02/02/14 – Peter Alan Lloyd – The Scott Horton Show

For Pacifica Radio, February 2nd, 2014.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Alright, y'all.
Welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton, here every Sunday morning from 8.30 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
My website is ScottHorton.org.
I keep all my interview archives there.
More than 3,000 of them now, going back to 2003.
And you can follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube at SlashScottHortonShow.
And we're going to do something a little bit different this week.
Our guest is Peter Allen Lloyd.
His website is PeterAllenLloyd.com.
He's the author of a new novel, Back, Part 1 and 2.
And he is a British expat living in Thailand and has been investigating and doing journalism about the Ho Chi Minh Trail, especially in Laos.
And he has this very important – I really hope you'll take a look at it – this photo essay at TheDiplomat.com.
It's called Remnants of the Secret War in Laos.
Welcome to the show, Peter.
How are you doing?
I'm very well, thank you.
And thanks for having me on.
Well, thank you very much for joining us.
I really appreciate it.
And I really appreciate this work.
It's a very important subject, and yet one that – well, you know, it's kind of old news as far as TV is concerned, so it doesn't get much coverage.
And therefore, it's not very prominent in people's mind, but I like to draw attention to it as often as I can.
I really appreciate you doing the work, so I have something to point people toward.
Again, that's TheDiplomat.com, Remnants of the Secret War in Laos.
And so I guess, first of all, it's interesting.
There's this documentary film, Bombies, about the unexploded cluster bombs, unexploded ordnance in Laos, especially the cluster bombs.
It actually begins with a comment of a guy talking about how Vietnam gets all the attention because that was the official war, and Cambodia gets all the attention because the war led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge nightmare.
But nobody ever really talks very much about the bombings of the Plain of Jars or any of the rest of the Secret War against Laos, or even, you know, especially the consequences that Laotians are still dealing with to this day.
So I think that's largely true.
I mean, in my understanding of growing up around tales of the Vietnam War, Laos was certainly the one we heard the least about.
So I guess, can you give us sort of just a background on America's war on Laos back in the 1960s and 70s, and then we can, you know, catch up with modern day times and consequences?
Okay.
Well, first of all, the Secret War in Laos, as it's called, was so-called because under the Geneva Accords, America was forbidden from going into Laos.
Unfortunately, the North Vietnamese had also disregarded the Geneva Conventions and had built the Ho Chi Minh Trail right down the spine of the country next to the Vietnamese border.
Using that trail, the Vietnamese were able to wage asymmetrical warfare on the Americans in southern Vietnam because they were bringing all their supplies, their troops, their weapons down the Ho Chi Minh Trail through the jungles of Laos and into Cambodia, then into South Vietnam.
So the Americans really had to try to interdict the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and the way they thought best to do this was by bombing it.
Well, and then they just bombed it and bombed it and bombed it for how many years in a row?
The whole time?
Nine years.
They didn't just bomb it.
They tried many different things on it.
They dropped, obviously, napalm and defoliant on the jungle because you couldn't see the trail from the air in many places because it was hidden under a tree canopy.
And the Vietnamese were very clever.
They were able to tie the branches of the triple canopy jungle trees together to hide the trail from the air.
So obviously, defoliants were dropped, napalm was dropped.
The Americans came up with a very clever idea to drop a detergent on the trail, hoping to make the mud on the Ho Chi Minh Trail so sticky that trucks would slide off.
Yeah, I was just reading about that one last week.
Yeah, yeah.
What the North Vietnamese did, they defeated that by simply laying down bamboo matting in the jungle so that the vehicles had traction over all the slippery mud.
Yeah, for every innovation on this side, they just innovated right around it, of course, although I don't know if they ever came up with a cure for cancer from all that Agent Orange and Agent Blue and the rest of the defects from that.
Sure.
The other thing that the Americans did to the Ho Chi Minh Trail was to drop listening sensors to look like trees on the trail, as well as pieces of animal excrement, which were actually movement sensors.
But they dropped them to litter the trail with them so that they would pick up any kind of vibration of people moving, trucks moving along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
And if anybody saw it, it just looked like animal excrement.
And now, I can definitely see in the mind of, you know, Robert McNamara and all the whiz kids from MIT over there coming up with the policy in the Pentagon about how, yeah, what we need to do is we'll have all these neatly camouflaged sensors and whatever.
But did it do the American war effort a bit of good?
Or for all the cancer they spread and the rest?
I don't believe it did the American war effort any good at all, because the traffic that moved down the Ho Chi Minh Trail only increased throughout the period of the bombing until 1973.
So all of those billions of dollars worth of bombs dropped on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos, Cambodia, was a complete waste of money, in my opinion.
