in a 1990 memoir of the Vietnam war, acknowledged that some Lao generals profited from the opium trade but “not Vang Pao or his officers, and certainly not the CIA or Air America.”

In 2002 the city of Madison, Wisc., which has a large Hmong community, withdrew the naming of a park for Vang Pao on the basis of a protest by McCoy, a University of Wisconsin professor. He repeated his finding that Vang Pao was among the generals who trafficked in opium with the complicity of the CIA.

The issue arose again in 2007 when the Madison school board proposed naming a new elementary school for Vang Pao. McCoy again protested. A mom began a petition drive for reconsideration due to the general’s “controversial” past, and the head of the teachers’ union expressed “concern.” The board withdrew the name.

By then the McCoy charges were enhanced by a federal indictment of Vang Pao and nine others in a sting operation in

Vang Pao In The Sixties

California. An ATF agent posing as an arms dealer had interested the group in purchasing weapons for Lao insurgents. (The cultural clash continues in Laos. A Hmong insurgency in the Plain of Jars region was put down in 2000.) Two years later the U.S. Attorney’s office in Sacramento withdrew all charges against Vang Pao, stating insufficient evidence, but the damage had been done.

Vang Pao died at age 81. In early February 2011 the Associated Press brought worldwide attention to his six-day funeral in Fresno, Calif. His body lay in the Fresno convention center, where CIA veterans paid their respects amid Hmong ceremonies for a hero. His family and representatives of the Hmong refugees in the U.S. petitioned the Pentagon to have him buried at Arlington National Cemetery, perhaps near the monument to the dead of the secret war. The Pentagon refused, with the rationale that the precious few grave sites remaining at Arlington are reserved for Americans. The Hmongs appealed to the White House. There was no response.

Sure he was a military hero, but there was this suspicion of drug dealing. Oh no! The insouciance in judging Vang Pao reminded me of Josef Conrad’s, “Heart of Darkness,” linked to the literature of the Vietnam war by Francis Coppola. The story – the deepening discovery of “the horror” on a voyage up a river in search of a corrupted colonial agent named Kurtz – is the plot line of Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now.”  Except, Coppola left out the ending. He did not recognize the epilogue, in which Conrad’s narrator, Marlowe, returns to London and pays a civilized visit to disclose the death of Kurtz to his fiancé. Marlowe has seen the cruelty of colonial exploitation in the Belgian Congo (now Rwanda), and she has seen nothing. “Was he respected?” is all she wants to know. Marlowe says yes he was respected. No more. The truth would be “too dark – too dark altogether.”

What if Vang Pao actually did deal in drugs? Oh no! Is that all we know about Air America and the secret war in Laos? Drug test: if positive, dishonor and arrest. If negative, you go to Arlington.

The “drug lord” concept is embedded in the pure American imagination. By contrast, the concept of “national security adviser” whispering of really good carpet bombing in the ear of an unstable president is unimaginable. Drugs threaten our children in parks, in schools. Cluster bombs threaten somebody else’s children, far away from here in a strange place strangely called Plain of Jars.

(See my next posting.)

(c)by LARRY CALLOWAY

THE JARS  on the Plain of Jarres (French colonialists named it) are empty. The bomb craters from the secret war in Laos, pockmarks of a sick strategy called “madman,” are not empty. They hold the remnants of cluster bombs that popped open in the air and birthed out baby bombs in tricky patterns. The “bomblets” (military jargon) were designed to explode and fragment at intervals, and some were destined to explode years later like forgotten land mines.

“The use of delayed-action antipersonnel weapons on the Plain after 1967 made life above ground very hazardous,” a report by the Congressional Research Service found. Villagers lived in trenches or caves. They farmed at night. One fourth to one third of

Cluster Bomb Casings

the Lao population became refugees, it said. The casualties at the height of the B52 sorties from 1970 to 1973 were estimated at 90,000 including 30,000 deaths. Each B52 bomber could drop 108 500-pound bombs from an altitude of 18,000 to 30,000 feet.

Descending to the Xieng Khouang provincial air strip in north central Laos near the new town of Phonsavan (the old one was destroyed in the war) I could see the craters, lines of red pocks in a land that reminded me of the arid part of the Colorado San Luis Valley where I live. Among the greeters of the dozen passengers in the waiting room was a young guide named Suen, whom I chose intuitively. He worked for a five-room guest house by some rice paddies on an ugly highway. Bomb casings decorated the entry. A wall of the dining room displayed war weapons.

