Fred Branfman Was a Great Inspiration to Me

From the desk of Jeremy Kuzmarov

In the winter-spring semester of 2003, I was a graduate student at Brandeis University working on a thesis on the Vietnam War and modern War on Drugs. For that project, which was eventually published as a book with the University of Massachusetts Press, I began reading deeply into the literature of the Indochina Wars. One day, I came upon a slim volume in the library called Voices From the Plain of Jars: Life Under an Air War by Fred Branfman. Published in 1972 by Harper & Row, the book immediately captivated me. 

A lot of the book consisted of pictures drawn by Lao villagers who had experienced first-hand the effects of the U.S. bombing of Laos. The stories that they told were heart wrenching. Many had lost loved ones from the bombs and had to live in underground caves and could only farm their fields at night. Fred explained in the introduction that the reason he used drawings was because most of the Lao villagers did not speak English. Additionally, the drawings could reach people on an emotional level. 

Fred had been working in Laos with the International Voluntary Services (IVS), an alternative to the Peace Corps for whom he ran some educational programs. Immersing himself in the Lao culture, he befriended many people who were Pathet Lao, the communist forces whom he came to understand were genuinely popular for having introduced land reform, and literacy and public health programs in Laos and for having defended the country’s sovereignty against foreign aggressors. One village elder near where he stayed whom he was close to, Paw Thou Douang, a Buddhist farmer and medic, was a regional Pathet Lao leader. Fred saw that he was a kind and caring man beloved in his community. He was the opposite of the demonized portrayal of communists that Fred had been warned about growing up in 1950s America. 

After hearing rumors about bombing operations in northern Laos, Fred decided to travel up there to see for himself. When he went, he was shocked to find out that his country was perpetrating a veritable holocaust on the Lao people whom he had come to develop great affection for. 

When Fred saw what the bombing was doing to innocent Laotian villagers, he decided to try and find everything he could about it: where it originated from and who was responsible for it. This led him to travel to Thailand to infiltrate an American military base where he was shocked by the calm and professional demeanor of the military officers who were coordinating the bombing strikes. Branfman told me that the base resembled the stock market in New York City. But instead of trading in stocks, the officers were coordinating bombing attacks that were devastating northern Laos. 

Presaging the era of drone warfare, Fred’s observations led him to recognize the dangers of modern-day mechanized warfare where the perpetrators of atrocity were far removed from the devastation that they inflicted. Fred wrote that what struck him was that the military officers he encountered had no animosity whatsoever towards the Lao villagers whose lives they were destroying. They didn’t even know anything about them. 

The Lao villagers who were being terrorized and killed also did not know who their tormentors were or why they had come to destroy their lives. Some had never even heard of the U.S. as they lacked any formal education and did not possess television or radios.

After appearing at a few congressional committees, Branfman was haunted by the testimony of one State Department official, Monteagle Stearns, who said that the reason the U.S. had bombed Laos was because there were planes lying around from bombing operations over North Vietnam and they had extra bombs that the U.S. military did not want to see go to waste. Fred saw how Stearns and his colleagues were making a bureaucratic decision without regard whatsoever for the humanity of the people whose lives were being impacted. Their feelings were never even considered. 

Fred wrote about all this in Voices from the Plain of Jars and in some other subsequent writings. Because he had learned some Lao, Fred made some money working as a translator for visiting journalists who came to northern Laos once the secret war in Laos had been exposed. Fred was struck by the careerist nature of most of the journalists who displayed little sentimentality for the Lao victims of the bombing. An exception was the famed MIT linguist and antiwar writer Noam Chomsky, who Fred said was the only one to cry alongside him. 

After completing my thesis and embarking on an academic career, I taught courses and continued to carry out research on the Indochina Wars and secret war in Laos. One day I found Fred’s email through his website and told him how much I respected his book and how illuminating it was for me to read it. Fred was delighted as by now over thirty years had passed and the book had been largely forgotten. And new atrocities were being committed by the U.S. military in Iraq, Afghanistan and other wars. 

In 2014, I managed to get some funding for a guest speaker at the University of Tulsa where I was teaching, and I invited Fred. He came and gave two lectures and visited two of my classes. In his lectures Fred went over his experiences in Laos and showed some of the drawings in his book. He also discussed how Laos was an awakening for him about U.S. foreign policy and U.S. politics. When he worked as an aide to California Governor Jerry Brown in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Fred said he saw some of the same patterns of arrogance and deceit among California state leaders that he had observed with the politicians in Washington who had tried to cover up the bombing of Laos in the 1960s and early 1970s. 

When a student asked Fred how they should judge foreign policy interventions, Fred responded wisely that they should consider whether they were in accord with U.S. and international law. The bombing of Laos, he said, was in violation of the Geneva convention mandating protection of civilians in war. The entire secret war in Laos was also waged illegally in violation of the 1962 Geneva conventions, which outlawed foreign involvement in Laos. 

Fred was a great hit during his visit to Tulsa, earning the respect of the students whom Fred knew how to relate with. He would ask the students many questions and get them to open up about their lives in extended discussions. It showed he was a genuinely caring person. For me this helps explains why he was so deeply impacted by the suffering the U.S. inflicted in Laos as he cared about people deeply. Fred’s love for the Lao people manifested in his repeated visits back to the country and his work with Legacies of War to try and clear Laos of undetonated ordnance that continues to harm and sometimes kill innocent people. 

Fred was overall a great man of wisdom and compassion who tried to promote peace in his lifetime. He is a great role model for people of all ages. Fred was angered by all the hypocrisy and evil that goes on in the world and the indifference of too many people to it all. As a Jew, he was anguished by Israeli war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank (a decade before the current unfolding genocide). He felt that Israeli crimes were not far removed from the crimes the U.S. had committed in Laos and the rest of Indochina. He said that the Israelis used the same propaganda as the Americans at the time: that the enemy was using civilians as human shields, which was an excuse to deflect blame for civilian bombings and killings that were in violation of international law. Fred was also concerned about climate change, and he had drafted a plan back in the late 1970s for the transition of the California economy to clean energy. 

For all the problems in the world that Fred identified, he still had hope for humanity. He was especially touched by the kindness of many of the Lao people that he had encountered during his time living in the country. He felt that Americans could learn from them in how they placed a value on building strong communities, sharing what they had, and being kind to one another rather than being consumed with a quest for material gain.