Spook‑hunting in Laos
NOTE: A much shorter (and partially censored) version of this chapter was first published in the Colorado College Magazine, Spring 1969.
Julian Manyon and I met along the journalism trail in Vietnam during that summer of 1968. He was intelligent, fluent in French, and spindly to the point of frailty. Sometime during our travels together, he had his 16th birthday. He'd been brought up in British "public" schools, which were really private, and had never been interested in sports or other such crude physical endeavors. He seemed so out of place that I greatly admired his nerve for coming to Vietnam at all, and he had traveled overland all the way from Russia, except for flights from Calcutta to Bangkok, and Bangkok to Saigon.
Once in a restaurant I noticed that the waitress, a Vietnamese woman in her thirties, kept looking quizzically at Julian. Finally her curiosity won out; she asked me if he was ong, man; or ba, woman.
He later caused me some jealousy when he showed up with a dazzlingly pretty young woman. Her mother was Vietnamese and her father had been a Japanese soldier during their occupation of Indochina during WWII. She was a stewardess for Air Viet Nam. She was also a Viet Cong agent. Their mutual trust had grown to the point that she'd confided in him. He had in turn insisted on telling me, and had done so before he introduced us. The visible struggle between fear and resolve in her eyes and body language as we stood and talked left no doubt as to the truth of the story, or to her nervousness at being in the presence of a stranger who knew her secret.
Manyon and I both had become interested in rumors floating among the Saigon press corps about a secret CIA airline operating in Laos. We were also interested in how the war was affecting Laos and Cambodia, both supposedly neutral. We checked and found that Prince Sihanouk strictly prohibited Western journalists from entering Cambodia. We went to the Australian embassy where Julian, a British subject, was able to wrangle student visas for both of us.
We traveled as cheaply as we could, leaving Phnom Penh on a large riverboat which went downstream from the city on the Tonle Sap River, then turned upstream on the Mekong. We traveled all night on the boat, pulling in several times to way stations along the bank. That night entered my dreams, so that my memory of it is built of both dream and recollection, a phantasmagorical montage of steep earthen cliffs, eroded into a brown corduroy which seemed to pulsate in the light of torches carried by children who scurried up the plank with baskets of hot corn‑on‑the‑cob, skewered meat, sliced mango and pineapple, and short, stubby bananas.
Manyon and I got along pretty well, but were a ways from being soul‑mates. 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 sizeable 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 other‑worldliness 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 T‑28's, an earlier model of the A‑1 Skyraider with which the U.S. had outfitted the South Vietnamese Air Force. Some were marked with the three‑headed 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 C‑123 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" stencilled 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 clean‑cut 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 had 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 IR‑8 and IR‑5([1]) 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.
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 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 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. 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 truck drivers 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 teen‑age 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.
We were up early and caught the bus to Thakkek, where we arrived at about noon, changed buses, and continued on. A few miles northwest of town there was a large steel bridge on which the Pathet Lao had done a beautiful job, dropping a full span of it into the river. The river was too deep to ford, so a ferry had been set up to carry vehicular traffic, including our bus, across. It was mid‑afternoon when we got to Paksane, where we looked up and saw a giant silver Boeing 707 tanker refueling one of a flight of four sleek fighters. I remember them because they looked so out of place over that town, a lovely little hick place that reminded me of Powell Butte, Oregon.
We had some bad luck at Paksane. The driver knew people there, and he sat in one of the cafes drinking lemonade and talking so long that he was conveniently able to decide that we'd never make Vientiane before the curfew, and would have to spend the night where we were. He drove the bus to a hotel where people who could afford it took rooms; Manyon and I slept in the bus with the other peasants.
The next day we were in Vientiane by noon. We went to the American Embassy and looked up the press officer, whose name was Phil Wilcox. The first thing he said was "Oh, yes, I've been expecting you two." The USAID man had called him from Pakse, and he already had the story about our photography excursion along the airstrip there. And by the time we got to Vientiane, we had been hitchhiking for several days while living out of our rucksacks, and looked it. Wilcox's quizzical expression as he looked us over seemed to ask the same two questions which by now we were used to: were we for real, and if so, were we a threat to his enterprise?
