agency’s largest, though it had only three hundred agents (the same number as Miami’s). They were under the command of Lawrence R. Devlin, who had just arrived there from Congo where as chief of station he was concerned — innocently so, he professed — in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the deposed prime minister.
Of course this was several years after France lost its hold on Indochina as a result of the battle of Dien Bien Phu. The United States had now taken upon itself the ridiculous responsibility for interfering in Southeast Asian affairs. Assuming office in 1961, the new chief executive, John F. Kennedy, made a display of saying that he would invade Laos if necessary. At that point, a curious moment in history seemed to come about. Would the United States attack Vietnam, where communists held power in the north, or Laos, where they were merely, in the American view, waiting in the wings? I have no doubt that Vegas bookmakers were giving odds. In his autobiography, Peter C. Newman, the famous Canadian journalist, remembers being asked to choose between reporting from Vietnam or reporting from Laos, as his editor in Toronto wouldn’t pay for both. Newman made the wrong choice: Laos. Arriving there, he was surprised to discover that Laos, which is landlocked, had a Royal Laotian Navy. A thirty-foot gunboat launched in 1904 was the only fully operational warship. A number of the others, made of rotting wood, were hauled up on the banks of the Mekong for use as chicken coops.
That Kennedy decided to terrorize Vietnam instead (though the great build-up took place under his successors) enraged the military and intelligence establishment who feared that he would wimp out on both alternatives. There is a memorable scene in the Oliver Stone film JFK that depicts a meeting of such hawks. One of them says angrily, “He fucked us in Laos, and now he’s going to fuck us in goddamn Vietnam!” But it was in 1964, the year after Kennedy’s assassination, when the U.S. bombings began. Before they were over, 2 million tons of explosives had been dropped on a small area that the U.S. believed was the marshalling yard of the amorphous Ho Chi Minh trail, which the communists used to help resupply their troops in the field. The weight of the bombs dropped on Laos and Cambodia by the U.S. was greater than that of all those dropped on Europe during the entire Second World War, according even to Robert S. McNamara, the American defense secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.
— AMONG THE HMONG —
I was full of questions about the Hmong that I hoped Khan could answer, but he couldn’t. He turned out to be less than expert in his Local Knowledge. For example, within sight of the largest collection of jars is a ruined and abandoned temple. It is a tower made of blocks of laterite, wide at the base, but redented as it rises toward the pointed crown, with each step almost completely covered by who knows how many generations of unchecked plant growth. It certainly looks like the simplest type of Khmer chapel, but in what’s now Laos, the Khmer culture didn’t penetrate farther north than Vientiane. Was this, rather, what’s known as a prang in Thailand, where Khmer ruins are conspicuous in many regions, and, what’s more, left their design influence on Thai Buddhism? Khan seemed to lack even the broadest historical understanding of who was where and when. Maybe the lesson to be gleaned from his deficiencies as a comprador is an awareness that today’s national borders are political, not cultural; that belief systems were passed back and forth, mutating as they did so; and that the French, for better or for worse — and, in some ways, obviously both — were a unifying and codifying cultural force and not merely money-grubbing power-grabbers, though, like all the European colonial powers, they certainly were that, as well.
Khan may have been unable to impart much knowledge even about the abundant Hmong, but he did lead us into their front garden, so to speak. The Hmong are one of the important ethnic minorities of Laos and Thailand. They dislike being called mercenaries, but using a softer term is as much a matter of tact as of accuracy. During the eight years when the U.S. waged a secret war in Laos, using Hmong tribesmen, sometimes in battalion-sized units, to fight the Pathet Lao, the most intense violence took place where we were going now.
We drove to the summit of one of the nearby hills. This was as far as we could travel in Khan’s vehicle as beyond that the road had become a mere muddy rut. We then continued on foot, over meadows with stunted conifers, and, way off in the background, the mountains of Vietnam (Dien Bien Phu is about 125 kilometres away). This description makes it sound pleasant enough, and viewed in broad perspective at the right time of the year it is indeed scenic. But the spot formerly called la Plaine des Jarres must be one of Southeast Asia’s spookiest places, a large, flat region, surrounded by mountains as high as three thousand metres and never completely free of disfiguring mist. The stone jars that litter the site (it’s a marvel that so many survived the bombing, even in pieces) are thought to have been made two thousand years ago, around the time the Hmong first migrated southward from Mongolia, a place of origin that can still be read in their faces. But the ancestors of the Hmong did not produce these jars. In fact, specialists tell us, they bear no discernible trace of the Tibetan, Chinese, Khmer, Indian, Viet, or Cham cultures, though virtually all of these people fought battles on the spot over the centuries.
Each jar is carved from a single rock or boulder, most of them limestone, but some are granite. The jars vary in size according to the size of the raw material. At the biggest of the several clusters scattered over the meadows, the largest jar is 2.5 metres high and quite wide (I could have stood up in it), but most are a great deal smaller. Some have stone covers.
Many theories have been advanced about their use. Some speculate that they were for collecting water during the dry season; others argue that they were for storing rice for use during times of famine, or even for fermenting it. Still others hold that they were intended for votive or funereal purposes. An anthropologist in the 1930s claimed to have found human bones in some of the jars, but this evidence and other artifacts have been lost. French photographs from the early twentieth century show figurative carvings on at least a couple of jars, but these features, too, were destroyed long ago. Now there’s only one lichen-covered jar that is said to have a sort of petroglyph of a human figure. Seeing the image, however, requires a great deal of faith and imagination. In any case, most of the field work and scholarly writing on the subject, until recent times especially, had been done by the French, who had patiently labelled, documented and studied each specimen. A disproportionate amount of the labour was the initiative of the admirable Ecole Française D’Extrême-Orient (representing the positive side of French colonialism). Madeleine Colani, a famous archaeologist, was one of the great figures in the field. Her book Megalithes du Haut Laos, published in 1935, is the seminal work, and I deeply regret not having bought the mildewed copy I once found in a box of junk under a rickety table at a hole-in-the-wall second-hand bookshop in Saigon (where I also spotted copies of the Associated Press Year Book and related items no doubt left behind hurriedly during the dramatic climax of the American War).
Odd to say, but the main Plain of Jars site smells like England. Close up, it feels and looks somewhat like England, too. There’s flint underfoot. Rounded green hills recall the Cotswolds. But when you look further and more closely, you see strange contradictions. The lookalike Cotswolds are backed up by a lookalike Swiss Alpine slopes and the whole scene is plopped down in the middle of the mountain rainforest that covers much of Southeast Asia. There’s a weird combination of flora: a few cacti, and trees that are close cousins of the Ponderosa pine, but also gum trees of the sort found in tropical Australia. The area seems pieced together using leftover bits from other climatic zones.
Such is the landscape today. Speculating about the landscape and climate two millennia ago is of course difficult at best and possibly foolhardy. At this particular location there has been relatively little development; and while the climatic cycle may have changed, the basic fact of alternating wet and dry seasons probably has not. As there is no river or other year-round source of water close by, it may well be that the jars, or some of them, were used to store up water during the monsoon. The design of the surviving lids, which have circular runnels for channelling rainwater, points to this. So does the fact that even today many Lao in this
