Laos: The Plain of Jars Revisited

When I flew into Laos' Xieng Khuang province on the north-western Vietnamese border in 1989, I had to take a Lao guide from Vientiane since unaccompanied travel outside Vientiane was not permitted for foreigners then. At the time I was only the second writer (and first American) to have been permitted to visit Xieng Khuang since 1975--even Kampha, my Lao Tourism Authority guide, had never been there before--but by 1996 the Plain of Jars was the third most popular tourist destination in Laos after Vientiane and Luang Prabang.

A Chinese Y-7 turboprop, replacing the Russian-built ME-8 helicopter I'd flown to Xieng Khuang on in 1989, cruised low over breathtaking green mountains and valleys scarred by row upon row of gaping red-earth bomb craters. Virtually every town, village and temple in the Plain of Jars had been wiped out by American bombs. The enigmatic, 2,000-year-old jars themselves, which legend says were used by a victorious Lao king to ferment rice wine, lay like giant one-eyed skulls in fields just outside of the new provincial capital, Phonsavan. It's remarkable that any of the jars have survived intact, since by 1964 the North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao had at least 16 antiaircraft emplacements on the Plain of Jars, along with a vast underground arsenal. By the end of the 60s this major battlefield was undergoing almost daily bombing by American planes as well as ground combat between the US-trained-and-supplied Hmong army and the North Vietnamese-Pathet Lao alliance.

Phonsavan itself is little more than a ragged, sprawling collection of wood-plank, tin-roofed rectangles interspersed with a few modern breeze-block buildings. A heavy sense of impermanence hangs in the air, as if the inhabitants half expected carpet bombing to resume at any time. A single 1969 air campaign--part of the secret war waged in Laos by the United States Air Force and the CIA--annihilated at least 1500 buildings in the town of Xieng Khuang, along with some 2000 more on the Plain of Jars, erasing many small towns and villages off the map permanently. Continuous saturation bombing forced virtually the entire population to live in caves; "The bombs fell like a man sowing seed", according to one surviving villager.

Mark Downey / CPA

Lao girl sitting on a bomb.

Xieng Khuang's ancient capital was so heavily bombarded during the 1962-73 Indochina War (known as the War of Resistance in Laos) that it had been completely abandoned. Twenty years after war's end the old capital is once again inhabited, though only one of the original French colonial buildings still stands, an old commissariat now used as a hospital. The rubble that was once quaint provincial French-Lao architecture has been replaced by a long row of plain wooden buildings with slanted metal roofs on either side of the dirt road from Phonsavan. Several Buddhist temples built between the 15th and 19th centuries lie in unrestored ruins; in Laos today the only intact Xieng Khuang-style temples--characterised by striking pentagonal silhouettes when viewed from the front--are in Luang Prabang, the capital of the next province west.

War junk has become an important part of the local architecture and economy in old Xieng Khuang. Torpedo-shaped bomb casings are collected, stored, refashioned into items of everyday use or sold as scrap. Among the most valuable are the 1.5-metre-long casings from US-made cluster bomb units (CBUs), which split lengthwise when released and scattered 150 tennis-ball-size bomblets (each containing around 250 steel pellets) over 5000-square-metre areas. Turned on its side, a CBU casing becomes a planter; upright they serve as fence posts or as substitutes for the traditional wooden stilts used to support rice barns and thatched-roof houses. I saw hundreds of casings used like this in Xieng Khuang villages along Route 7, which stretches north-east all the way from Phonsavan to Hanoi.

Farmers from around the province keep piles of junk--including pieces of F-105 Thunderchiefs, A-1 Skyraiders and other US planes downed during the war--beneath their stilt houses or in an unused corner of their fields, using bits and pieces as needed around the farm or selling pieces to itinerant scrap dealers who drive their trucks from village to village. These trucks bring the scrap to small warehouses in Phonsavan, where it is sold to larger dealers from Vientiane. The going price for scrap in Phonsavan is 200 Kip per kilogramme, around US$0.56 (at the time of writing). Eventually the scrap is melted down in Vientiane or across the Mekong River in Thailand as a source of cheap metal. Considering this keen commerce in bits of metal it is very difficult to believe that anyone in Laos could possibly be harbouring live MIAs (soldiers "missing in action") in the face of US reward offers ranging from US$10,000 upward for simple information leading to the rescue of any US soldier.

