From War
Laos does not rank highly on many world records. With a population of just about five million, it isn’t the smallest country in the world, and it certainly isn’t the largest. An annual per capita income of less than 400 dollars means that it isn’t the poorest or the richest either. There is one list, however, that the nation does top. Laos is the single most heavily bombed country in the history of warfare. During the conflict in Indochina, as a part of its “secret war” in Laos, the American military dropped more bombs on the country alone than it did during all of World War II, and three times as many as it did during the Korean War. The bombing cost US taxpayers 7.2 billion dollars, or 2 million every day from 1964 through 1973. Most Americans have forgotten these astonishing facts—if indeed they ever knew them to be true.
I, for one, had no idea until I moved to Laos. And even while I was there, it was easy enough to forget. Although the war in Indochina had ended less than three decades before, the entire conflict appeared at times to have been relegated to the deep recesses of the Lao collective memory. Not once did a Lao friend ever raise the subject of the war in conversation. Lao my age and younger, while certainly aware that a major conflict had taken place, could be vague on who exactly had been involved. And when I revealed my nationality to Lao who had been alive during the hostilities—even to men who had fought against the Americans and their allies—I never encountered a scowl or so much as a strange look. On the surface, at least, I was presented with nothing but smiles and overwhelming approval.
“America?” people would exclaim after I had told them where I was from. “Oh, very good! America number one!” When other expats, European or Asian, introduced themselves to my Lao friends and colleagues, I listened for the reaction. No other country received such a positive response as the US.
If you looked closely, though, evidence of the war and America’s involvement in Laos was not hard to find. A sign for the “Lao American Association”—an organization supported by the US in the 1970s to promote American culture and the English language in Vientiane—still stood outside the complex now used as the headquarters of Laos’ state news agency. US Army parachutes shaded vendors selling fresh fruit juice and beer on the banks of the Mekong. In the countryside, families used empty bomb casings as planters or pylons. By recycling the remnants of this dark period in their history, most people seemed to have moved on. Or had they?
Every so often, the smallest of things would remind me that the war wasn’t such a distant memory after all. Once, toiling away at my desk, I looked up to find my colleague, Souksan from the Marketing and Promotion Unit, standing before me, smiling. Souksan’s smile was ever present, and it was contagious. It disappeared in only the rarest of situations, such as when he attempted to formulate complete sentences in English—and even then only for a moment. Though his English was terrible and his computing skills minimal, Souksan had been put in charge of producing the brochures the National Tourism Authority distributed to tourists. He didn’t mind the job, really, especially since it meant he was able to use the new scanner the office had just acquired through the UNDP. Boy, did Souksan love to scan. Graphics were never a problem in NTA brochures, for Souksan seemed to spend most of his time taking photographs and scanning them into the computer.
As I saw it, my job was to make sure that the text of Souksan’s brochures was readable, and that the design fit into the broader marketing scheme for Visit Laos Year 1999-2000. I had a difficult time convincing Souksan that the NTA should develop a set of uniform marketing materials; each time he put together a brochure, which seemed to be weekly, it had an entirely different look and a new take on the English language. But my frustration hardly had a chance to surface when I was working with Souksan, who was relentlessly upbeat despite the odds stacked against him. Even his name, in English, meant “Happy.”
Happy asked me to look over a draft of a new brochure he had been working on. He pulled a chair up next to mine and, since I required it of any staff member who wanted my help,
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began to edit the brochure along with me. We made some truly daring alterations, like changing “now clothes” to “new clothes” and eliminating English words that even I could barely understand—terms like “simonize” and “circumambulate.” Heaven knows where he came up with this vocabulary; he certainly hadn’t studied it in my intermediate English class. By working through the awkward language, we tried to make Laos sound as if it were, in addition to being a “unique tourist destination” (as Souksan had put it), a relatively nice place to visit.
Souksan soon lost interest in the task at hand and left me to it. As he played around with the computer, I plowed through a series of incomprehensible descriptions of Laos’ tourist attractions. The brochure took me on a bumpy journey through the country’s highlights: Vientiane, the political capital and home to the majestic That Luang stupa, the symbol of Laos; up north, Luang Prabang, the former royal capital and World Heritage site; and Wat Phu Champassak, the ancient Khmer temple complex in Southern Laos.
Then came Xieng Khouang. This northeastern province was home to the Plain of Jars, a landscape of rolling hills throughout which large jar-like structures, said to be more than 2,000 years old, are scattered. No one has ever been quite sure what to make of these “mysterious” jars. Perhaps humans had used them as sarcophagi, or for wine production or rice storage. Regardless, the Plaine des Jarres, in French—or PDJ, as the US military liked to call it—had also been a major battleground during the Indochina War. The North Vietnamese and the Pathet Lao had numerous camps in the area, from which they launched a major anti-aircraft operation. Residents of Xieng Khouang lived through daily bombing raids by American planes and constant ground combat between US-trained forces and the communists. Nearly every town and village in the province was bombed between 1964 and 1973. In 1969 alone, 1,500 buildings in the provincial capital and another 2,000 on the Plain itself were destroyed. Even today, Xieng Khouang suffers from the legacy of war; more than sixty citizens a year fall victim to unexploded ordnance like land-mines and cluster bombs.
In this section of Souksan’s brochure, to my surprise, the English was absolutely perfect. “Xieng Khouang province,” it read, “offers the beauty of high, green mountains combined with rugged karst limestone formations. The original capital of Xieng Khouang, Muang Khoun, was almost totally obliterated by US bombing in the 1970s, and its inhabitants consequently moved to nearby Phonsavanh.” Whoever had written this paragraph certainly hadn’t minced words. The phrase “almost totally obliterated” was dead on. But was it appropriate for a brochure intended to appeal to Western tourists, potentially Americans?
Just as I considered rewriting the text to soften the blow, Souksan pumped up the volume on the computer’s speakers. Certainly the most useful feature of any computer at the NTA was the CD player, which provided endless entertainment for the entire staff. The next song was “Heal the World,” by Michael Jackson.
“Ha! This is American song, no?” asked Souksan. “Very good.”
Perhaps Souksan thought nothing of it, but for me the irony inherent in this situation was overwhelming. It captured in a single moment the contradictions I often felt living as an American in Laos. What did the Lao I knew really think of me? Were we bitter, historical enemies or natural friends? When he listened to Michael Jackson, did Souksan think at all about America’s role in his country’s history? Was America really “very good,” all unimaginable wealth, pop music, and designer clothes, or did he silently despise the US for the problems it had caused. I’d had nothing to do with the war in Laos. But I was an American, after all, and I had benefited from that fact. Wasn’t I partly responsible for the past as well? And wasn’t I just another quiet American, a direct descendent of Graham Greene’s fresh-faced Harvard man, convinced that I knew what was right? It wasn’t guilt, exactly, that I felt as I heard Michael Jackson sing, but a nagging discomfort about my role at the NTA and in Laos in general.
I decided to leave the text untouched.
Copyright Brett Dakin, 2003
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