Secret U.S. Bombings in Laos
The French colonial era in Indochina—Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia--came to an end in 1954. The Viet Minh forces of Ho Chi Minh defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu, and the first Geneva Accord of 1954 was signed. Laos was declared a sovereign and neutral nation. But the country soon became torn apart by civil war, with rightist, moderate and leftist factions vying for power. A series of coalition governments formed and promptly fell apart as foreign involvement increased.
A second Geneva Accord was signed in 1962, which again recognized Laos as a neutral country and banned the interference or presence of foreign military personnel. The reality on the ground was quite different. Russia, China and North Vietnam sent arms or troops to support the leftist Pathet Lao insurgents. The U.S. and Thailand provided arms and air support to the rightest Royal Lao government, while the American CIA recruited special guerilla forces to fight behind enemy lines.
From 1964 to 1973, the U.S. dropped more than two million tons of ordnance over Laos during 580,000 bombing missions - equal to a planeload of bombs every 8 minutes, 24-hours a day, for 9 years. The bombing was an effort to destroy North Vietnamese supply lines along the Ho Chi Minh Trail and fend off the Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese Army, who had taken control of the eastern provinces. The U.S. launched an unprecedented secret bombing campaign without authorization from the U.S. Congress. To evade the Geneva agreements, the U.S. placed CIA agents in foreign aid posts, contracted with private plane companies, and temporarily turned air force officers into civilian pilots. The Ravens, a code name for U.S. pilots in Laos, flew 1.5 times the number of air sorties flown in all of Vietnam. Each cluster bomb casing scattered several hundred tennis-ball-sized bomblets (known as bombies in Laos) over 5000-sq-meter areas. About 260 million cluster bomblets fell over Laos with close to 53 million bomblets dropped within one kilometer of villages. Up to 30% of the bomblets did not detonate on impact, leaving as many as 86 million unexploded cluster bomblets buried in fields, roads, forests, rivers and villages.
In 1971, seven years after the first accounts of the bombings in Laos, a U.S. Senate report concluded that, "The United States has undertaken a large-scale air war over Laos to destroy the physical and social infrastructure of Pathet Lao held areas and to interdict North Vietnamese infiltration . . . throughout all this there has been a policy of subterfuge and secrecy . . . through such things as saturation bombings and the forced evacuation of population from enemy held or threatened areas-we have helped to create untold agony for hundreds of thousands of villagers." (ii) Most of the bombings occurred on undefended civilian targets, such as in northern Laos, including the heavily devastated province of Xieng Khouang, home to the famous Plain of Jars. Thousands of villagers, mostly farmers, were killed or internally displaced during this period.
Many bombing victims were innocent villagers - cattle raisers, rice farmers, peasants, men, women, children, and the elderly, all human beings - made indiscriminate by the blasts of explosives, anti-personnel bomb pellets, napalm, and white phosphorous dropped from the skies above. In 1970, Far Eastern Economic Review reported: "For the past two years, the U.S. has carried out one of the most sustained bombing campaigns in history against essentially civilian targets in northeastern Laos . . . Operating from Thai bases and from aircraft carriers, American jets have destroyed the great majority of villages and towns in the northeast. Severe casualties have been inflicted upon the inhabitants . . . Refugees from the Plain of Jars report they were bombed almost daily by American jets last year. They say they spent most of the past two years living in caves or holes." (iii)
Despite questions surrounding the legality of the bombings and the large toll of innocent lives that were taken, Ural Alexis Johnson, the U.S. Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs (1969-1973) stated, "[The Laos operation] is something of which we can be proud as Americans. It has involved virtually no American casualties. What we are getting for our money there . . . is, I think, to use the old phrase, very cost effective." (iv)
Today, unexploded "bombies" and other ERW kill and maim hundreds of Laotian citizens every year. In a country of just over 6.5 million, it is estimated that 5,000 people have been killed and 7,000 injured by ERW since the end of the war. Children make up 40% of the casualties. Because of the remote nature of many villages and poor reporting, the actual numbers are thought to be much higher.
i. Blum, 1995
ii. Senate Committee on Refugees (1971)
iii. Blum, 1995
iv. Branfman, 1996