Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
THE FALL OF PHOU PHA THI
In a decision that would prove to be the turning point of the war in Laos, US President Lyn-
don Johnson ordered the installation of a navigational beacon to guide air strikes against
the North Vietnamese atop
Phou Pha Thi
. Here, US air force cargo helicopters dropped
off the components of the device, code-named Commando Club, which was assembled a
few hundred metres from fields growing some of the best opium in Laos. Hmong soliders,
not known for their ability to defend fixed positions, were assigned to protect the latest in
military wizardry.
A few weeks before Commando Club became operational in late 1967, a couple of monks
were caught on the summit of Phou Pha Thi carrying cameras and sketch-books; they
were Vietnamese spies, and soon after Commando Club began directing its all-weather,
high-altitude air strikes on the Hanoi valley, two Soviet-built biplanes, dark-green museum
pieces with cloth-covered wings and wooden propellers jury-rigged to fire mortar shells,
buzzed the site - the only time during the war that the North Vietnamese attacked a tar-
get with biplanes. The planes were shot down, but the Vietnamese, provoked by this high-
profile site that threatened their security, moved more troops into Laos. By the time North
Vietnamese commandos scaled the summit with grappling hooks and ropes to take the pos-
ition on March 10, 1968, the nineteen Americans operating Commando Club knew the end
was near.
The
fall of Phou Pha Thi
was typical of the lack of unified command that plagued the
US' war in Laos. As historian Roger Warner wrote in
Shooting at the Moon
: “The radar
installation belonged to the air force, but the CIA was supposed to defend it. The CIA
couldn't defend it as it chose, because the ambassador didn't want unauthorized weapons
on the mountaintop. Kept from direct accountability for its own men, the air force lost in-
terest, even though it had proposed the installation in the first place, and, on the mountain
itself, nothing held the villagers from wandering where they pleased, including to the little
opium patch near the summit, which they harvested just as they always had.”
Phou Pha Thi also signalled a shift in the demands the US placed on its Hmong allies:
they were no longer being armed to defend their own mountaintops, but were now pawns
of the war in Vietnam. Eight Americans were pulled off Phou Pha Thi, leaving eleven dead
or missing - the beginning of prolonged confusion, as Warner indicates, over the fate of
Americans missing in action in Laos, and for whom the search actively continues today.
Hintang Archeological Park
64km south of Sam Neua, signposted off Route 6 ∙ Best reached by motorbike, but if you want to use public
transport, take a bus or sawngthaew from Sam Neua's main bus station towards Phonsavan (roughly hourly
7am-2pm; 20,000K) and get off at Ban Phao. The stones are a 6km walk away along the dirt road.
