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

[rcli4 at comcast.net]

You forgot to tell how this was a main supply route that the loas govt rpeatedly promised to close.  The supplies brought in by this route were used to try to kill me.  Sorry if I don't fell sorry for the sons a bitches.

Clyde

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From: "Mara Factor" <mfactor at gmail.com> 

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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