And then something else from that movie Bombies, they talk about how, and this is something that I think there's even congressional testimony like this, that, well, what do you do in bombing these people, you know, all day, every day with these bombs, these targets?
And the answer is, well, we have all these airplanes sitting around, and we have to use them.
Just like in Nick Terce's book on Vietnam, Kill Anything That Moves, have all of this surplus artillery ammunition.
And so they just sit there dropping shells in the tubes all day long.
They don't have anything to shoot at except people out there, but they can't just let it pile up.
And it's the same thing when it comes to carpet bombing the plane of jars for years.
Well, certainly when the Americans stopped bombing North Vietnam, the assets that they had available were the aircraft assets were then turned on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, particularly the plane of jars, and into the tri-border area where the Ho Chi Minh Trail splits.
Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia all share a common border.
It's called the tri-border area.
And that area was heavily bombed as well during the war.
Yeah, there's also the great documentary Hearts and Minds, where they interview a lot of veterans, and they interview a bomber pilot talking about the mentality.
How easy it is, really, to just drop bombs on people's heads all day and know that, hey, you're the best of the best at this very technical, highly skilled profession.
And so, you know, all right, we got him again.
And it took until, I guess, till he was out of the service before he finally stopped to realize that, hey, that was real people I was tearing apart down there.
I think that's easy to do from the air.
But once you're on the ground, and particularly fast forwarding this two generations, even now, when you see the legacy from the Vietnam War lying around you in the jungle in Laos, with bombings still just strewn across the jungle, you will have seen on my website, the airplane bombs being diffused in the jungle.
It's quite sobering to think that you can fight a war 40 years ago, but still the legacy is blowing up people today.
Imagine people, tens of millions of undetonated little cluster bomb units, little bomb bees sitting around buried under an inch of mud all over this entire country of Laos to this day.
That's correct.
Absolutely.
One of the most sobering statistics is that there are 80 million bombings still unexploded in Laos.
And that's a statistic from UXO Laos, who are a very, very reliable organization for unexploded ordnance in that country.
That is just absolutely incredible.
And then you talk about, I only saw a statistic on your website when I was looking, of 40 killed per year just from this one province in Laos.
But I've read much higher numbers in the past for all of Laos and for Cambodia and the region too.
Do you have any more numbers along those lines of how many people are still killed every year by these so-called duds?
It's hundreds, but it's very difficult to find a reliable estimate because often in these outlying villages, still in the jungle, in mountain regions, these figures aren't very well collated, although UXO Laos do as good a job as they possibly can.
I generally think the figures are far higher for killed and injured each year in the whole of Laos.
It's very, very difficult to find a reliable estimate.
Yeah.
Well, you know, you just think about the war in Afghanistan where, you know, I don't guess anybody's counting the Afghans, but we've had in some of the worst years of the war, a few hundred dead Americans, you know, 2010 and 2011, I guess, were the worst years of the American surge there.
And you have, you know, three, four hundred Americans killed, dying violent deaths.
These are American soldiers out there fighting a war, dying violent deaths like that.
You're talking about what's happening to the Laotians in what's their home country and what's happening to mostly little children who pick these things up or farmers out till in their fields, innocent civilians, the people who feed the rest of them, their kids.
This is a big problem, particularly now in Laos, where population growth is increasing.
Their farmland is incredibly rich and fertile for the most part.
So now the jungle is being chopped back as people try to develop the land for agriculture.
And this is bringing people into conflict with the bombings and the unexploded bombs.
I have a photo on my website of an airplane bomb in a woman's rice field.
It had been there for many years.
She simply planted the rice around it.
Yeah, I just, I guess, is cross your fingers a custom in Laos?
I think so.
The other funny thing, I saw when I was in Laos last month, a cluster bomb casing, which used to contain 400 cluster bombs, which actually had a warranty written on the side of it.
And it struck me as bizarre that this weapon should have a legal warranty attached to it, which you can still see today.
Yeah, you know what got me about that was, if I remember right, and I have it here somewhere, but I believe the warranty is just for 30 days, which makes me wonder if that's why there were so many duds because they were all past their shelf life and maybe the explosives aren't meant to work at least reliably or can't be counted on to work reliably unless it's, you know, the chemical mixture is still really fresh, something like that.
Because 30 days is, that's a pretty short warranty for anything, right?
Absolutely.
30 day warranty.
I can't imagine it's to cover the whole period from manufacture to dropping, given the supplies.
But the fact is, in one of the most litigious countries in the world, the manufacturer of a cluster bomb warranty cluster bomb felt he needed to give a warranty to the military.
And my question on my website was, if that's the case, surely the duty of care was owed to the military to make sure that all of these cluster bombs exploded, not 30% remain unexploded in the jungle.
That's just a completely negligent manufacturer, in my opinion.