He began questioning us, and when he asked what publications we were writing for, I pulled out the article I'd had published in the Denver Post. That broke the ice; it turned out that his father‑in‑law was one of the editors. In fact, his brother-in-law, Chuck Buxton, was editor of the Colorado College Tiger, and I also had a credential from him. We talked about Colorado, and then, as he had decided to help us, about the vast differences in journalistic activity between Vietnam and Laos. Manyon and I complained about how difficult it was even to talk to Americans in Laos, much less to get transportation assistance or information concerning the policies and projects of the American mission in Laos.
In spite of his offer of help, Wilcox again became defensive. He explained that since there was a full‑fledged war going on in Vietnam, the American military establishment there had huge appropriations for such things as accommodating reporters, but there weren't any of our military personnel in Laos at all, and the civilian budget, he said, was pitiful. (It was another stanza of the same song we were to hear from American and Laotian functionaries alike: nobody cares what happens in Laos, the same people who are contributing so much to the war effort in Vietnam don't even care that there are 40,000 regular North Vietnamese troops right there in Laos, Congress wouldn't give them weapons or airplanes or money... it was "the forgotten war."
Wilcox was careful to ascribe the limited nature of his offer of help (he would give us names of people to see, and try to get us aboard an Air America plane to Savannakhet if there were any extra seats) to limited resources. He skillfully parried our questions intimating that the reason journalists weren't welcome aboard Air America planes, or even, it seemed, in front areas in general, might be because something was going on there which the public wasn't supposed to hear. He would shrug off such queries, saying that we already knew that there was no American military effort in Laos ‑ after all, that was strictly forbidden by the 1962 Geneva Accords - and we should know how much it hurt when the Americans had to stand by helplessly and see their Laotian friends get overrun by superior numbers.
We didn't press further because we needed his help. He gave us press passes to the airport where the three American pilots were to be flown in from Hanoi the following night (Friday, August 2, 1968), and told us how to get in touch with General Oudone Sananikone, who was Chief of Staff and Information Officer for the Royal Laotian Army.
A hard core of reporters had been making the round trip from Saigon to Vientiane and back for as many as four weekends in a row by the time Manyon and I had arrived after a haphazard journey of six days, which covered some seven hundred miles by just about every means of transportation imaginable except flying. When the newly released pilots conveniently deplaned less than thirty‑six hours after our arrival, some of the Saigon‑based journalists were envious of our luck.
It was a disgusting experience, made more disgusting by the fact that what happened really surprised no one who was present.
The International Control Commission aircraft (a C‑47, I believe) taxied onto an apron near the terminal building at about 10:30p.m., local time. Ambassador Sullivan, dressed in a tropical suit and tie, climbed the portable stairway into the plane. We were expecting a wait (there were 30 or 40 reporters present), and we got it. The cordon of Laotian police allowed us to pour through the gate and form a large half‑circle with its center at the tail exit of the aircraft.
After a time some men ‑ possibly members of the Commission ‑ began to straggle to the exit and down the ladder, disappearing behind the ring of reporters and American Embassy personnel. Once in a while we would see a stewardess appear silhouetted in the doorway, then disappear again inside. Two or three times the policemen fell back and let us reduce the size of the ring. The still photographers were talking about shutter speeds, and the television cameramen set up their floodlights to create a small area of intense whiteness in the surrounding dark.
Finally Sullivan came down the ladder and strode to the center of the ring of waiting newsmen. He made a terse statement that Major so‑and‑so, as senior man, would speak for the three pilots, and that we should keep our questions brief. Then he left.
Then, after about a forty‑minute wait, the pilots came out. All were wearing white shirts, open at the neck, and not‑too‑convincing smiles.
"How's it feel to be back, Major?" was the profound first question.
"Oh, great, just great, really good to be back...." Toothy smile followed. Somebody had given the major a big cigar, and he lit up and puffed happily. When he was asked how they had been treated in prison; he answered, "Very well. The North Vietnamese treated us very well."
He was already beginning to sound like a tape recorder.
