HITCH-HIKING IN LAOS (4)

 

                                    HITCH-HIKING IN LAOS (4)

It was a jolly ride, sitting atop the load of rice bags as we passed primitive frontier outposts where a soldier and his family, living in a pole shack at the end of a bridge, would be its only security. Several of the bridges were recently blown, and we'd have to leave the road and drive through the woods until we came to a ford. It was all the same to the driver; he'd bounce along through the trees until he got back on the main road, then drive like hell for the next crossing.

     The mood of the countryside began to change. There were more outposts, with more barbed wire and revetments, and more soldiers with weapons more in evidence.

     Toward evening one of the truck's tires blew out, and we all piled out while I helped the driver change tires. The driver and the other two Laotians in the cab reminded me of the truckers I'd worked with in Colorado Springs the summer before, the way they sweated and cursed and laughed as we were changing the tire.

     Soon after that we stopped for a meal in a roadside village. The open-front, weathered board building where we ate must have been the rural Laotian equivalent of a truck stop. The women who worked there seemed to be three generations of the same family. They looked at Manyon and me with some curiosity, but when we smiled and said "merci" and made the traditional gesture of hands together under the chin, bowing slightly, they became open and very friendly. We had some strips of boiled meat – maybe pork - and some ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..        [NOTE IN 2014: Re-reading this passage about relating to rural Laotians in 1968, at the height of the Vietnam war going on right next door (and, really, all around us: branches of the Ho Chi Minh Trail crossed our path more than once.), I am struck more strongly now than I was while I was there in Laos. As I wrote this chapter, we were on our way to a place where we’d have a closer look at NVA-occupied territory. At the time, I was preoccupied with walking under, and through, a triple canopy jungle at night in the rain./Another thing strikes me powerfully now, that maybe only occurred as a faint glimmer then: the people we spent those days with – the truckers, and the family who ran the truck stop – had to have known what the other Americans were doing in their country. They lived with it every day, in the form of bombardments, covert and not-so-covert troop movements, Air America gunships strafing NVA positions and troop columns in their neighborhoods… of course they knew. But once we treated them with courtesy and respect –- not to mention helping with the work of changing the truck tire -– they were no longer enemies. In fact, they were friends. The proprietress told her teen-aged daughter to sit beside me and talk, with the few words of English at her disposal, and offer me a glass of tea. Many US veterans of that war, especially those most involved in close combat, never had the chance to see the “other side” of the people among whom we lived and moved. Or didn’t know where, or how, to look. PLEASE SEE WAYNE KARLIN’S EXCELLENT BOOK, “WANDERING SOULS.”   )……………………………………………………………..] ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

(CONTINUED FROM ABOVE) foul-smelling soup with animal parts floating in it, and the glutinous rice they always had that you grabbed a handful of and rolled into a sticky ball and ate like a candy bar. In fact, you ate everything with your hands except the soup.      

     Julian Manyon would have none of it. He was quite sure that his digestive system couldn't handle such strange food. In fact, there were many times during the trip when I had to laugh at how utterly out of place he was in a primitive situation. There were even a couple of times - like when we were with the army outside THAKKEK  - when I would roundly curse him for it.     

     I offered, not too insistently, to help pay for the meal, but the driver wouldn't accept. I think he'd been pleased by my helping with the tire change, and then when we'd finished and were all thirsty, I'd broken out two canteens of water and passed them around. Also, he could see that we weren't rich tourists, and he didn't feel compelled to make a profit from hauling us. In fact, this was something we were to notice several times - the business of paying what you could afford.

     On the little bus that had brought us into PAKSE  from the south, there was a wrinkled old man who had walked out of the jungle and stood at the edge of the road to wait for the bus, and when the boy who was collecting fares came in front of him, the old man pulled from his pocket a 100 kip note that was even more wrinkled than his face, and the boy refused it. The old man made the appropriate gesture to save his dignity, then finally the boy took the bill from his hand and shoved it emphatically back into the old man's shirt pocket. We got the feeling that this scene was re-enacted every time the old man got on the bus, with the same 100 kip note. (I also got a break on the fare that time. It was obvious to the Laotians who lived in areas we passed through, that I had very little money, and was used to working my way as I traveled.) And weeks later in Cambodia, as I was taking the river boat back downstream to PHNOM PENH one of the passengers bought me a meal of fried rice from the little kitchen on the boat's fantail. Without it, I'd not have eaten.

