Bombing Haunts Villages on Laos Trail

Just off a red clay track by the sparkling Tchepone River is the reborn hamlet of Ban Dong Nai, which American bombers pounded into oblivion a generation ago.

Today, the villagers smile and welcome foreign visitors, but the older ones still wonder what they did to deserve the terror that rained from the skies between 1964 and 1973.

The United States attacked Ban Dong Nai during the war because the clay track was part of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the network of jungle paths through eastern Laos and Cambodia that North Vietnam used to move men and supplies into South Vietnam.

Not far across the Vietnamese frontier is the former U.S. base at Khe San, which Gen. William C. Westmoreland called the key to stopping full-scale infiltration from the trail. U.S. Marines held it during a 1968 siege that cost the lives of about 500 Americans and 10,000 Vietnamese.

The Ho Chi Minh Trail was the main target of America’s “secret war” in Laos, which involved 242,000 bombing sorties in 1969 alone. More than 2 million tons of bombs were dropped on Laos altogether, more than U.S. forces used in all of World War II.

Lahoun Maprayvong, a former guerrilla now an administrator in Tchepone town, recalled that first day of bombing, during a Buddhist festival in 1964.

“We were warned, but we just didn’t know what to expect,” he said. The bombardment grew steadily worse. The planes came every day for nine years, sometimes four or five times a day and also at night.

Lahoun said the villagers were most afraid of the huge B-52 bombers the United States began using extensively in 1967.

“They flew so high you couldn’t see them, so there was no warning,” he said. “They dropped bombs in line--Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam!--like that. If you were next in line, then that was it.”

Each B-52 dropped 30 tons of bombs in “boxes” half a mile wide and 2 miles long. They left permanent craters.

“When they bombed like that, people ran away to the mountains to live in caves,” Lahoun said. “Some years, we had to change places five times. When we came back, there was nothing left.”

Ban Dong Nai and Tchepone were gone by 1973.

Noi, who was a young girl in the 1960s, said her father was killed in one attack. “I just don’t understand why the Americans did what they did. You couldn’t escape the bombs,” she said.

Khamlai was in her twenties in 1968, when she and her younger brother, walking to a rice field, both stepped on American mines.

She looked down at the ugly, metal-and-rubber left leg she has worn for 22 years, and said: “Can you tell me how to make it more beautiful?”

Her brother lost both legs.

People along the trail recalled day after day of napalm attacks. Lahoun said that some of them still suffer from injuries caused by napalm and phosphorous bombs. Many hillsides stripped by chemical defoliants are still barren.

After South Vietnam’s unsuccessful attack on the trail in 1971, all the trees and bushes were burned away and the road was jammed with the wreckage of tanks, helicopters and guns, said Phou Wattana, a district official and former guerrilla.

Villagers pointed out the hulk of one American-made tank and chopped away the long grass to uncover an artillery piece. Children played near piles of rusty shells and bombs.

“They’re only dangerous if you put them in the fire,” a policeman said with a shrug.

Xoun, an old man who stays home from the rice paddies to tend the children of Ban Dong Nai, used a machete to uncover unexploded 250-pound and 500-pound bombs.

Many bomb craters remain in and around the village, and Xoun said that thousands of small, unexploded antipersonnel bombs remain to kill and maim farmers.

“When the planes came, we had to go and live in the forest for many years,” he said.

“As you can see, we are used to living peacefully around here. There used to be lots of fruit trees --jackfruit, coconut, banana--but after the Americans came, there was nothing left. We had to rebuild everything, but the fruit trees won’t grow anymore.”