CONTEXTS - The Rough Guide to Laos - page 408

to fight in it were handpicked volunteers, and anyone accepted for a tour seemed to disappear
as if from the face of the earth.”
From 1964 until the ceasefire of February 1973, US planes flew 580,944 sorties - or 177
a day - over Laos and dropped 2,093,100 tonnes of bombs - equivalent to one planeload of
bombs every eight minutes around the clock for nine years - making Laos the most heavily
bombed country per capita in the history of warfare.
The turning point: 1968
On March 10, 1968, communist forces overran a strategic limestone massif in Hua Phan
which the US had crowned with a high-tech bombing guidance device that directed attacks
on Hanoi and was guarded by Hmong troops. The fallofPhouPhaThi underscored the lack
of unified command that plagued the various US factions - the embassy, the CIA and the air
force - responsible for fighting the Laos War.
According to Roger Warner in his book Shooting at the Moon , while some involved in dir-
ecting the US war effort thought the US had erred by provoking the North Vietnamese with
the installation of this direct threat to Hanoi's security, others argued that the North Viet-
namese escalation in Laos was simply a part of the same intensive effort that produced the
January 31 Tet Offensive , in which a combined force of seventy thousand communists vi-
olated a truce to launch attacks on more than a hundred cities across South Vietnam. In a
Washington reeling from Tet, which brought with it the popular perception that the commun-
ists were winning the war in Vietnam, President Johnson vetoed requests for a massive troop
expansion, and on March 31 he suspended bombing north of the Twentieth Parallel to jump-
start the peace talks in Paris that would grind on for five years. By the year's end the bombing
had completely ended.
The suspension of bombing in Vietnam was terrible news for Laos, as the US Air Force's
reaction was to send more planes over Laos than ever before. Swarms of planes circled the
country, homing in on their targets their targets with the help of a new breed of forward air
controllers known as Ravens, introduced in the wake of the Phou Pha Thi disaster. These pi-
lots, dressed in civilian clothes, flew single-engine Cessna propeller planes, with a hill-tribe
translator in the backseat to communicate with ground forces, guiding up to three hundred
American sorties per day. The early days of Operation Momentum, when the CIA quietly
waged a grassroots guerrilla war, were a distant memory.
Nixon's presidency
In order to facilitate pulling out of Southeast Asia while saving face for the US, President
Nixon initiated a policy of “ Vietnamization ”. This involved a gradual withdrawal of US
forces coupled with an intensification of the air war and more material support, as well as