[at-l] (OT) Bombies, a Secret War, and Really Big Stone Jars

[Mara Factor]

Hi all,

I don't usually post off-topic missives but I went on a very unusual hike
yesterday and thought I would share the relevant portion from my journal
entry.  I've been in Laos for three weeks now.  I got to Phonsavan a couple
of days ago and went on a tour which involved a fairly short 2km hike
yesterday.  That said, it was a very intense hike.

Sometimes life can be put in a very different perspective and my own
perspective on life certainly took a hard left turn yesterday.

Mara

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Bombies, a Secret War, and Really Big Stone Jars

I'm used to hiking where the biggest danger to me is falling off a mountain,
twisting an ankle, or contracting giardia.  Today, a misstep could have
literally blow me to pieces.

I'm in the area to see the Plain of Jars.  In this region, there are twenty
sites with groups of hundreds of these mysterious jars.  They are made of
stone, top out at 2.5 x 2.57 meters and 6 tonnes (a tonne, or metric
tonne, is 1000 kilograms or 2,205 pounds).  Who made them, when, and why
have been lost to history.  There are many theories floating around but
nothing has been proven.  The jars were not carved on site from existing
boulders.  The boulders came from areas between two and ten kilometers away
and then moved to their present positions.  There is nothing dangerous about
the jars.

They are huge with some easily large enough to sleep in or stand in
depending on whether they are standing up or not.  The smallest ones were
probably .6m and still heavy.  If there were any even smaller then that,
they've been removed, most likely by looters, but there doesn't seem to be
too much evidence of that.  Smaller artifacts that were here when a French
woman first investigated these jars in the 1930s are long gone.  Wandering
around the sights, looking at the size of these jars, just made them seem
all the more bizarre.  I keep wondering how and why they were put here.
Just the act of hollowing out the boulders must have been a huge task not to
mention moving them.

The Plain of Jars is on the high (1200m) plateau in the northeastern part of
the country.  The area very much reminds me of the US western plains
states.  The mountains have trees including some sort of long leaf pine tree
and the lower rolling hills are covered with golden grass in this, the dry
season.

These plains were heavily bombarded in the 1960s and 1970s by the CIA's
"Secret War."  Secret because the bombing violated the terms of the Geneva
Convention that the US had signed in 1962.  There were two areas of
bombardment.  In the north, the campaign was trying to end the control of
the Pathet Lao (the Lao communist movement) and in the south, the US was
trying to disrupt the use of the Ho Chi Minh trail.  It's the result of this
bombing that makes this area so dangerous.

>From a poster in the MAG (Mines Advisory Group, http://magclearsmines.org)
Visitor Information Center in Phonsavan:

"The two million metric tonnes dropped on Laos is more than the combined
total dropped on Japan and Germany during World War II.  Over half a million
bombing missions were carried out; 50% more than over North Vietnam.

It has been estimated that the US dropped one plane load of bombs on Laos
every eight minutes for nine years.  This was equivalent to about 20 tonnes
per square kilometer in the areas that were bombed, or more than one tonne
for every person in the country at the time."

Had every bomb exploded when it hit the ground, then the Lao would have been
able to get on with their lives and rebuilding their economy long ago, but
the use of cluster bombs, meant that there are tonnes of unexploded ordnance
(or UXOs) still littering the landscape.  Years of growth also means that
these are not necessarily sitting on the surface where they are easy to see,
but are often buried on layers of dirt, waiting for an errant shovel or plow
to dig them up.

Children find them and think the yellow bombies (bomblets) look like fruit
they are used to eating.  Or don't understand the danger, after all, it
seems most of the houses around here have many relics from the war in their
own houses.  With limited land on which to grow crops, the Lao also resort
to collecting scrap metal.  The metal detectors do not distinguish between
live UXOs, shrapnel, and other material.  So, they dig, trying to be
careful, and sometimes aren't careful enough.  Some who uncover UXOs also
try to open them for the valuable gunpowder contained within and lose that
bet.  It's been over 40 years since the bombing campaign started and still,
the people are rightfully scared to venture into their own fields.

I had read about UXOs (unexploded ordnance) in my guidebook but this is the
first time I've actually been in the affected area.  On our tour, we started
with the third Plain of Jars sight.  We paid our $.70 admission fee and
started across rice fields.  Areas and corridors cleared by MAG are clearly
marked with concrete markers delineating the cleared and uncleared area.
The corridor we walked on through the rice fields was all of 1 to 2 meters
wide.  The entire area with the jars had been cleared so we could walk
around there with impunity.

>From the third site, we walked a couple of kilometers to the second sight.
All along the way, we could see bomb craters scattered across the fields.
Some have been turned into fish ponds.  Some just have growth because the
crater walls are too steep to plow.  At one point, we had to walk through a
field that hadn't been cleared.  There was a well used trail and we all were
very careful to step only on areas that had already been well trodden.  I
was consious of the fact that I weigh considerably more than the average
Lao, but also that this was the trail used by most falang on the same tour I
was taking.  It's also likely used by cattle so I felt reasonably safe.  We
were soon back on a cleared corridor.  This time it was a bit more
interesting.  There was small and very recent craters where I had to be
careful not to step into them and break a leg.  These were created by the
bomb clearing team when they exploded bombies that had been found there.
Out in the fields, they explode them on sight rather than try to move them.
There were sandbags blown open by the blast still lying around.

Other smaller holes were created by metal hunters out with their metal
detectors.  If the detector sounds, they dig a small hole, just big enough
to twist an ankle.  If the trail had been a rough trail, it wouldn't have
mattered but the trail was nice a smooth so we had to be careful not to get
lulled into forgetting to watch where we were walking.

Our van met us at the second site where we saw trees that had grown inside
of cracked jars, splitting them further apart.

We then drove to site 1 where we saw the only jar that had been carved with
the form of a human.  These jars also have lids though many of the original
wood and sandstone lids are long gone, the lids made of the same harder
stone are still scattered about.  There are definite differences in the jars
from place to place and even within the sites.  The rims are carved
differently, the lids may be different, and the inner rims also vary.  This
site also had areminder about the cultural loss of the wat.  There was a
large jar on the edge of a bomb crater.  It looked undamaged while other
nearby jars had been broken.  Countless jars were obliterated during the
bombing.

This first site also has a cave where the Lao took refuge during the war.
This one, while it had a very high roof, didn't have that much room so not
many people stayed there.  Another nearby cave was large enough to hold
hundreds and survived many bomb attacks until one low flying plane made a
run and got a bomb right into the cave.  It exploded killing 374 people.  It
was three days before things cooled off enough for anyone else to enter the
cave.

The night before my visit, I viewed a film called "Bombies" which gave me an
excellent overview of the entire situation both then and now.  From the
Bullfrog Productions web site
(http://www.bullfrogfilms.com/catalog/bombie.html):
"Between 1964 and 1973 the United States conducted a secret air war,
dropping over 2 million tons of bombs and making tiny Laos the most heavily
bombed country in history. Millions of these 'cluster bombs' did not explode
when dropped, leaving the country massively contaminated with 'bombies' as
dangerous now as when they fell 30 years ago. "


-- 
Visit my Travels and Trails web site:
http://friends.backcountry.net/m_factor
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