There were more questions: about how long each of them had been imprisoned, whether they'd heard from their families, when they'd found out they were to be released... and there was the question of how the three would return to the United States, to which the major answered that they had been given the choice of going by commercial aircraft or a special Air Force jet, and "hadn't decided yet." The questions were mostly of the unphilosophical, home‑town news release type, and several of us were getting the impression that the major preferred them that way. As the queries got closer to sensitive territory ‑ what kinds of missions they'd been on, what they felt about the damage they'd caused ‑ the major began to hedge, and indicated that it was time to cut the thing short; they were very tired and wanted to get home to their wives.
Manyon's question was the capper: "Major, have your personal views changed any as a result of your missions over North Vietnam and your subsequent imprisonment?"
"Well, since you don't know what my views were before, I guess you can't tell, can you? Ha, ha."
Again, there was the toothy smile and a flourish of the cigar as the three pilots began to ease their way through the crowd of reporters. Someone muttered that Ambassador Sullivan had done a pretty good coaching job.
The next day we were in General Oudone Sananikone's office asking for help. He was a thoroughly pleasant chap, as indeed were all the Laotian officers we met. We repeatedly got the impression that while they all realized they had a war to fight, they saw no sense in getting up tight about it. In fact the regional commander at Savannakhet told us a couple of days later that the massive sweep toward the Ho Chi Minh trail which Manyon and I were supposed to accompany had been postponed due to insufficiency of ammunition; then he shrugged and reiterated the already familiar complaint about la guerre oubliée, the forgotten war. By the time I left Laos, the military establishment there was to remind me several times of characters in Steinbeck's novel Tortilla Flat: not real go-getters.
There were two other reporters in the general's office for a briefing; we were invited to sit in. One was a beefy Australian who wrote for the London Daily Mirror; I think the other was an American. We stood around in front of a large wall map as the general pointed out unit locations and sketched their situations, and once again we were swamped with descriptions and statistics concerning the activities and military superiority of the North Vietnamese forces in Laos, and how Laos was really the key to the whole Southeast Asian question, but the Americans refused to recognize the fact and give them airplanes and rifles and money to fight the war.
The other two reporters were quite familiar with the map, and we soon found out why: neither had been to the field with the army more than once or twice; they did most of their reporting from that very briefing room. In fact, there were few foreign journalists in Laos, and they almost never went on operations. Laotian journalists, the general said, never went on operations, period. Truly, the forgotten war... it was forgotten even by the nation and the army who were supposed to be fighting it.
The general was pointing out some positions along "The [Ho Chi Minh] Trail," and saying that there would be a major sweep of the area in a couple of days. Manyon and I asked if we could go along.
He shook his head, replying that he had more trouble trying to protect people like us who ran around his country trying to see the war than he did in fighting the enemy. He was especially negative about the Frenchmen who occasionally went into the hinterlands to talk to the Pathet Lao. As the briefing wore on, the general again launched into a stream of complaints about how the world wouldn't believe his plight, so I jumped on him: "General, if you want people to believe you, why won't you let journalists go to the field with your army? Surely you don't expect us to write only what you tell us. But we'll write anything we see, if you'll let us go out there."
"That's bullshit!" blurted out the reporter from the Mirror. He proceeded to call us a couple of punk kids who didn't know anything about war, and who'd only go out and get ourselves shot up and ruin things for the professional journalists. We countered that we'd both been shot at ‑ probably more than he had ‑ and that we felt that journalism's first requirement was to go where the story was. He was still scornful, and angry at our attempted usurpation of his territory. General Sananikone finally acquiesced and gave us a note, in Khmer typescript, which he said directed his subordinates to render us assistance commensurate with operational requirements.
Sunday morning ‑ less than two days after the pilots were released ‑ we were sitting on the runway in the shade of one wing of the C‑47 which was to take us south to Savannakhet, headquarters for the operation we'd finally gotten permission to cover. It was a long wait, and as we got up to wander around and stretch our legs, the Laotian Air Force pilot eyed us nervously. Once Manyon asked if he could go down to the end of the runway where the T‑28 fighter squadron was located. He was told emphatically that he could not.
