the sky, I could see how the old bomb craters were evenly spaced in straight lines, with the lines crossing and recrossing one another as sortie followed sortie. A funny thing about bomb craters. In Vietnam, the pace of development, especially since the late 1980s, has turned attention away from the destructiveness of the past. The fierce determination and practicality of the Vietnamese is an equally important factor in the process. You still see unreconstructed craters, but many others have been converted to round paddies or incorporated into irrigation systems or simply made into ponds for ducks or cattle and water buffalo. The Lao seem different. They’re generally a more pessimistic and melancholy people. In Laos, what you see are barren yellow declivities in an otherwise lush landscape. People are routinely injured falling into them. So are animals, sometimes drowning.
The airport at Phonsavan consists of a short runway and two dirty one-storey structures. The smaller building appears to adhere loosely to the concept of the first-class lounge, for what are known throughout East Asia as “charming hostesses” were leaning out the open windows. The larger one, the terminal, was a single room with a big hand-lettered advertising sign: LAO AVIATION — ALL PASSENGERS ARE COVERED BY INSURANCE.
Nearing Phonsavan, one gets the first inkling that the Plain of Jars is not far off. Just west of there are fields with huge stone jars in the familiar shape, but left unfinished where they were being worked on. Their incomplete state suggests some sudden calamity, as do those moai on Easter Island that lie half carved in the quarry where they were being sculpted. One group of jars is close to what used to be Muang Sui, in its day a great centre of Buddhist worship that later became a staging area for U.S. bombing runs. After the American defeat, the newly reunited Vietnamese levelled the tainted place in the course of driving out the Royal Lao Army. Since then, a new town has been built on the spot and a great many Vietnamese have settled there.
There are numerous limestone caves — entire networks of them — throughout this area, and many ruined or looted wats and temples. The most dramatic ruin consists of a few still-upright pillars and an enormous centuries-old stone Buddha the side of whose face started to melt, like an ice cream cone, as a result of the great heat caused by the phosphorous bombs that also of course killed the community of monks. Close by is another shocking reminder of both the American War and the one that preceded it. It is the remnants, just a couple of metres high, of a large red-brick hospital, built by the French, bombed to smithereens by the Americans.
At first glance, and judging by Lao standards, Phonsavan is bustling right along, thanks to its role as the capital of Xieng Khuang province and investment by the nearby Vietnamese. Yet, paradoxically, it also seems little more than a sad and dilapidated Hmong market town, with rows of shophouses on either side of the partially paved roads. Bomb casings, particularly from the old 250-pounders (why none from the five-hundreds?), are propped up outside some of the small businesses or used in front gardens as fences or planters. There are still amputees walking the streets, though fewer than I feared. The government centre for the distribution of artificial limbs is located there.
Along the high street we saw few restaurants. This was a concern as M and I needed to find a meal and a place to stay before tracking down our local expert on Plain of Jars lore. Among M’s sterling qualities, one of my favourites is the fact that she is such a game traveller. One can’t beat a private school old-girl for laughing at discomfort and being indefatigable.
We found a low, dark eating-place, open to the street on two sides. In spots, the ceiling was only two metres high and one section of the floor was made of packed earth. The kitchen was an open stone hearth of the sort one sees in rural China. Sheets of sticky white plastic covered the plank tabletops and the seats were somewhat like milking stools. No one spoke French or English, and between us M and I didn’t have a word of Lao or one complete sentence of Vietnamese. So we had only the vaguest notion of what we ate, except that we hoped it wasn’t pork. For throughout the meal we heard the pitiful death-row squeals of a pig being dragged down the empty street to slaughter. At every step it dug its trotters into the dirt and tried to slip out of the rope round its neck. The two children taking it to be killed laughed at the creature’s predicament, and so did our fellow diners — or all of them except a very old man whom the others had summoned to the restaurant to meet us, the two visiting big-noses from America or Europe. He shook our hands as firmly as he could, and we asked him to join us. He had a wrinkly upper lip and kind rheumy eyes. I would put his age at eighty-something. I imagine that M and I were having the same thought: “He’s not mocking the poor pig simply because he himself is old and probably dying, but because he’s lived through death round here his entire life.”
The place we found to stay overnight was a kind of Alpine lodge, owned by a mature French woman to whom all the locals seemed to kowtow. M engaged her in conversation, but not for very long: the woman was simply not interested in talking to her guests. I thought perhaps she was one of the few who had chosen to stay on after Dien Bien Phu. I was reminded of the scene in the director’s cut of Apocalypse Now about a French plantation family that had done just that (a scene that spoiled the movie’s pace, showing once again why certain scenes are deleted for narrative reasons).
Outside the woman’s front door was a 250-pound bomb, a dud, its nose stuck in the ground, around which a tree had been growing for all these years. Had it exploded on impact as it was supposed to, the chalet and its residents would have perished in an instant.
— THE TARGET ZONE —
Khan, our local expert, was born and reared in Luang Prabang, the old royal capital on the winding Mekong, the place where we would be heading in a couple of days. When he was a boy, his father wished him to learn French. Apparently the father was older than the norm when Khan was born in 1976 and so was harking back to his own youth when French was a requirement for an ambitious young Lao who wished to get ahead in the established order. Khan studied for only a couple of months. “I was not liked by French,” he remembered. “Everything was le, la, les …” He finished the sentence with a Gallic shrug, brushed hair from his eyes, and took a drag on his cigarette, readjusting the minuscule waist of his grey pleated trousers. His family then countered that he take up Russian, for Russian was still somewhat in fashion, though he found that language, too, to be uncongenial. But he knew he had a knack for English, which is to say a knack for making money. He knew what he was taking us to see, but I wondered how much he knew about why foreigners, particularly ones of a certain age, were interested in going there.
Much later, back home in Canada, I came upon the following item in the Globe and Mail, paraphrasing a news story that had appeared in the paper fifty years earlier, on August 24, 1959: “The Globe and Mail reported that pro-communist Pathet Lao insurgents attacked and infiltrated parts of Vientiane province, within 50 miles of the Laotian administrative capital city of Vientiane. Although unconfirmed by Laotian defence officials, Western military sources said the insurgents attacked two army posts within a 70-mile radius.” And thereby, at least by suggestion, hangs the entire tale.
Assimilating (a polite term) a place as wild as Laos wasn’t an easy task for the French or an inexpensive one. It was in 1907 — the year of so many of the postcards in this book, long after Cambodia and the parts that now make up Vietnam were somewhat stable and at least temporarily safe — that the French got control of all the Lao land on the east side of the Mekong, facing Siam. The Japanese kicked them out during the Second World War, but they returned in 1945 in a massive airborne operation and re-declared the Protectorate. When the local population did not respond by lining the streets waving Tricolours on little sticks, the French granted them status as an independent associated state and then, in a surprisingly short time, full sovereignty. But this resulted in a coalition government that the United States brought down, only to be left with the fear that the Pathet Lao communists would win a majority in the election to be held in 1960 — which, therefore, the CIA shamelessly rigged. In that simpler time and smaller
