US ‘Secret War’ remembered as Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin visits Laos | Conflict Matters

In August, the family of United States Air Force Sergeant David S Price finally had his remains buried after more than 50 years of waiting.

The 26-year-old was stationed at the CIA’s top secret site – Lima Site 85 – on a mountaintop in northeastern Laos when it was attacked by Lao and Vietnamese communist forces in March 1968.

The number was among 13 US servicemen, and 42 Thai and Hmong soldiers, killed at a CIA radar station used to guide US bombers in their attacks on Laos and neighboring Vietnam during the Vietnam War.

It took decades to find and identify Price’s remains mainly because US warplanes were given orders to destroy the CIA compound to cover up its activity, part of a wider effort to cover up the “Secret War” Washington waged illegally in Laos – a legally neutral country – in the 1960s and 1970.

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the start of the US’s biggest secret war effort, Operation Barrel Roll – a nine-year US bombing campaign that would see Laos become the most heavily bombed country per capita in history.

First visit to Laos by the US defense secretary

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is in the Laotian capital of Vientiane this week, becoming the first defense secretary from Washington to visit Laos.

Austin will attend the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Meeting-Plus of Defense Ministers on Thursday, as part of a regional tour that has already included stops in Australia, the Philippines and Fiji after Laos.

The defense secretary’s visit comes after geostrategic rivalries in the Asia Pacific region have intensified, with Southeast Asian defense chiefs seeking security assurances amid escalating maritime disputes with China in the South China Sea and uncertainty ahead of the January return of President-elect Donald Trump. Trump.

Not on Austin’s official agenda, however, is the commemoration of Operation Barrel Roll and the beginning of the darkest chapter in Laos’ modern history.

Operation Barrel Roll

Operation Barrel Roll formed an important part of the Secret War in Laos, so-called successive US administrations carried out military operations in Laos, including arming 30,000 local Hmong forces against the communists, while hiding America’s involvement in the war from Congress.

Only revealed to the US public in 1971, the military campaign in Laos was one of the most closely held secrets of the US’s long, disastrous and ultimately unsuccessful, anti-communist efforts in Southeast Asia in the 1960s and 70s.

As the conflict in neighboring Vietnam spilled over into Laos, Operation Barrel Roll saw US forces fly 580,344 bombers – dropping 260 million bombs – between 1964 and 1973 as they targeted communist North Vietnamese supply routes inside Laos.

“It was very destructive, and it accomplished nothing. They were bombing a lot in ways that didn’t make sense psychologically,” Bruce Lockhart, associate professor of Southeast Asian history at the National University of Singapore, told Al Jazeera.

“The type of war that was going on there, it was not successful in attacking the bomb. “So you caused a lot of damage and loss of life without really accomplishing anything,” said Lockhart.

Operation Barrel Roll saw the equivalent of an American bomb dropped every eight minutes, every day, 24 hours a day, for nine years.

The result was more bombs dropped on Laos – whose neutral status was protected under the agreements signed at the Geneva Conferences in 1954 and 1962 – than in the entire World War II.

The lasting legacy of the US bombing of Laos

Although more than half a century has passed since the last US bomb was dropped, the lasting legacy of that time is still felt today. Since about 30 percent of the cluster bombs dropped by the US fail to detonate, tens of millions of unexploded ordnance (UXO) remain buried in Lao soil.

Since 1964, an estimated 50,000 people have been killed or injured by UXO in Laos, according to the Landmine and Cluster Munitions Commission, with nearly 20,000 of these casualties occurring since the war ended in 1975.

Children, attracted by the toy-like appearance of cluster bombs, which are fragmentation grenades the size of a tennis ball, fall by the millions in Laos, accounting for about 75 percent of casualties.

Fourteen of Laos’ 18 provinces, and a quarter of the country’s villages, are “heavily contaminated” with UXO, according to Norwegian People’s Aid, which carries out UXO and demining work in the country.

Thanks, in part, to nearly $391m in US funding for UXO clearance in Laos since 1995, the war against the bombs is being won – albeit slowly.

The number of deaths from unexploded ordnance dropped from 200 to 300 annually in the 1990s, to around 50 annually in the late 2010s. But by one estimate, at the current rate of decommissioning activities, it will be 200 years before Laos is UXO-free.

Tom Vater, a Bangkok-based writer and author of the book The Most Secret Place On Earth – The CIA’s Covert War in Laos, told Al Jazeera that “UXO is the most obvious, visible legacy of the Secret War”.

But, he added, another legacy of the devastating US bombing campaign was the rise to power of the ruling Lao People’s Revolutionary Party, which eventually defeated US-backed royalist forces in the country’s civil war in 1975, ruling the country with an iron fist. since then.

“The type of politics in Laos is like a hermit, like North Korea and Cuba. There is a similarity there that there is no accountability to the outside world. That is another legacy of the Secret War,” said Vater.

“They won the civil war, then they closed the country, and they ran with that,” he said.

“For the small elite of the communists who run the country, that has been the way to success, so they just keep it that way,” he added.