In the morning, Suen drove me to see some craters where bomblets could be found buried in the dust. Perhaps they were duds – otherwise the area would have been posted – but I heeded Suen’s warnings. If I had picked one up it would have felt like a steel baseball with exaggerated seams. The International Red Cross has estimated that 11,000 people in Laos have been killed or injured by unexploded devices (UXOs)since the end of the war in 1975. Many were children at play or farmers at work. The accidents continue at about 1,000 a year.

The first group of jars five miles from town looked in the distance like an old and crooked cemetery on a hill. The jars were three or four feet high with enough room inside for a Lao to hide, like a rodeo clown in a barrel, when the American planes came bombing or soldiers of one side or another (Pathet Lao, the CIA’s Hmong recruits) came shooting. Suen showed me where a bullet had nicked a heavy jar.

The jars are blocks of limestone, boulders hollowed out like high Halloween pumpkins, rough inside and out, but carefullyshaped. Unfinished jars have been found at a quarry. They are perhaps 3,000

years old, and a quarter of them are cracked or broken. Nobody knows who made them and rolled them across the Plain to particular hills and swales or why. Nothing is in them except spiders and such things. A few stone lids have been found and I saw one with a shadow man carved on it, but there is no direct evidence they held human remains.

Most of the 140 jar cemeteries are unsafe. The three accessible sites are circumscribed by cables with warning signs attesting to the work of the London-based Mines Advisory Group, which had cleared away the bomblets. Some Japanese tourists followed us, shooting pictures of themselves. Craters within the cemeteries were posted. There was a hole in the bottom of one where, a boy told me, a farmer had dug looking for scrap metal, a risky enterprise.

Suen took me to two caves where villagers had lived. The last one, Tham Piew, was in the side of a limestone cliff above farm lands. A billboard at the government memorial below the cliff told a grim story in English. On Nov. 24, 1968, local farmers and their families were hiding in the cave when American fighter planes came over firing rockets. The first two missed, blowing out scars in the cliff that are still visible. The third scored a bull’s-eye, exploding inside the cave. The narrative claimed 374 died. One American response I found was that everybody in the cave was a communist combatant. Suen sat on his heels at the mouth of the cave looking solemnly at the cool green plain below. He told me his grandfather, a Pathet Lao fighter who went on to become governor of the province, helped recover the bodies.

For the people of Indochina, concluded a 1972 Cornell University study of American bombing, “Their most tangible perception of America is death from the sky.”

“BAD MAN”

At tiny Muang Kham we walked along a commercial strip – open stalls under corrugated roofing – where bomb scraps were for sale among household goods. An old man sat in front of one stall sharpening a steel fragment on a flat stone. Suen said the man was so old that he spoke French. We went inside to see the war junk, mostly cluster bomb casings with stenciled numbers and

Bomblets and household goods

U.S. suppliers. There was a pigeon-hole rack of bomblets.

Outside in the sun the old man continued sharpening his knife. Back and forth on a stone. I said hello and he said nothing. I tried bonjour and he said nothing. Then he said, “American people OK. Nixon bad man.” His expression emphasized bad in such a way that the meaning was badder than bad. Evil. I said, “Johnson not bad?” He did not respond.

His focus on Richard M. Nixon puzzled me until, later, I read some histories of the Vietnam War. President Lyndon B. Johnson was a shy bomber by comparison with his successor, and for this reason he was criticized by hawkish politicians including chairman John Stennis of the Senate Preparedness Committee, who said – and some still say — we could have brought North Vietnam down if we had used all the firepower available. These code words implied nuclear weapons. Johnson bombed North Vietnam from when the first U.S. combat troops landed at Da Nang in March 1965 until the eve of the 1968 presidential election. The workhorse was the B52 bomber. His attacks on Laos were more discriminating, relying mostly on F4 fighters. It was his successor, Nixon, who secretly re-aimed the B52’s on neutral Laos soon after taking office in 1969.

