Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Hmong army. The communist offensive fitted neatly into what would become the standard
seesaw pattern of fighting in northern Laos, in which each side went on the offensive when
the season best suited them.
But in the spring of 1964, the communists came up against a whole new enemy:
airpower
.
Single-prop T-28 aircraft hammered at communist positions, scaring off their soldiers who
had never faced aeroplanes before. Within a matter of weeks, T-28 bombing runs were joined
by US jets, which were sent over Laos as they happened to be in the neighbourhood. Once
the bombing began, Washington apparently decided it wasn't such a bad idea. And although
the bombing campaign would be reported for years by Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese ra-
dio, it would take five years before the US public heard anything about it.
Escalation
In 1964, with the US pushing hard for an
escalation of the bombing
, Souvannaphouma,
prodded by the US embassy, declared that the North Vietnamese were using the eastern flank
of Laos to send combatants and supplies to South Vietnam along what would become known
as the
HoChiMinhTrail
. He then gave the go-ahead for what were euphemistically known
as “armed reconnaissance” flights over Laos, permission that essentially became a blank
cheque for the US to bomb wherever it pleased.
The war was intensifying next door in
Vietnam
, too. US President Lyndon B. Johnson, fa-
cing an election in November 1964, did not want to be the president who lost against the
communists. After the USS
Maddox
came under attack off the coast of North Vietnam, US
senators passed the
GulfofTonkinResolution
, which became Johnson's justification for the
Vietnam War. No such resolution was passed regarding Laos; after all, the country was “neut-
ral”.
When Ambassador William Sullivan assumed his post in Vientiane near the end of 1964, his
assignment was to wage war while maintaining the fiction of the Geneva Accords. He came
to the Lao capital aware of US plans for Operation Rolling Thunder - a sustained carpet-
bombing campaign against North Vietnam designed to go “after the manure pile” rather than
simply swatting flies, as the Commander of the US Air Force, General Curtis Le May, elo-
quently put it. Even before the Vietnam operation began, Sullivan established his own pro-
grammes for Laos, called
Operation Barrel Roll
in the north and
Operation Steel Tiger
in
the south.
Sullivan set the tone for the US campaign in Laos - ground troops were kept out (apart from
reconnaissance missions and raids on the Ho Chi Minh Trail area) and military planes had to
take off outside the country. The war took place in total secrecy. As British journalist Chris-
topher Robbins wrote in
The Ravens
, based on interviews with pilots who fought in “the Oth-
er Theatre”, “There was another war even nastier than the one in Vietnam, and so secret that
the location of the country in which it was being fought was classified… The men who chose