About mid‑morning, a small, olive drab, twin‑engine aircraft landed, taxied to a position across the runway from us, and stopped. Black letters along the fuselage plainly spelled out U S Army. I had seen similar aircraft in Vietnam; it was a Mohawk reconnaissance plane. But in Laos, unless the pilot were a civilian, the thing's presence and activities would be illegal.
Perhaps the pilot was a civilian. But this question occurred to a lot of people who observed "civilian" American pilots at work in Laos: what is the difference between a military man and a civilian on a military mission?
Manyon finally went up to the Laotian pilot and told him that he had to go to the bathroom, period, and asked if there were a toilet in the hangar of the fighter squadron. The pilot said yes, and reluctantly let him go. He had been gone nearly half an hour when our plane began to load, so I ran down to the hangar to look for him. I tried a couple of doors; both were locked. A little farther down, a tall, sandy‑haired American was wheeling a single‑engine aircraft into the hangar by means of a long tool attached to its rear wheel. I walked over to him.
"Hey, did you see a tall British kid around here?" I asked. "Came to go to the bathroom."
"Nope, I sure didn't," he replied. "But if he's in there..." ‑ he pointed to the enclosed end of the hangar ‑ "...he's locked in, 'cause I locked the door when I came out."
We walked over and he pulled out a ring of keys and unlocked the door. Manyon came out and we hurried across the runway to our plane. On the way he told me that he'd walked right into a pilots' ready room just like the ones in Vietnam, with Playboy foldouts all over the walls, and about half a dozen Americans sitting around playing cards and drinking beer. I had stumbled into a similar scene earlier, as we passed through one of the Laotian towns. Weary of hitchhiking, we'd been poking around an airstrip trying to finagle a ride on one of the many airplanes we had seen taxiing, taking off and landing. This more convenient sort of hitchhiking had been standard procedure for journalists in Vietnam. In that earlier situation, I'd finally been motioned toward an open side door of a metal hangar building. I stepped inside as I knocked. There were two or three American men wearing grey uniforms similar to those worn by Greyhound bus drivers. Each had a very small shoulder patch which said "Air America," and was wearing a flak jacket and a pistol in a shoulder holster. Since they were obviously dressed for adventure, I asked if a couple of journalists could ride along, see what the war was like in Laos. Not a chance. I was told that they were civilians, that they carried only civilian cargo, that there really wasn't much of a war going on, and besides their contract forbade them to haul unauthorized passengers.
The commanding officer at Thakkek was as cordial as the others had been, though we woke him from his afternoon nap. He listened as we explained that the operation out of Savannakhet had been cancelled, and that we had been advised to view some of the forward positions around Thakkek if we wanted to get a view of the Laotian army in the field. Apparently there was actually a "front line" at a distance of about twenty‑four kilometers from town, beyond which North Vietnamese forces held sway.
After reading General Sananikone’s letter of authorization, the colonel was amenable. He dispatched his driver to take us to a restaurant in town while he finished his nap, then the driver returned and took us to his office. It was a bare room with a desk, a couple of guest chairs, and a wall map with le front sketched neatly on an acetate overlay in black grease pencil. The colonel pointed out the relative positions of the RLG and North Vietnamese forces, and said that he had made arrangements for us to be taken to a forward position. We sat down to wait for the vehicle.
There was hardly anything on the colonel's desk. He turned his attention to a small neat pile of white papers directly in front of him, each of which had a few lines of Laotian script ‑ it looked like Sanskrit, to my ignorant eye ‑ typed across the middle. He would pick up the top paper, peruse it carefully, think about it for a moment, then sign it with a flourish and set it down to his right. After about every other signature, he would tap a little bell on the corner of his desk. An enlisted man would come in, valiantly attempt to stand at attention, then pick up the papers and leave. The colonel would sign a couple of more sheets, and ring the bell again.
After a time a young lieutenant entered the room; the colonel introduced him, saying that he would be our escort to the front, would serve as our interpreter while there (he spoke French; Manyon would translate for me), and would render us any assistance possible. We shook hands and took leave of the colonel. He smiled and said, "attention la moustique." Watch out for mosquitoes.
