America's Legacy In Laos

Truthmonger

Here's an excerpt:

http://rawstory.com/showoutarticle.php?src=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.worldpress.org%2FAsia%2F2562.cfm

"During the war I was very angry at Americans. I couldn't understand how can somebody be so brutal. How can somebody kill fellow human beings in such cold blood? But now my government tells me that everything is ok, that it is past and we should forget. But how can we forget? I don't feel angry anymore, but I would like the world to know what happened to us."

John Bacher, a Ph.D. in history and a Metro Toronto archivist once wrote about The Secret War in Laos: "More bombs were dropped on Laos between 1965 and 1973 than the U.S. dropped on Japan and Germany during WWII. More than 350,000 people were killed. The war in Laos was a secret only from the American people and Congress. It anticipated the sordid ties between drug trafficking and repressive regimes that have been seen later in the Noriega affair."

In reality, it is hard to call this twisted campaign of terror "a war." There were hardly any serious strategic merits of indiscriminately bombing one of the poorest countrysides in the world, scarcely inhabited by subsistence farmers and their domestic animals.

In this biggest covert operation in U.S. history, the main goal was to "prevent" pro-Vietnamese forces from gaining control over the area. But the entire operation seemed more like a game, overgrown boys allowed to play, unopposed, their war games, bombing an entire nation into the stone age for more than a decade. The result of that "game" was one of the most brutal genocides in the history of the 20th century.

Some of the most brutal bombing raids were done out of spite, with no planning. When U.S. bombers couldn't find their targets in Vietnam due to bad weather, they just dumped their load on the Laos countryside, as the airplanes couldn't land with the bombs on board. After the end of the bombing campaign against North Vietnam, the U.S. military decided to simply use its old bomb arsenal (by dropping it on Laos) accumulated in Southeast Asia, instead of carrying it back home. The value of human lives, of the Lao people, was never taken into consideration."

IndianSummer

something like dropping a plane load every 10 minutes or so, if i remember the discovery channel program correctly.

usa has left more people maimed and/or legless in laos and cambodia than we will ever know or the american press will ever acknowledge.

jlew24asu

There were almost twice as many casualties in Southeast Asia the first two years after the fall of Saigon in 1975 then there were during the ten years the U.S. was involved in Vietnam.