Because he had campaigned as a peace maker with a secret plan to end the war and because the war protest at the Chicago Democratic National Convention had helped defeat Hubert Humphrey, Nixon could not rationally resume the bombing of North Vietnam. Still, his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, was engaged in secret Paris peace talks and making secret overtures to the Chinese, and he would not negotiate from weakness. Nixon wanted to look “tough” (a frequent word in his rhetoric) in the eyes of Ho Chi Minh in the North and our man Nguyen Van Thieu in the South. So they (Nixon and Kissinger) bombed Laos. Besides, there was substantial air and fire power sitting idle at bases in Thailand and elsewhere. “We just couldn’t let the planes rust,” was the defining quote, attributed to an anonymous official by the Far East Review.

Even though Laos was neutral by agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union, the bombing had a rationale: arms and guerrilla fighters were moving from north to south through the Plain of Jars along the Ho Chi Minh trail. (It made more

So old he spoke French

sense than, thirty years later, invading Iraq in reaction to terrorism based in Afghanistan.) Besides, it was secret enough that nobody seemed to care except the New York Times and, well, a Pentagon  think-tanker named Daniel Ellsberg.

Early in 1971 Ellsberg wrote  “Murder in Laos” just as the ill-fated invasion by U.S.-supported South Vietnamese troops was under way. “How Many will die in Laos?” he asked. “What is Richard Nixon’s best estimate of the number of Laotian people – ‘enemy’ and ‘non-enemy’ – that U.S. Firepower will kill in the next twelve months?

“He does not have an estimate. He has not asked Henry Kissinger for one, and Kissinger has not asked the Pentagon; and none of these officials has ever seen an answer, to this or any comparable question on the expected impact of war policy on human life.”

Ellsberg concluded his article pleading for support of “the moral proposition that the U.S. must stop killing people in Indochina.“ The Washington novelty of a moral proposition had no immediate effect. Four months later Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, the secret official history of Vietnam decisions on high and their results, which tipped public opinion.  ( The New York Review of Books, March 11, 1971)

At lunch in Muang Kham I saw some Westerners at another table and approached them. They were young Brits and suspicious, probably because I was about the age the infrequent American Vietnam veterans who return to Indochina as tourists. The Brits were with the Mines Advisory Group, and a diplomatic conversation ensued. They said that the United States is the leading opponent of the international treaty outlawing cluster munitions (we still are). They said America spends far more money in support of the search for search for lost prisoners of war and soldiers missing in action than it does in support of UXO cleanup.

One day Suen took me to visit an ethnic minority, some Tai Dam people, in a village approached by trail across a swinging foot bridge. A woman weaving a decorative band of fabric invited me into her stilt house to see some of her work. Suen nodded that it was OK. So I shed my shoes and went up the ladder.

The woman turned on a light bulb (powered by a portable Chinese hydro generator propped on rocks in the river). As I looked at

Cluster Bomb Stilts

the textiles hung on bars in the palm-leaf dwelling I became aware of a gathering behind me. Ten other women from the village, barefoot and silent, had assembled to sell me their woven wares. Before long I was backed into a corner on a bamboo mat surrounded by the women. They began selling their textiles, all long weavings in intricate a colorful patterns. I would learn later that most of them were traditional skirt hems.

Soon it became a competition, each woman fighting to put her weaving on top of the pile. I took a fancy to a large figurative one. How much? A lady in a sort of commie hat said twenty thousand. I looked at Suen, who nodded approvingly (what did I expect?) I shelled out twenty thousand million billion rits (I had no sense of Lao currency values). This excited the rest of the women, who tried smiles and pathos and aggression. In the end, after dispersing another forty thousand trillion jillion rits, I had three skirt hems. The women folded their textiles and gossiped and padded away. As Suen and I left the village one of the women came up and gave us a cluster of bananas. Another gave us a big bunch of fresh garlic. Suen said, “We give to driver. He very poor.”

The driver had been a driver since the revolution, in 1975. And he knew where the Ho Chi Minh Trail ran. At a point where it became un-drivable, we got out and walked. The trail ran beside a river here, and there were few bomb craters. We passed a young man tending watermelons. It was dark, rich soil, but this was still the dry season. He carried water to each plant in an old metal bucket. Suen talked to him, and before we walked on the young farmer gave us three fat cucumbers. I whipped out several thousand million billion rits, and the farmer refused, until a few words from Suen changed his mind.