The driver was a young ragamuffin straight out of the jungle. He wore an old baseball cap perched on top of a shock of long black hair that made him look like one of the Apaches out of an old western movie. His uniform was made up of accumulated parts, and he seemed continuously conscious of the fact that he was wearing boots. His weapon was an old M‑1 rifle with the blueing gone from the barrel.
The jeep's battery was dead, so we had to push the thing to get it started. It was twelve kilometers ‑ seven and a half miles ‑ to the headquarters of the company we were to visit; it would be that far again to the forward position. It was already late afternoon when the jeep coughed its way up the last hill before the headquarters area, sputtered, and died. As we got out of the jeep, the garrison of some twenty little brown soldiers was being dismissed from its evening muster, which consisted of a formation of two lines held in the road where it went between two huge rocky crags to disappear in the jungle. That was the only place around flat enough to hold a formation. The ex‑Marine in me watched as the command for attention was given and the assortment of boots, sandals, and bare feet come together in what I thought was a pathetic attempt at unison.
The company commander had spent some time training at a U.S. Army base in Texas, so we had to talk for a while about Texas, though I had never been there, and Manyon had never even been to the States. He was as eager to help us as the other Laotian officers had been; in fact, we again got the impression that the visit of two foreign correspondents ‑ the first ever at that position ‑ was more important to him than his immediate responsibility to the war effort.
The ridges on both sides of the camp were high and abrupt; darkness fell quickly. The company commander got on the field telephone and tried to get another vehicle for us. He couldn't. He shrugged, and asked apologetically if we wanted to walk. I thought it a rather bald attempt to discourage us yet again, and we'd already spent too many precious days trying to see the Royal Laotian Army "in action." So we said yes. The lieutenant who was our escort squawked, but the captain shut him up. It was raining lightly when we started out.
A squad of soldiers accompanied us. But for us, they would have been able to wait until morning came and the rain lifted before returning to the front. But they went, and we went, swinging along in the wet dark. What we began to learn about them during that walk would later become strikingly clear: while it was true that they wore semblances of uniforms and carried weapons, they were not so much soldiers as simple jungle people who had finally been touched by the outstretched tentacles of government.
So we walked with these little soldiers through the night and the rain, deeper into the rain forest. There was no measure of time or distance until the road ended at a bridge made of rickety poles. We crossed carefully, one by one, and started into the minute tunnel through dense foliage which the trail entered on the other side. The soldiers were no longer talkative, although they did not seem afraid. At intervals they would stop for a moment and listen, then continue.
Finally at one of these listening stops we were met by a sentry who was no more than a low voice in the soggy blackness. Once we had left the road behind, there was no more sky, and therefore no more rain. We moved through foliage beneath three layers of jungle canopy; there the rain fell on the top layer and worked its way down until it dripped on us from the leaves directly overhead, and was brushed onto us as we shouldered our way through the undergrowth.
We turned off the trail there and moved into a low semi‑clearing where water stood calf‑deep on the jungle floor, and shadowy figures moved by flashlight beams along pole bridges between tiny thatched huts which stood on stilts above the water. A voice with a flashlight showed us a hut where we could wait out the night and the rain. The floor extended out from the front wall to form a small porch. You backed up to this porch and sat down on it and took off your boots or sandals and left them in the corner so as not to carry mud into the hut. The roof extended out as far as the floor, and since the water only fell straight down because it dripped from the underside of the jungle canopy rather than falling from the sky, it wouldn't get in our boots.
I tried to stretch out on the bamboo floor, but couldn't. The hut had been made for people a head shorter than me. It was one of those situations I had met so many times in Southeast Asia which said, "You are a stranger here." I put my head down on a hard lump, and unwrapped it to find, carefully oiled and stored and long unused, a US A6 .30 caliber machine gun. There was no other place to put the gun; the hut wasn’t even big enough for Manyon and me. I rewrapped it and used it for a pillow.
So just when the business of the too‑small hut finished saying, "You are a stranger here," the gun added, "So are the things you bring with you."