     The tire change had taken more than an hour, and as we got on the road again, the sun was going down. With the coming of darkness, the mood of the Laotians changed. They no longer laughed or talked or pointed off to the sides of the road; they just sat there, and the driver pushed the truck as fast as it would go. There would be some conversation now between the driver and the guards at each checkpoint, and when we started up again he'd get the truck back up to top speed right away. Apparently it wasn't a good idea to be on the road at night in that part of the country. Manyon and I joked nervously about the possibility of his convincing the Pathet Lao that we were Frenchmen.

     But points of light began to wink more often from the side of the road, and the truck slowed as the driver and his friends relaxed and began to talk again. We were pulling into the outskirts of SAVANNAKHET.

     There was a military barricade at the town limits, a curfew after which no autos were permitted to enter town, and we were late. Manyon and I got down from the truck and went over to a roadside cafe where one of the truckers was still standing around. As we approached he was saying something about us to the mother of the family who ran the cafe, and it must have been favorable, because the driver hadn't asked us for any money. It was customary for truckers to earn extra money hauling passengers because there were so few buses.

     The eldest son of the family came up and said in English that he had a motorcycle, which was allowed past the barricades, and that he would be glad to take Manyon and me, one at a time, into town. He said that it was 4 or 5 kilometers, and that he knew where the hotel was. We thanked him and decided that Manyon should go first. As they started off I walked over to one of the little metal-topped tables and sat down. The mother and her teenage daughter and younger son all sat down around me, and they were very friendly. At first I was suspicious; I had been conditioned to be that way in Vietnam, where Americans got used to overtures being made with monetary return, or something more sinister, in mind.

     But these Laotians were genuinely warm people, and soon began to disarm me. The boy, who was about ten years old, had had some English in school, and we tried for a while to carry on a conversation. I asked him how many Americans there were in the area, and he said that there were quite a few, more than at PAKSE. After a while he asked if I would like anything to drink, and I said no. The mother spoke to her daughter, who got up and brought me a glass of tea anyway. I reached for some money, but they wouldn't accept it, even though the place was a restaurant. Then the mother motioned for the girl to come and sit closer to me. I finally forced myself to relax and admit that they didn't want anything. It was one of the most subtly painful experiences I was to have all summer, for it became a tactic of survival for an American in Southeast Asia to distrust, as a potential enemy or opportunist, anyone he didn't know. The strength of the habit became cruelly apparent when I found myself acting coldly towards people who truly wanted to befriend me.      

     The older son returned, and I thanked his family and got on the motorcycle behind him. He took me to the hotel in town where Manyon was waiting. There was a strong odor of marijuana smoke as I entered the lobby; the stuff was legal in Laos.

NEXT: HITCH-HIKING IN LAOS (5)

HITCH-HIKING IN LAOS (3)

HITCH-HIKING IN LAOS 1968 (3)

Traveling with Julian Manyon/Pakse/Nicholas Lawrence Lieuw of Kotakinabalu, Borneo/Saravane/Air America/Pakse airstrip/Jeep caught us/Colonel and General/USAID and American girls/IR8,IR5 rice/hitching on a rice truck





Manyon and I got along pretty well, but were a ways from being soulmates. I was astonished at his physical weakness, and, in my typically intolerant fashion, more than a little put out by having to help him hoist his pack to the top of a bus, or even to push him up over the side rails and into the back of a truck. Ours was a pragmatic arrangement: I had a strong back and military experience; he spoke French.
Kracheh was the end of the line for the riverboat; from there we took a series of rural buses, and hitched the odd ride with truck drivers. That got us as far as Stung Treng, the last sizable town in northern Cambodia. From there, we hitched a ride with two merchants in their jeeps to the Laotian border.
Pakse was our first Laotian town. It lay on the east bank of the Mekong at the end of a hectic four hour ride in a tiny bus over a road periodically interdicted by bridges which had been hastily blown by the Pathet Lao (cousins to the west of the Viet Cong) and just as hastily repaired by government road gangs spending money furnished them by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

