The Sounds of Silence

By * Strobe Talbott

VOICES FROM THE PLAIN OF JARS:

LIFE UNDER AN AIR WAR

compiled, with an Introduction and

Preface, by FRED BRANFMAN

160 pages. Harper Colophon Books.

$1.95.

The publisher of this modest-looking paperback recently explained its meager promotion budget by telling the author, "The war just isn't selling any more." Maybe not in the bookstores, but it's still going strong in Southeast Asia.

The war Fred Branfman writes about is the U.S. bombing campaign in Laos, hardly an overworked subject, and the "voices" he records have rarely been heard. They come from the ground beneath the air war, and they belong to peasants who lived on the Plain of Jars in Laos' verdant Xieng Khouang province, one of the secret battlefields of the war. Eight years ago, the U.S. Mission in Laos designated their farms and villages part of a new Communist "social and economic infrastructure"; in the years since, the Air Force has bombed them with increasing intensity.

In May 1964, the area fell under the control of the Pathet Lao and a small number of North Vietnamese army troops and advisers. For the next 5 1/2years U.S. airpower bore down on the Plain of Jars, ostensibly to support the efforts of CIA-backed Meo tribesmen to recapture the province. Bombers flew daily and sometimes hourly attack sorties, a total of 25,000 missions, dropping an estimated 75,000 tons of napalm, white phosphorus, antipersonnel bombs and high explosives--more than a ton for every Pathet Lao guerrilla, NVA soldier and civilian in the area. The bombing was intended to harass the Communists and drive the local population out of the Plain of Jars into southern regions controlled by the Royal Laotian government. Throughout that period, the air war over the Plain of Jars remained an official secret on two of the sides involved. North Viet Nam has never admitted that its troops are operating in Laos; until October 1969, the U.S. repeatedly denied it was bombing in northern Laos; then it insisted that civilian targets were rarely if ever attacked.

Over the years some 60% of the population of the Plain of Jars has been evacuated to refugee camps elsewhere in Laos. Branfman, a former International Volunteer Services education adviser and Lao-speaking freelance journalist, visited more than a dozen camps around the capital of Vientiane between September 1969 and February 1971, when he was abruptly expelled from Laos, he believes at the request of the CIA. Before he left, Branfman was able to interview more than 1,000 refugees. He collected folk songs and poems about the air raids, as well as 30 handwritten eyewitness accounts, 16 of which are incorporated here and illustrated with the refugees' drawings of broken bodies, burned huts and attacking planes.

Peasants who previously had barely known what an airplane was quickly learned to distinguish a T-28 from an F-105: "In the eleventh month of 1968, two F-4H planes flew over and bombed my village for 45 minutes," writes a 16-year-old. "They dropped eight napalm bombs, the fire from which burned all my things, 16 buildings along with all our possessions inside, as well as maiming our animals. Some people who didn't reach the jungle in time were struck and fell, dying most pitifully."

A 69-year-old former monk describes the destruction of a pagoda he had helped build in 1916, and a young man testifies to how successful the bombing was in driving the population out of Pathet Lao territory: "We saw that it wouldn't end, and we fled to the side of the government of Prince Souvanna Phouma, the Prime Minister. Because the war was so severe, we had to flee from our homes, rice fields and paddies, cows and buffalo and come here in poverty."

Black Crows. Such testimony firmly establishes that of all the warring forces that raged around them -- from al Pathet Laotian Lao to Army Meo regulars -- tribesmen the and Roy peasants of the Plain of Jars most hated and feared the "black crows" of the U.S.

Air Force. Despite inevitable repetition, and the primitiveness of their writings and drawings, the peasants make that point far more vividly than Western antiwar critics with all their articulate and occasionally overwrought outrage -- Author Branfman included.

The eyewitness accounts collected here also make shabby all official U.S. doubletalk intended to deny or obscure what has actually been inflicted on Lao tian civilians by American airpower, especially since 1968. Branfman ends his book by quoting without comment a May 1971 letter to Michigan Senator Robert Griffin from David M. Abshire, Assistant Secretary of State for Con gressional Relations: "The rules do not permit attacks on nonmilitary targets and place out-of-bounds all inhabited villages . . . We deeply regret the fate of all victims of the war, both those killed by North Vietnamese action and those whose lives have been lost or dis rupted as a consequence of the defense of their country."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.