Morning never really came. The process was so slow that instead of greeting the dawn, we came to realize that the night must have left because there was enough light to see the blue smoke that hung over the pools of water in the clearing, and the clusters of little brown people who sat on the porches of their huts and waited for the rain to stop. It seemed that their very lives consisted of waiting for the rain to stop. They did it patiently, because there was really nothing for them to do when it did stop except to put pots of rice and meat on to cook over smoky wood fires.
There was a break in the jungle canopy off a ways in front of our hut, and gradually the rain stopped falling through it and above the sky began to emerge and lighten, and then a great jutting ridge appeared out of the fog opposite the clearing. Shafts of sunlight fell through the opening in the canopy, heating the pools of water until the clearing was a steamy, other‑worldly place.
We ate a meal of rice and meat with the officers at a bamboo table under its own thatched roof. The rice was kept and served in wonderful, tightly-woven little cylindrical baskets, with tops that slipped over in a close fit and were held in place by a fiber loop which also served as a carrying handle. They gave me one of the baskets. (Some days later, as I walked about forty kilometers south from the Cambodian border before I caught a ride the remaining few kilometers into Stung Treng, the sticky rice in that Laotian lunch bucket, and the water I scooped from the ditch beside the road and treated in my canteen with halazone tablets, kept me alive for a day's hard walking.)
The French‑speaking lieutenant, like the captain we'd met earlier, had been to Texas for training. So again Manyon and I had to try to talk about Texas. As we were finishing the meal, the lieutenant jerked his chin toward a pretty young woman seated a few yards away with her back leaned against one of the large stones that dotted the clearing. He asked Manyon a question in French, which he translated: "Do you want to fuck her?" We both declined. I'm sure she knew what was said, though it was in French. She just sat and looked at us. I have often wondered what she was thinking. I have also realized, over the years, that a part of me had wanted to say yes.
None of the soldiers were eager to move; we had to wheedle them into taking us to "le front." We waded through the jungle for a few hundred yards until we came to another of those abrupt rock formations, and began to climb. The soldiers were like cliff dwellers, clambering up the steep face with the ease of experience. The rock was brittle and had broken up into knife‑edged chunks. Some of the soldiers climbed these with bare feet. During our mealtime chat we'd learned that it was the army's policy to go to an area like this and draft the people who lived there in the jungle, then assign some officers and noncoms to form a military unit, and leave it there as a garrison.
We climbed almost straight up, past tiny huts perched in crevices where women with blank brown faces sat waiting in silence. It was strange, the way they looked. It wasn't as if they were waiting for something. They were just waiting.
We finally came to a pocket on the crest of the ridge where we could stand and see over. The spine of rock was so steep that we could lean against it and still be standing. The lieutenant who was our escort did this and tentatively raised his head above the ridgeline, motioning to the canopied hills that stretched away below. "Le front," he said.
That was all there was to the front, and to the existence of the small band of people who spent their days and nights squatting on the porches of the huts back in the clearing, or perched in the sheltered places on the south side of this massive chunk of black rock: a place out there where no one ever went, where it was said that the North Vietnamese troops sat and waited out the weeks and months as they did, and from where, once in a while when a Laotian soldier would silhouette himself against the skyline, a shot would come.
I was alone in southern Laos. Manyon had crossed the Mekong to Thailand; I was headed back to Phnom Penh for a flight to Saigon and another to the States. Fall semester would be starting soon.
I'd come to an unmarked crossroads and taken the wrong fork. I was lost. All I saw was a narrow road and two walls of jungle that nearly closed out the sky above it. No humans, no peasant huts, not even a blown bridge or an abandoned guard shack. I walked the road. Finally a large building of weathered boards came into view. I stepped onto its high porch, halloed. No answer. The building was open, but no one was around. It seemed there hadn't been anyone around for a long time, though it was clean and in good repair. There was no hint of what the building had been used for. Maybe meetings, maybe classes... I couldn’t tell.
Looking through an open window, I saw the only evidence, besides the building itself, of human presence: a life-size, nicely framed, official portrait of Lyndon Baines Johnson.
[1] The word on the ground among Americans in Southeast Asia was that these new rice hybrids might revolutionize rice production in the entire Mekong region. I remember the name Rockefeller as being attached to them.