I remember Pakse for a couple of reasons, the first of which was a very good, if not overly clean, Chinese restaurant where Manyon and I stuffed ourselves on sweet and sour pork, shrimp, steamed rice, fried rice, salad, and beer for less than a dollar each. We talked about Chinese expatriots around the world, how there is a remarkable consistency about the way they move into a place with hardly a possession, and manage to set up some kind of business by means of which they transform wretchedness into dignity. Often when success comes to them, it is at the expense of the less ambitious Vietnamese or Cambodians or Laotians around them, so they form islands of Chinese society in indifferent or hostile seas; they draw into themselves, endure the envious stares of the locals, and await a friendlier day. As we spoke of this, I remembered Nicholas Lawrence Lieuw, a Chinese Catholic from Kotakinabalu, Borneo, and how he had been able to converse in Mandarin with the restaurateurs in Phnom Penh, and how that was the only time I saw a spark of emotion in the one old man's face - the one who ran the restaurant at the Hotel Mondial - during the time I was in that city. He and the other waiters in the place seemed to get along with the Cambodians, but it was more like respectful tolerance of customers than real warmth.
In Kotakinabalu, Lieuw worked as a travel agent. He was on an extended Asian vacation, a benefit of his job. His main interest seemed to be to sample the women in the brothels of each city he visited.

For Manyon and me, Pakse was the location of our first contacts with the American and Royal Laotian Government establishments. We began looking for evidence of secret air operations. If American pilots actually were conducting military operations, this would be a violation of the 1962 Geneva accords on Laos, which stipulated that Laotian soil be neutral, and that the presence of foreign military personnel was prohibited. The U.S. was a signatory. Of course, the thousands of North Vietnamese troops infiltrating through Laos into South Vietnam via the Ho Chi Minh trail would be illegal as well.

From the beginning, our trip through Laos was a series of experiences which were so contradictory that we began to get a feeling of otherworldliness about the place and about the war that was supposedly going on there. We had as yet seen nothing to confirm the presence of an actual shooting war, except for the blown-and-repaired bridges we had crossed and the well guarded checkpoints we had passed through on the road up from Cambodia.

One afternoon Manyon had a long talk with an old Laotian doctor in Pakse. He asked the doctor if there was really any fighting going on in the country, and was informed that there was at that moment a fierce battle in progress at Saravane, about fifty air miles northeast of Pakse toward where the Ho Chi Minh Trail snaked through the eastern part of the country on its way into the northern provinces of South Vietnam. Apparently the RLG (Royal Laotian Government) garrison was completely surrounded and in imminent danger of being overrun. The doctor also said that there were many American aircraft, including fighters, flying in and out of the place. He said that some of the airplanes were marked "Air America," an ostensibly civilian aviation company contracted to USAID in Vietnam and Laos which some Americans in that part of the world admitted off the record to be a CIA front.

We had heard that there was an airstrip outside Pakse where such flights might be originating, so we took a shuttle taxi out the highway and got off at the first of two gates to the airfield. We knew that the hangars and office buildings were near the other gate, but wanted an excuse to wander along the airstrip and take a look at some of the hardware of the Royal Laotian Air Force and its American "civilian" benefactors.
The Laotian fighters were T28's, an earlier model of the A1 Skyraider with which the U.S. had outfitted the South Vietnamese Air Force. Some were marked with the threeheaded elephant (actually four, when seen in three dimensions) which was the seal of the government, and some were unmarked. There were only a few American aircraft around; most were C123 cargo planes used widely by the U.S. Air Force and Marine Corps in Vietnam. It is originally a military aircraft; the ones we saw in Laos were all plain silver and identified only by the words "Air America" stenciled in very small black letters under the wings, and by equally small black numbers on their tails.

No one accosted us before we got to the hangar area, so we looked around for some Americans to talk to, and encountered another strange phenomenon of the "forgotten war": the Americans received us with a coolness which bordered on hostility, which seemed to deepen as they noticed our ages, as they found out that we were college students, and particularly when we told them we were journalists. It is customary for countrymen who cross paths in out of the way places to greet one another at least civilly, but this almost never happened to us in Laos. It was a strange feeling, after spending several days without seeing a Caucasian, to pass on the street some cleancut type in civilian clothes, of stern demeanor, who is obviously an American, who just as obviously recognizes you as being an American, and who then averts his glance and passes without a nod.
 
