The Most Bombed Country in the World

[url=http://www.bikeradar.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=19736375#p19736375]Mr Goo[/url] wrote:

Well I would never had guessed at Laos. Watch the video, you may want to skip to near the end after the animation element starts.

https://vimeo.com/81819289

I cycled through North Vietnam into Laos last March. The legacy of US bombing in the country is quite astounding. Huge areas of the country cannot be developed or farmed and there are still many deaths a year caused by 40 odd year old bombs exploding.

Like most people, I was aware of the US bombing of Vietnam but it was almost embarrassing not to know the extent to which this nation was terrorised over such a long period of time. There's a reason they call it the Secret War. When cycling through the jungle (which was pretty much most of the time), if you want a pee, you do it on the road. It is potentially deadly to walk even a few feet into an untrodden path.

It is an outstandingly beautiful country. The communist government (you know . . . the thing that the US was trying to prevent when dropping all those bombs . . .) has ensured that the towns have comparatively good infrastructure . . . most of it less than 50 years old due to the original towns being completely obliterated during the war.

When eating breakfast on my first morning in Laos, a chap came up and sat next to me asking loads of questions about why I was there and what I was doing (he spoke good English which is rare in Laos). I asked him if I was in a new town as everything looked very different to the rest of what I had seen in SE Asia. I asked him when the town had been built - he looked at me incredulously and said "well, 1973 of course!" I told him that I didn't understand why that should be so obvious. He then told me the story of the town (Viengxay) and what had happened to it. How generations avoided the bombs by living, working and being educated in the caves surrounding the town as everything else was mercilessly bombed for years. We then went to see the caves which was quite incredible. Schools, homes, even a theatre! This town was the birthplace of the revolution and was singled out for special treatment by US forces.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viengxay_caves

At the time of the bombing most people in Laos were subsistence farmers (most outside of the towns still are) they had not seen aeroplanes before and most did not know where or what America was.

As I said before, it is an outstandingly beautiful country with great people and a very interesting culture - but it does have a terrible story to tell.

Very very hilly if you're cycling (one 18km climb was particularly memorable!) very very basic food and accommodation out in the sticks but some truly lovely food in some of the bigger towns. Oh, and Beerlao is the best beer in SE Asia. Fact.

Thanks laurentian.

Obviously not in anyway comparable to Laos, but I live in Coventry and they still regularly find unexploded WWII ordnance when doing building work. At the start of October they were digging foundations for a student hall of residence on a site that had formerly been a working man's club, but prior to that had been a car factory (used for munitions manufacture during the war). A JCB hit a bomb during the digging and they had to cordon off the area. Army bomb disposal arrived, originally with the intention of moving it to a Warwickshire quarry to carry out a controlled explosion. When they investigated further they discovered it was a 1 tonne bomb with over 600kg of high explosives in it.

Bomb disposal ultimately spent over 36 hours on site piling sand bags and corrugated steel on top of it before eventually carrying out 2 controlled explosions. The 2nd explosion set off the high explosives, and although it was 3/4 of a mile away it rattled our entire house when it went off.

Given all the discussions about whether we should intervene with airstrikes in Syria it's worth remembering that as well as the inevitable civilian casualties at the time, this stuff doesn't go away once the airstrikes stop. It lingers around for decades afterwards.

Mr Goo wrote:

Well I would never had guessed at Laos. Watch the video, you may want to skip to near the end after the animation element starts.

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Must say I'm not too surprised having watched the carpet bombing on a daily basis on tv as a youngster.

We were on about such things at work recently. Comparing the uproar created nowadays if one bomb hits a school or such like as opposed to the intentional obliteration of civilian communities in said conflict.

[url=http://www.bikeradar.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=19736555#p19736555]Mr Goo[/url] wrote:

Lovely story Laurentian.
Seems to me that over recent history the Good Ole US of A are incapable of keeping their noses out of other countries affairs. And the rest of the global community continually pays for their interventions.

Agreed.

The astounding thing to me is the US continuation of such policies despite the obvious rate of failure to ever achieve their ends at such an enormous human, never mind financial cost.

I loved Laos and Vietnam but admit there were a couple of times when I cried there. I'm cycling in Cambodia in February before going back to Southern Vietnam and Ho Chi Min City.

Despite the history it is a wonderful part of the world.

For various projects in Germany I obtained the RAF bombing maps - the ones in the Ruhr were pretty saturated. Terrible to know about Laos.

The memories people have given me from the bombing of Hamburg are pretty dreadful (24 hours per day for days on end).

I recall having to suspend meetings in Madrid as the B-52s returned from Iraq in the first Gulf war - too noisy to talk, but TV gave the myth of precision bombing. It took over an hour to get all the planes in.

Will we ever learn? Is it ever worth it?

The radio active material present from bombing in Bosnia is a terrible legacy left over. The time and money spent cleaning up land mines and the human cost from the Falklands to Angola is abhorrent. I have so little faith in many aspects of 'humanity'.

The statistic I was looking for is this:

When given the "green light" for "armed reconnaissance", US pilots flew 580,000 attack sorties over Laos. An average of one plane load of destruction every 8 minutes for almost a decade.

On rice farmers.