And it's causing big problems for the US PR wise and certainly for the locals in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam who are being killed and injured by these pieces of ordinance, which really should have exploded on impact if you're going to drop them at all.
I would hope that today, the manufacturers of cluster bombs, if you have to make them at all, which I don't think you do, I hope that the percentage of the ones that explode on impact is 100% and not 70% leaving 30% for future generations to die and be maimed through.
Right.
Well, unfortunately, we know that that's not the case from the cluster bombs that America ships to Israel that they use on the Lebanese and the Gazans from the American cluster bombs that they've used, certainly in Afghanistan.
And I don't know if I've heard too many stories like this out of Iraq, but it must be a problem in Iraq to the duds.
Sure.
Terrible.
Right.
I mean, my pitiful little brain broke down trying to do the math.
But I think you report that the UXO clearance teams working very hard, 13 teams working full time out there were able to clean up 3000 of these things last year.
Well, and then so what's 80 million divided by 3000?
And how many years is that?
Too many for I can put it in Google here, I guess.
Infinity.
Yeah.
Well, how about we just bring the soldiers home from all of the wars and deploy them all to Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam to and Iraq, unarmed to, you know, with their metal detectors to help with the cleanup?
It would certainly help.
That seems like, you know, if you're going to have a standing army, that could be a legitimate use for them.
Cleaning up.
To be fair on the US in the context of cleanup in Laos and Cambodia and Vietnam, they do spend a lot of money on UXO cleanup and sponsoring the UXO team, particularly in Laos.
But obviously, the job is so enormous, it will never I don't think it will ever be completed.
And it's a shame that it has to be done anyway.
It's a shame that these things are still littering the landscape.
You say America's effort in Laos is even more significant than in Vietnam or Cambodia?
I can't speak to the comparables there.
But I know from my own experience of going out with the UXO teams into the jungles of Laos and to the Ho Chi Minh Trail that America is supporting financially a lot of the UXO cleanup out there.
Well, that's definitely good to hear.
Think of all the all the money that they have to spend on dropping more of these things on people.
You know, they could probably increase the cleanup budget a bit, but that is good to hear that at least something is moving forward along those lines.
Can you tell us about you went out with these clearance teams?
Can you tell us about, you know, what it's like to spend a day taking pictures of these guys?
Well, the first thing that's ever happened to me when I arrived on a UXO cleanup site in the jungle, again, it was on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in southern Laos, I had to sign an enormously long legal disclaimer for any damage or death or injury that might occur to me.
Being a lawyer in my previous life, I looked at that warranty and thought I would never advise anybody to sign this.
But of course, I signed because I wanted to be out with these guys and see the incredible work they're doing up close.
But I was shocked then when they started to detect right along the road that we've just driven looking for munitions.
I registered real shock when I saw them do this.
I wondered why wasn't that track safe?
And they said, normally the track where the wheels go is safe, but that small area of green between the wheels is where you often find cluster bombs still.
That's why they were checking it.
Wow, that's really something else.
So how long did you go out there with them?
How many days?
Just the one day?
No, no, I've been out with them a few times in the south doing the research for the novel.
And another time we were out with these guys and they discovered a napalm munition that they'd covered in a hole that we're going to detonate it later.
I asked, Can I take a photograph of it?
And the guy lifted up the sandbag, one of the workers contract works on the site lifted sandbags so I could take a picture.
And after being so paranoid that I don't go anywhere near this munition, it was so dangerous.
After I'd taken the photograph, he accidentally dropped the sandbag right on top of it.
That was quite hairy.
Another time, and this wasn't UXO, this was a village in the jungle, we came across a guy trying to disarm one of those pineapple cluster bombs that you mentioned earlier, the yellow ones with the fins.
I've got an article on my site and a photograph of the actual cluster munition the guy was trying to break with a hammer.
I couldn't believe it.
So we took that photograph and we ran like you wouldn't believe after that village.
It's a shrapnel weapon.
And boy, that's got to be a horrible way to die.
I mean, this is this is a serious matter.
This is Although they contain like hundreds of steel balls and they when they explode, they fire in all directions up to you know, 100 200 miles an hour.
It's not a pretty sight.
We've seen pictures and I've even interviewed people who've been destroyed by these munitions in villages in hospitals in Laos.
They are extremely dangerous.
And yet you don't feel that when you're looking at it.
It looks like some quite, I mean, I can understand why kids pick them up.
They look fascinating.
They are extremely deadly, unfortunately.
Yeah.
Well, I remember being a boy.
It wasn't that long ago to me anyway.
And if these things have been laying around in my neighborhood, that's how I would have died.
Guarantee I would have picked one up.
You couldn't.
And the more you told me not to the more I would have anyway, you know, what are you going to do?
