Last August, the family of U.S. Air Force Sergeant David S Price finally buried his remains after waiting for more than 50 years.
The 26-year-old was stationed at Lima Site 85, a top-secret CIA base atop a mountain in northeastern Laos, when it was taken over by Laotian and Vietnamese communist forces in March 1968.
Price was one of 13 U.S. agents, along with 42 Thai and Hmong soldiers, killed at a CIA radar station used to guide U.S. bombers in attacks on Laos and neighboring Vietnam during the Vietnam War.
It took decades to find and identify Price’s remains because U.S. warplanes were ordered to destroy CIA sites as part of a broader effort by Washington to conceal a “secret war” it was illegally waging in Laos, an officially neutral country. Because I received it. 1960s and 1970s.
This year marks the 60th anniversary of the start of the main front of America’s secret war, Operation Barrel Roll. This was a nine-year American bombing campaign that made Laos the most heavily bombed country per capita in history.
First US Secretary of Defense visit to Laos
U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin visited the Laotian capital, Vientiane, this week, becoming Washington’s first defense secretary to visit Laos.
Austin is attending the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Defense Ministers’ Meeting Plus on Thursday as part of a regional tour that has already taken him to Laos, followed by Australia, the Philippines and Fiji.
The defense secretary’s visit comes as Southeast Asian defense ministers seek security assurances amid a growing maritime dispute with China in the South China Sea and growing uncertainty ahead of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s return home in January, while geopolitical competition intensifies in the Asia-Pacific region. It was accomplished while it was happening. erase.
But Austin’s official agenda is to remember Operation Barrel Roll and mark the beginning of the darkest chapter in Laos’ modern history.
Operation Barrel Roll
Operation Barrel Roll formed a key element of the so-called Secret War in Laos, in which successive U.S. administrations conducted military operations in Laos, including arming 30,000 local anti-communist ethnic Hmong troops, while also allowing U.S. This is because they hid their participation in the war from Congress.
The military operation in Laos, revealed to the American public only in 1971, was one of the most closely guarded secrets of America’s long, disastrous and ultimately unsuccessful Cold War and anti-communist efforts in Southeast Asia in the 1960s and 1970s. It was.
As the conflict in neighboring Vietnam spread into Laos, U.S. forces targeted communist North Vietnam’s supply routes inside Laos between 1964 and 1973, with U.S. forces flying 580,344 bombing missions and dropping 260 million bombs.
“It was extremely destructive and achieved virtually nothing. They were bombing very heavily in a way that strategically made no sense,” Bruce Lockhart, associate professor of Southeast Asian history at the National University of Singapore, told Al Jazeera.
“Bombing, like the war going on there, was not effective at all. So you caused massive damage and loss of life without actually accomplishing anything,” Lockhart said.
Operation Barrel Roll had the equivalent of an American bomb being dropped every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, every day for nine years.
As a result, more bombs were dropped on Laos, whose neutral status was protected by agreements concluded at the Geneva conferences in 1954 and 1962, than in the entirety of World War II.
The legacy left behind by the U.S. bombing of Laos
More than half a century has passed since the last American bomb was dropped, but its lasting legacy is still felt today. Approximately 30% of the cluster bombs dropped by the United States failed to explode, leaving tens of millions of unexploded ordnance (UXO) buried in the soil of Laos.
According to the Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor, UXO has killed or injured about 50,000 people in Laos since 1964, with about 20,000 of those deaths occurring since the end of the war in 1975.
Children who are misled by the toy-like appearance of cluster bombs, the tennis ball-sized fragmentation bombs that have been dropped by the millions in Laos, account for about 75 percent of the injuries.
Up to a quarter of villages in 14 of Laos’ 18 provinces are “severely contaminated” with UXO, according to Norwegian People’s Aid, which carries out UXO and mine clearance operations.
Thanks in part to some $391 million in U.S. funding since 1995 to eliminate UXOs in Laos, the war on bombs is being won, albeit slowly.
The number of deaths from unexploded ordnance has decreased from about 200 to 300 per year in the 1990s to about 50 per year in the late 2010s. However, according to one estimate, at the current pace of bomb removal operations, it will be 200 years before Laos is free of UXO.
Tom Vater, a Bangkok-based writer and co-author of the documentary The Most Secret Place On Earth – The CIA’s Covert War in Laos, told Al Jazeera: “UXO is the most obvious and visible legacy of the covert war.”
But he added that another legacy of America’s devastating bombing campaign was the rise to power of the ruling Lao People’s Revolutionary Party. The Laos People’s Revolutionary Party eventually defeated the U.S.-backed royalist forces in the 1975 civil war and ruled the country with an iron fist. ever since.
“The political nature of Laos is reclusive, like North Korea or Cuba. There is a similarity in that there is no responsibility to the outside world. That’s another legacy of the Secret Wars,” Vater said.
“They won the civil war, shut down the country, and ran with it,” he said.
“For the small communist elite that runs the country, this has been the secret to success and they keep it that way,” he added.