That evening I sat thinking with a beer at a table outside the guest house in the low sun. A bright painted planter made from a cluster-bomb casing was bursting with flowers. A vendor came by and stopped, wordless. A walking Walgreens, she carried everything from toothpaste to flashlights on a rack. I bought a trinket and didn’t argue about the price. I had been thinking about the generosity and perseverance of these people, how much I liked them. I wondered how men could send firepower to destroy the lives of women weaving skirt hems beside stilt houses, farmers watering their tiny fields by hand, vendors burdened by their entire business inventory. The bombing was indiscriminate; there was no way to distinguish the ethnicity or politics of villages from 30,000 feet.

VOICES

The explanation for this distant executive killing is in the abstract reality of taped conversations between Nixon and Kissinger. They talk like high school football players in the locker room. When, for example, they resumed bombing of North Vietnam in 1972 Kissinger told the president by phone, “They dropped a million pounds of bombs.” Nixon responded, “Goddamn, that must have been a good strike!” Nixon’s only reservation was: “Johnson bombed them for years, and it didn’t do any good.” Kissinger responded, “But, Mr. President, Johnson never had a strategy. He was sort of picking away at them. He would go in with 50 planes, 20 planes. I bet you will have had more planes over there in one day than Johnson had in a month.” In another White House tape, Kissinger talks of “bombing the beJesus out of them.” (New York Times, Dec. 24, 2008)

The “them” is a dehumanized force of strangers, like scary movie aliens. The “we” are righteous commanders, blind to any moral proposition. “Bombing, even by B52s in populated areas, never seemed to raise any questions of morality inside the White House,” Seymour Hersh wrote  (“The Price of Power,” 1983)

Fred Branfman, a freelance translator and aid worker, claimed to have interviewed over 2,000 rural people in Laos and, “Every single one said that their villages had been leveled by American bombing.” His book “Voices From The Plain Of Jars” is a stream of heart-rending anonymous quotes:

– “Four planes of the jet type dropped their bombs together to destroy my village and returned to shoot twice in the same day. They dropped eight napalm bombs, the fire from which burned all my things. . . buildings along with all our possessions inside them.”

– The planes came “until there were no houses at all. And the cows and buffalo were finished, until everything was leveled and you see only the red, red ground.”

– “These human beings would die from a single blast as explosions burst, lying still without moving again at all.”

– “In my village there was a young man who went to graze his buffalo in the forest. The airplanes dropped bombs and killed the buffalo. The young man ran away from that place, but not in time. He was hit in the waist, cut right in half. For two days you could see him like that.”

– “There were two brothers who went out to cut wood in the forest. The airplanes shot them and both brothers died.” Their mother and father “were like crazy people because their children had died.”

– “A spotter plane saw monks spreading their blankets to air in the sun. Three jets were called in. They destroyed the pagoda, which had taken so many years to build.”

– “We went into the village and saw all the houses burning and the animals dying in the fire. Then I saw my father lying with the buffalo in the plowed earth. My sister and I ran over to him, but I saw that my father already died. I wept and then I carried him out of the field.”

Cluster bomb units (CBUs) were classified as “antipersonnel weapons” because their primary function was to cut people down with high-velocity steel fragments. The secret of the weapon might have been a timing mechanism based on the number of

Craters Near Phonsavan

revolutions of each spinning bomblet. A large “dispenser” (military jargon) that popped open at 600 feet could dispense more than 500 bomblets in a pattern about 1,000 feet wide and 3,000 feet long. At first a version of the weapon was carried by F4 fighters, which had to come in low and level to make it effective. Later-model CBU’s could be dropped by the big, high-flying B-52 bombers. The dispensers plowed into the ground and survived intact, as did some of the still-explosive bomblets.

While cluster bombs were used earlier, by Nazi Germany in World War II, the refinement of the weapon was primarily of the work of the U.S. Air Force, which deployed it in North Vietnam in the summer of 1966, according to a contemporary researcher, Michael Krepon. (Foreign Affairs, April 1974)

Krepon argued for a system of civilian, or in his words “political,” review of new conventional (meaning non-nuclear) weapons. The CBUs were deployed based on narrow military considerations without regard to civilian casualties. “It appears that in this and other respects the military promoters of the weapon went to considerable lengths not to raise the broader questions,” he wrote. Civilians in the Defense and State Departments who knew about the new weapon “countered not by arguing the inhumanity of the weapon per se, but how its use would be regarded by ‘world opinion.’”

