Category Archives: Theatre of War

Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, northern Thailand, Gulf of Siam

By Larry Joseph Calloway © A Great Place to Have a War: America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA by Joshua Kurlantzick (Scribner, 2017) Laos is a great place to be a tourist. It has Luang Prabang, with its French colonial architecture and Buddhist monasteries along a simple historic main street. It […]

      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

A king at rest   (C)text and photos by LARRY CALLOWAY   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

        (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

During the Vietnam war he spoke out against foreign ideology and foreign arms. He created a volunteer youth group to rebuild destroyed villages. He was consequently exiled. Now he was back, in peace.

As the tour guide struggled through the life of the Buddha I watched a depressed monk smoke a cigarette and stare out toward a pile of skulls pressed against glass. I wondered what he was thinking.

On the eve of a return trip to Southeast Asia, I recalled a village scene 40 years ago that to me defines the difference in practice between the two “vehicles” of Buddhism. Theravada is not as lonely as Mahayana.

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