In the office building there were a switchboard operator and a couple of pilots in civilian clothes who were about to leave for the day. They were carrying flight helmets and flak jackets, and were not particularly anxious to sit and chat with us. We asked them if they had any aircraft going out to the area of Saravane where the fighting was going on, and if so, could we catch a ride?
The answers were short and polite: Air America didn't carry unauthorized passengers; besides, there were no aircraft going out to the area of Saravane because nothing was happening there. There hadn't been any fighting anywhere around for months because of the rainy season. (We knew better: that was when VC and NVA mounted many attacks because it limited the effectiveness and range of their enemies' air support.)
We walked back along the flight line toward the gate where we had entered. Since we were unsatisfied with the information we had been given, Manyon and I decided to see if the Americans at Pakse were as much on the up-and-up as they would have us believe. If they weren't doing anything to be touchy about, they shouldn't mind if we took a few pictures of their little ol' unmarked airplanes....

The jeep caught us at the far end of the flight line. There was a Laotian Brigadier General in the passenger seat and a U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel, in full dress green uniform, in the back seat. The driver pulled up alongside us and skidded the jeep to a stop. The Colonel was excited.
"Hey, who the hell are you?" he yelled from the back seat.
"Oh, hello, Colonel. We're student journalists. He's British, and I'm American. We were just...."
"I saw what you were doing. You were taking pictures, weren't you?"
"Yeah. What's wrong with that?"
 
The guy couldn't believe his eyes and ears. I had on a pair of faded, dirty Levi's, an old cowboy shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a few days' growth of beard; Manyon looked like a London street urchin. And we called ourselves journalists.
"Well, there's nothing secret about them or anything, but you're just not supposed to take pictures on the flight line, any flight line. It's just military security. You guys got any identification?"

We showed him our press credentials from Saigon, which he did not recognize, but which were obviously legitimate. He cooled off a little. We acted dumb, and that fools most American army officers, including this one. He showed our press cards to the General and spoke to him in Lao. Then he asked us just what sort of story we were after, and we replied that we had thought it would be interesting to do a feature story on the Royal Laotian Air Force for the students back home who seldom get to hear about this sort of thing, and did he have any suggestions?
"I think you'd better go see the head of USAID," he said. "This is highly irregular."
He spoke again to the General and the General got out of the jeep and the Colonel climbed out and let us into the back seat and then got into the General's seat, and we drove off leaving the General standing at the end of the flight line.
The two secretaries at the USAID office were American girls about my age, fine-looking to two of us just in from the wilderness, but about as friendly as the Colonel and the pilots had been. They gave us coffee and we waited for the official who was the local head of USAID.

When he came in we could tell that the Colonel had spoken to him at some length about us, because he looked us up and down carefully, and because he already knew all about the business at the airstrip. But we did the harmless act again and started asking about rural development and about how the new IR8 and IR5(
) rice strains were doing in Laos, and he loosened up somewhat and began to answer questions. We got around to asking him if there were any way he could help us with transportation as we went about our research, and he got careful again and said that we'd have to go to Vientiane, the capital, and talk to the press officer at the embassy there. He emphasized that this was a requirement, not a request; and that the press officer would be expecting us.
It was about noon when we got our packs from the hotel room. (This is how we lived in Laos: a cheap hotel room would be 600 or 700 kips at 500 to the dollar so since Manyon had more money than I, he'd pay 500 and sleep on the bed, and I'd pay 200 and sleep on the floor. He hated discomfort; I was more worried about food.) We took a taxi out of town a ways and caught a ride on a rice truck.

It was a jolly ride, sitting atop the load of rice bags as we passed primitive frontier outposts where a soldier and his family, living in a pole shack at the end of a bridge, would be its only security. Several of the bridges were recently blown, and we'd have to leave the road and drive through the woods until we came to a ford. It was all the same to the driver; he'd bounce along through the trees until he got back on the main road, then drive like hell for the next crossing.
The mood of the countryside began to change. There were more outposts, with more barbed wire and revetments, and more soldiers with weapons more in evidence.