He continued, “It is a fair conclusion that military officers in the Pentagon downplayed the question of CBUs to deflect political channels from making an issue of their use, as they had done with napalm.” In other words, they had learned a political lesson from the protests against firebombs, which were used with the same intent as CBUs, that is, making large areas uninhabitable.

“As the CBU story shows, powerful forces are at work to diminish the humanitarian perspective in policy-making. Policy assumptions, bureaucratic behavior, and political imperatives all work to dehumanize in the abstract; when placed in the context of weapons development and use during wartime, they become brutally real. This is especially true when area weapons are billed as life-savers to American infantrymen and pilots,” Krepon concluded.

“BOMB,BOMB,BOMB”

Students of Hiroshima will recognize the argument. The lives the atomic bomb saved were Americans being prepared for the invasion of Japan. In announcing the Hiroshima bomb, President Harry Truman dehumanized the destroyed city by calling it a military installation. The Vietnam war and World War II defy comparison, but Nixon used the Hiroshima defense for the

Garden decorations in Phonsavan

bombing of Cambodia (and by extension, Laos) – that is, it saved American lives by halting traffic in arms.

This military argument is difficult to prove or disprove (more than 20,000 Americans died in Vietnam under Nixon), but the strategic bombing had strident military opponents during the Vietnam war. President Johnson is quoted as complaining to Army Chief of Staff Gen. Harold K. Johnson:  “Bomb, bomb, bomb. That’s all you know. . . Now, I don’t need 10 generals to come in here in order to tell me to bomb. I want some solutions. I want some answers.” (James A. Fry, “Debating Vietnam,” 2006)

Gen. David Shoup, commandant of the Marine Corps appointed by President Kennedy, wrote, “Much of the reporting on air action has consisted of misleading data or propaganda to serve Air Force and Navy purposes. In fact, it became increasingly apparent that the U.S. bombing effort in both North and South Vietnam has been one of the most wasteful and expensive hoaxes ever to be put over on the American people.” (Atlantic Monthly, April 1969).  Shoup did not oppose air support of Marines on the ground, which is by nature more discriminate. (In Laos, the ground war was under command of the CIA, not the White House or Pentagon, as I will show in another chapter.)

The late general continues to be a respected idiosyncratic figure in recent military history. Among other reforms, he repudiated boot-camp brutality after the deaths of recruits at Paris Island. Martha Shoup, a former resident of Crestone, loved her grandfather and remembers playing with his collection of Marine “swagger sticks” when she was little. She has been contacted twice in the past year by researchers for new biographies of him.

Historian James Fry wrote that even Defense Secretary McNamara rejected the military arguments that increased bombing was the key to American victory in Vietnam. Unlike Germany or Japan in World War II, North Vietnam was predominantly an agricultural country with “no real war-making base” to destroy. He thought bombing would not change the resolve of the North Vietnamese leaders.

Further, McNamara argued that targeting civilians was contrary to U.S. values and military doctrine, wrote Fry. In the last years of his life McNamara also regretted his own role in planning the firebombing of Japan. (Errol Morris’ film “The Fog Of War,” 2010)

In 1998 in Hanoi, CNN interviewed Gen. Nguyen Giap, the chief military strategist for North Vietnam during the war and a hero as the architect of the defeat of the French at Den Bien Phu in 1954. He said, “The B52 is not an effective way to fight.” The defense against it was to evacuate or go underground in caves or tunnels. The Cu Chi tunnels, now a sort of Vietnam national park less than 20 miles from Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), are a good example. The 125 miles of narrow tunnels there were under more than 10 feet of clay, almost invulnerable to bombing. The tunnels gave the Vietcong secret access to a U.S. military base, just as Giap’s tunnels brought his troops into fortified Dien Bien Phu.

When the bombing of Laos could no longer be kept secret, Nixon the administration minimized it. Hersh records in a footnote that Kissinger, at a lunch with reporters when the Ellsberg antagonism could no longer be ignored, said Ellsberg was uninformed and, “No civilians are in the area of Laos where this operation has been conducted.” No reporter asked how he knew this, considering that a few minutes earlier he had acknowledged that intelligence in Laos was poor.