On my second day in Xieng Khuang I wanted to visit a cave I'd heard about where 400 villagers had been killed by a single rocket from a fighter plain. After our battered Soviet jeep bounced along an unsealed road for 50 or more kilometres, we turned and ploughed into a thick green forest along a one-metre-wide trail meant for occasional foot traffic. The driver had never been to the cave before, and we quickly became lost in the thicket.

Through the forest canopy we could just make out the limestone cliff that contained the cave--though it was totally hidden from view--and finally the woods and undergrowth became so thick that the jeep couldn't proceed any further. As we were about to turn back, a black-clad farmer carrying a crude, hand-made machete stepped out of the woods like a character from an unfamiliar Lao folk tale. We asked directions to the cave and, after some hesitation, the farmer led us through a labyrinth of trails until we were at the foot of the ridge. After hiking over a stream and up another trail we mounted a shaky ledge along the high cliff and came to the cave entrance. The large tunnel went straight into the ridge without losing much height; the floor was littered with broken limestone from a partial cave-in. Mixed with the rubble were human bones, along with bits of wood and steel that had once formed simple furnishings.

It wasn't difficult to imagine the effect of a direct rocket on 400 people crowded into this natural shelter. The fifty-seven year old farmer and impromptu guide, who knew a great deal more about the incident than my Vientiane guide, volunteered the details. His wife and three children has been in the cave on that Christmas Eve in 1969, as had nearly the entire population of his village, Ban Nameun. He had survived because he had been stationed in Phonsavan with the Liberation Army at the time. I asked him a string of questions about the incident; if he felt bitter toward Americans, he didn't show it. He has since started a new family.

Joe Cummings / CPA

Mine disposal expert, Xieng Khuang, Laos.

Undetonated ordnance is still a problem for much of northeastern Laos. A local official led me to a field near my hotel where one could see unexploded fist-sized bomblets, from CBUs, barely embedded in the earth. Older villagers knew to avoid areas like this, he said, but children occasionally set them off and are seriously, sometimes fatally, injured. Today casualties from CBUs in Laos continue to run as high as 10 to 15 people per month, along with uncounted numbers of livestock. Several international volunteer organisations are working to remove, detonate or defuse live ordnance in the countryside; so far the Lao government has refused all offers of US government assistance in this area.

Besides the scrap metal warehouses, the rebuilt Phonsavan consists only of a few Vietnamese noodle houses, the Phonsavan Photo Shop, a handful of government buildings, and a rambling outdoor market crowded with Lao, Hmong and tribal Thais from all over the countryside. To see what was drawing these shoppers, many of whom have walked considerable distances for the chance to browse, I wandered through the market while waiting for the plane that was to fly us back to Vientiane. Considering the remoteness of the province, the market seemed quite well-stocked. As elsewhere in Laos, many of the products for sale were Thai--cigarettes, pharmaceuticals, clothing fashionable a decade ago in Thailand, processed foods. Adjacent to the market was the somewhat stark Xieng Khuang State Store, which offered a utilitarian selection of rubber sneakers from China, Lao rice whisky, Lao cigarettes, bundles of nails, umbrellas, army canteens, and sewing machines of 19th century design. The only leftover Soviet product I saw in the State Store was a refrigerator.

The return flight to Vientiane was delayed for several hours while the pilots waited for the fog to lift from the mountain range that separates Xieng Khuang from the Mekong River Valley and Vientiane. As I watched the fog slowly recede I pondered the way the people of Xieng Khuang appeared indifferent to the war and destruction they had endured for so many years. No one I had spoken to had appeared at all emotional when they talked of the war, not even the man whose family and neighbours had been annihilated at three in the afternoon in a cave. Laos has been at war for nearly 30 years, but since 1975 has earned a seemingly stable peace.

An earlier version of this article was first published in Asia Magazine.

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