Well, you know, on my website, I have lots of photographs of this unexploded ordnance, the cluster bomblets and the airplane bombs being diffused in the jungle in Laos.
And that's one of the reasons I'm really happy to promote the work of UXO Laos because they do such an incredible job out there.
That's UX as in xylophone.
UXO Laos, right?
That's correct.
I don't want people getting warning to Bob Hope guys or whatever.
UX, yes.
All right.
And then now, well, there are a few things I wanted to ask you and little time, I guess.
What about the POWs?
You believe these tales about POWs left behind in Laos and Ronald Reagan called off the op and it never happened to go get them?
I do believe it, to be honest.
And first of all, because I'm not American, obviously, we didn't have a dog in the fight.
So I feel I can stand a little bit outside the culture wars of America about the POW and MIA issue in Laos.
And I've been to many places where they were allegedly held after the war.
I posted something last week about a trip to a place called Nomaras where the U.S. were going to launch a rescue raid in 1981.
I was looking for the caves that allegedly American POWs were being held in up in Vieng Phai in the north of Laos, where some very famous American POWs were held in these cave complexes.
Acapa in the south, where POWs were held as well.
I've traveled around and visited all these places, partly as research for my novel, but also because I'm actually genuinely interested in that whole debate.
Right.
And by the way, I should remind people – I'm sorry, I meant to mention this a couple of times through the interview here.
PeterAllenLloyd.com is the website, and there's some very fascinating reading here if people want to go back.
And he's a great photojournalist as well, so he shows you what he's writing about all the time, and of course you can get access to his novels there and the rest of that too.
That's at PeterAllenLloyd.com.
And yeah, looking at those caves and those complexes and reading those stories about, well, what sounded, at least in your retelling, like some pretty good leads as to where some of these men may have been being held.
But I guess you said that the Laotian government to this day, they don't really have a thing to say about it one way or the other, other than no comment kind of answer, right?
No, and the other problem for trying to account for the POWs after the war was it took a couple of years for Laos to actually fall to the communist Tata Laos forces, who the Americans were fighting inside Laos, and the North Vietnamese, obviously.
But because they didn't have control over the whole countryside, communication even today is very difficult in the jungles and in the mountains.
Nobody would have had a clear idea of who was held where.
There's no question in my mind that even if they were honest about it, the now Laotian government, there's no way they could find out from records how many people were held.
It will always remain a mystery.
Well, and then the mission, as you talk about the CIA and the special forces guys and a planned mission in the early 1980s to go in there, you could see why they scrapped it, especially as you write, just after the massive failure in the desert in Iran and the failed attempt to get the hostages there.
You can see for political reasons why they'd be very reluctant to even try in a real tough situation, tough location, as you describe there.
One interesting thing about that story, that was based in Nomaras, N-H-O-M-M-A-R-A-T-H, it's called, in central Laos.
I was there last month.
The interesting thing about that story is how credible it is and the sources.
That was originally a story in Time magazine, and the sources were unimpeachable, it seemed to me.
And to think that the POW issue had such a serious traction, even so late after the war, is certainly enough to make one think how many of these guys were left behind and what became of them.
Nobody will ever know.
Well, you know, it's just amazing to think about the millions killed and all these consequences still rippling through to this day, as you so well document.
And America's friends with Vietnam now, after losing the war and the communists taking over the whole place, and as you say, obviously the communists took over Laos and took over Cambodia, and we haven't had a problem since then.
In fact, Richard Nixon just went over there and shook hands with Mao Zedong, so there goes your domino theory.
And so, all of it was for nothing at all.
You know, nothing at all.
It's a good example of did my enemy's enemy is my friend.
And now with China and Vietnam, it's why this is happening.
Although I do wonder whether 58,000 people killed and over 600,000 people wounded in the Vietnam conflict was, in retrospect, how American veterans feel when they see the head of the Vietnamese army being shaken hands with on the steps of the Pentagon.
Even to me, it was an amazing sight, and I just wonder whether veterans respond to that positively or negatively.
Yeah.
Well, in a way, you could call it mission accomplished.
I don't know.
I'm sorry we're all out of time for this.
I'd ask you a lot more.
Hopefully we'll talk again.
Okay.
It was a pleasure talking to you.
Thank you very much for your time.
Appreciate it.
Everybody, that is Peter Lloyd.
PeterAllenLloyd.com is the website.
You can check out his novel Back, part one, Across the Fence, and part two, Into the Jungle.
And check out this great photo essay in The Diplomat, Remnants of the Secret War in Laos.
And that's it for the show.
Thanks, everybody, for listening.
We'll be back here next Sunday from 8.30 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
Again, my full interview archive is available at ScottHorton.org.
See you next week.