(Kissinger is still at it. In a CBS Sunday Morning interview in 2011 he was asked about the bombing of Cambodia, which he personally supervised. He responded that it was “miniscule” by comparison to “what’s going on now in Pakistan.” This went unchallenged. Kissinger got away with equating months of carpet bombing by B52s with 200 strikes by drones.)

The intentional bombing of civilians in Laos was long ago established by the Senate Subcommittee on Refugees chaired by the late Sen. Ted Kennedy. A staff report said the strategic bombing was intended “to destroy the social and economic infrastructure of Pathet Lao-held areas.” It said, “Where Laos is concerned, classified American military documents have specifically mentioned bombing civilian villages in communist-held areas ‘to deprive the enemy of the population  resource.’ The population, in short, was deliberately made the principle target of American war planes.”

The Cornell studies showed that was indeed the intent. The Pentagon Papers journalist Neil Sheehan wrote in the preface: “The air war may constitute a massive war crime by the American government and its leaders.” It was, he supposed, “a level of calculated slaughter which may gravely violate the laws of war, laws the United States has pledged itself to uphold and enforce.” (Raphael Littauer and Norman Uphoff, editors, “The Air War in Indochina,” Cornell, 1972)

Christopher Hitchens’ first count in his suggested indictment of Henry Kissinger for war crimes was “the deliberate mass killing of civilian populations in Indochina.” He attributed to a member of the Joint Chiefs, Air Force Col. Ray Sitton, the information that Kissinger was personally involved in the command of bombing raids in Cambodia and Laos.

Bombing civilians has been going on for at least 80 years despite international law. The Hague Convention of 1907 said, “The attack of bombardment, by whatever means, of towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings which are undefended is prohibited.” American presidents and their subordinates have been able to ignore it.

MADMAN IN CHIEF

So if moral, political, military and legal indictments are set aside, what remains to prevent an American president from bombing the beJesus out of anybody who can’t retaliate in kind?

Well, there is Congress with its exclusive power to declare war. But Congress seems politically allergic to using this check on presidential power to execute war. The War Powers Act was not passed until the Vietnam war was all but over, and it has been bypassed ever since.

The second restraint is political – that is, the consideration that bombing civilians in a far land might lose an election at home, but this does not matter if the bombing is kept secret, at least until it’s over, and there’s a probability that it actually will be popular.

In 1972, for example, Nixon consulted pollster Albert Sindlinger about bombing Hanoi and was told it would get overwhelming support from the “hard hats,” which was the synecdoche for his anti-liberal populist supporters. And so, from Dec. 18 to 29 the “Christmas bombing” pounded Hanoi. It is remembered, I was told, by small monument in a crowded and rundown section of the city where a hospital was destroyed, but there is no accounting of the dead and wounded. The statistics on our side say 15 B52’s were shot down and 93 airmen were missing. Nixon, deep in his narcissism, complained later, “It was the loneliest and saddest Christmas I can remember.”

The presidency has evolved into the most powerful military command in the world, wielding the ultimate power of life and death in other nations without internal restraints or the external restraints, for now, of other superpowers. All this unchecked power in one office can become a global risk if the man in office is unstable. Long after the fact anecdotes indicate that Nixon was unstable. He was losing it, drinking heavily and not sleeping. He was out of touch.

By the spring of 1970, with the secret bombing of Laos revealed by the New York Times and student protests closing down the nation’s college campuses, Nixon launched an invasion of Cambodia. When Ohio National Guard troops shot down protesters at Kent State on May 4, the campuses exploded. Four days later, with 100,000 protestors gathering on the Washington Mall, the president held a news conference in which he waivered, backing down with an announcement of a three-month limit to the invasion (Kissinger in a memoir called it “panicky”). That night between 9:22 p.m. and 4:22 a.m. phone logs showed the president making 51 calls. At dawn he wandered with only his valet to the Lincoln Memorial, where he tried to schmooze with student protesters, who were incredulous and probably a little frightened. He wanted only to talk college football.

In February 1971, after an series of dissimulations to make it look like somebody else’s idea, he authorized the secret invasion of Laos by South Vietnamese soldiers advised by American officers on the theory it would stop the North’s preparations for an attack of the South in the coming election year. Some 9,000 South Vietnamese troops died in the cynical adventure, which Hersh called “a classic military failure: poorly planned, poorly executed, and based on poor intelligence.”

He could perhaps rationalize his behavior as a clever deception that Kissinger advocated years before: the madman strategy. In a game of bargaining the madman makes the opposition believe he will do anything to win – screw the consequences. So Ho Chih  Minh would be convinced that the president of the United States was irrational, a dangerous menace with no concern for human life. In current jargon this is called, “going nuclear.” It actually worked in the early 1950’s when President Eisenhower let it leak through diplomatic channels that he was considering the use of nuclear weapons against North Korea. But that was another era and another president.

Giap said, “I appreciate the fact that they (the Americans) had sophisticated weapon systems, but I must say it was the people who made the difference, not the weapons.” An 18-year-old girl studied bomber flight patterns and one day shot down a B52 with a light firearm, he said. North Vietnam never wanted to fight the U.S., but once it was clear it had to fight, the people were confident they could win, he said, because we “knew little about Vietnam and her people.” (CNN, 1998)

The threat of irrational bombing (screw morality, politics, military experience) had no effect on North Vietnam. Traffic on the Ho Chi Minh Trail was never cut off. The irony of the madman strategy is that Nixon probably was, as subsequent events and personal memoirs showed, a little mad.

WINDS OF WAR

Reporters covering presidential campaigns like to investigate character issues, flip flops, friends, fiancés, and finances but not the humanity of the candidates with regard to the most unchecked, unbalanced and consequential prerogative of the office: the authority as commander in chief of the armed forces. The last time humanity became a major issue was 1964 when Lyndon B. Johnson exploited fears that Barry M. Goldwater would use nuclear weapons in Asia. Today the issue of the button in the brief case, the secret code changed daily, evokes no feelings, stirs no fears. Even the terminology of  the Sixties has been domesticated. “Nuclear option” means a parliamentary maneuver, and “the F-bomb” is not remotely in the same category as the H-bomb. Worst fears become comedy routines. The drone-delivered bombs at issue now are smaller by a factor of millions, but still . . .

The humanity of American presidents is more relevant now, the scale of things aside, because they can actually use the arbitrary power as commander in chief. They can have people killed in small ways in small countries. And the power is generally unchallenged because most politicians, worried that compassion is a sign of weakness, are reluctant to advocate the exclusive power of Congress to interfere. To the relief of most of them, these military decisions that fall short of actual war are kept secret until any opposition appears unpatriotic. The presumed majority called “The American People” by politicians pretending to represent it, loves these aggressive adventures,  particularly as diversion in these times of trouble at home. Clearly we cheered the killing of Osama Bin Laden, and we understood the need for secrecy in executing the mission. Not so popular, I suppose, are the  White House-stamped drone attacks that killed non-combatants by mistake in Pakistan. The drones fly at presidential discretion and are not subject to military discipline or rules of engagement. They are minor covert activities as opposed to a president deploying armies with Congressional approval without traditional declaration of war (Johnson in Vietnam, Bush in Kuwait, W. Bush in Afghanistan and Iraq, Obama again in Afghanistan), but civilians are just as dead and children just as crippled no matter what the label on the missile.

The exercise of this presidential power to have people killed in small countries is not new – and not simply the result of exotic weapons. It goes back more than half a century when Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon secretly bombed the landlocked Southeast Asian kingdom of Laos.

But they are gone, long gone. Most people in the former Indochina – and they are young – have forgotten the “American War.” Or so it seems to the tourist, because they don’t debate it, even if we still do. As the region has opened to tourism, guides such as Suen, two generations removed, could be quite amiable to the rare American such as myself who came to see the most bombed (an estimated 1.5 million tons)civilian target on the planet. Suen, in fact, had a story, the cleverness of the words probably lost in translation, about a villager visiting a friend in a neighboring village and standing with him by his perfectly circular pond reflecting the sky. “Damn the Americans,” the jealous villager said. “Why did they stop before I got a fish pond too?”

In a UN-sanctioned village for Hmong refugees a fourth generation was growing and learning and watching me. Three kids dragged a tree branch in the dust. A girl carried her baby sister like a doll. Students in a dark school room squinted at their lesson pads. The village was once a Pathet Lao camp, or thought to be, and therefore, heavily bombed. The cluster-bomb casings were so common they were used in construction: house stilts, feeder troughs, garden planters, even fence posts. They were old and rusted and the children paid no notice as they played.

From the air over the farms of Laos, the craters are mirrors in fields of green. On the Plain of Jars they are only dry red-brown circles. In places they are nested like cuckoos among small dark circles, the jars. Leaving the plain I wondered again why an ancient folk went to all that trouble. Why were the jars made, to contain what? Rainwater? Grain? Wine? Dead souls? Emptiness?

Emptiness. About 2,500 years ago the Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu, a Taoist, wrote a conversation between a master and a  disciple who finds him seated staring at heaven as if his body were a piece of dry wood and his heart-mind a pile of dead ashes. Asked what’s going on, the master replies with an extended metaphor about the sounds the wind makes. “Angry sounds come from thousands of hollows. Have you never listened to its prolonged roar. . . rushing, whizzing, making an explosive and rough noise, or a withdrawing and soft one, shouting, wailing, moaning, and crying? . . . When the winds are gentle, the notes are small, and when the winds are violent, the notes are great. When the fierce gusts stop, all hollows become empty and silent.”

Perhaps you have heard the music of earth and the music of man, the master says, “But have you heard the music of heaven?” On the Plain of Jars for a moment in its long history there was the wind of war. Now, there is silence. The jars endure among the “ten thousand things” of earth, things described by two Chinese characters: under, heaven.

There was a strange grey stone shaped and lined like a size medium Indian moccasin, right foot, the foot you extend first in yoga, Buddha foot, scout foot. We (my traveling partner Pat and I) first saw it on the six-mile walk up the shore below Todos Santos in south Baja California. It had been tossed high on the otherwise clean dry sand by the explosive surf. We kept walking in the cool wind – it was April – entertained by heavy grey pelicans gliding impossibly just inches above the sand like hovercraft and by hermit crabs of all sizes flashing to their safe houses. We ate nachos and drank margaritas and watched the surfers from a table at the gringo-owned Los Cerritos Surf and Beach Club (the club is private, the beach is public). On the way home, there it was again, the unlikely Buddha foot. We took it, packed it, flew it a thousand miles. It rests now on the right outside my door as if I have a one-foot guest who knows the Way. (more…)

Shopping for cameras in Singapore would be a cultural experience, I thought, a story to take home like eating in a hawker market or posing among the eerie manikins depicting the Japanese surrender in 1945. I thought I might discover that salesmanship is a cultural thing, that sales techniques vary with cultural diversity, if there is any such thing in global merchandising. All this helped me rationalize the intention to resist buying a fine Lumix camera made in Japan. (more…)

It seemed odd to me that Singapore, where 70 per cent of the population is Chinese and the biggest annual all-consuming holiday is Chinese New Year, would have a Chinatown. But there it was, as promised by the tourist map and guaranteed in the name of a subway station: a few colorful lines of old shop houses against a backdrop of tall buildings in the mumble of traffic. (more…)

Some Singaporeans can ride the Mass Rapid Transit trains without holding on. They can stand there texting or reading or even napping, confident they will not be toppled. It’s a matter of experience-based trust. They know the ride will be smooth, no jolting, just as they know the doors will open precisely on the platform marks and the electronic MRT cards will debit accurately according to time traveled. (more…)

Thich Nhat Hanh’s return to Vietnam in May for a retreat followed by a United Nations conference was a triumph for his “engaged Buddhism.” Not only was his global influence evident at the conference, but he and 400 retreatant-delegates (most of us Westerners) were warmly received on a dramatic slow walk in the center of Hanoi.

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The great white whale is a monstrous force of nature in American lit, but after walking among the relics of an Arctic whaling station established about the time Moby Dick was published, I saw that nature

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lost. The bow whale is long gone from the ice edge. The ice itself is receding. As the title of an early book on global warming suggests, we have seen “The End Of Nature.” I heard a Lakota spiritual leader say a white buffalo, among other white creatures, will be the sign of the rectification of nature, but I do not believe its time has come.

In this dark mood I returned from an aborted trip to an incredible wild national park in the Canadian Arctic that among other things has the tallest, sharpest granite exposures on the planet.

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On a summer day in January we landed at Wulaia in rubber Zodiacs from the Mare Australis, a clean new expedition crucero of Chilean registry. For now, this is the only cruise through the restricted Murray Narrows south of the Beagle Channel, a passage from Ushuaia to Cape Horn. (more…)