0700 hrs., Saturday, 4 December 1999

Dear Brothers,

I was thinking of you last night between 9 and 10 as I watched an old movie on local TV produced by the folks who run Lao propaganda. It was a tall tale about the RLA (Royal Lao Army) and the PLA (Pathet Lao Army). Part was set in Vientiane houses (real ones that can still be seen), Vientiane nightclubs (for example, "Vien Tiane Club"--did it really exist?) and barracks (probably gone because they were made of wood and the replacement structures are brick) on the outskirts of Vientiane. Another part was set in Xieng Khouang (Plain of Jars). Yet another part was set in a jungle with a magnificent waterfall (at its base, PLA soldiers--their mothers, wives and children in tow--ford it).

The RLA officers were depicted as slovenly drunkards who drive American jeeps and are obsessed with rank and how many wives they can maintain. The Pathet Lao were depicted as honest family men who fight for freedom. The spies who infiltrate the RLA are servants who bring food to the colonel’s desk, tribesmen who shoot with crossbows and convince an artillery battery commander that they’re on his side, and (barely) teenage daughters of Vientiane civil servants who secretively carry messages on folded bits of paper to plainclothes partisans, their meeting points being the steps of out-of-the-way Buddhist temples by day and the capital’s chock-full dance floors by night.

I’m inclined to believe there’s more truth than fiction to this movie. The confirmation that I’m probably right was driven home when the movie shifted to a made-up scene in our embassy--there was an American flag in the spacious room and the outside entrance looked like it might have been the entrance to USAID off Sidamdouan or the American school at KM6. A Caucasian approaches our ambassador. Wow. It was Claude Vincent himself, albeit much younger than I remember him. Claude was murdered traveling north out of Kasi a couple of years ago. In fact he rang me up only a day or two before his departure. He’d been assisting a European friend who used to play the piano at the Lobby Bar in the Cambodiana, a French-managed hotel in Phnom Penh, which is where I met her--she was writing for Lao Aviation’s inflight magazine, which I launched in 1993.

Well, everybody in Vientiane learned about Claude’s left-leaning tendencies after the so-called Liberation. Did he keep them that submerged prior to 1975? He sure dupes our ambassador in this propaganda gem from the Ministry of Information and Culture. "Claude betrayed his French partner years ago," a Lao friend and business associate stated recently. "He took his money, and his Lao backer in one of the ministries made sure the Frenchmen never entered Laos again. Lots of French of Claude’s generation were like that. You know, a better Frenchman than Claude could’ve been murdered. There was poetic justice in his death." The sentiment reminded me of a piece that ran in The New York Times in the 1970s about how the Vietnam War was like our American Revolution, there being traitors and betrayers on both sides.

The movie was preceded by a rerun of footage artfully recorded during the 50^th anniversary of Lao independence, 22 September 1945--right, on the heels of the end of WWII. Shot, I believe, on the stage in the National Assembly (more or less adjacent to That Luang), the footage was an hour-long display of singing, dancing, and the two combined. You’d be surprised at the professionalism of the overall presentation. The Lao girls were as beautiful as their shimmering, traditional costumes. The Lao boys were handsome, their black hair and dark eyes contrasting with their white, double-breasted suits--a Freudian slip of long-gone Indochine? Yes, every outfit was magnificent--it was the best display I’d ever seen. The voices were so galant, even full of life, that they would’ve filled a cathedral. And when it wasn’t really Lao, the choreography was straight from Moscow--there was even balalaika music! Oops. Almost forgot the backdrop, which the cameramen seldom excluded. A red, white and blue Pathet Lao flag big as a storefront, flanked by an equally large red and yellow Hammer and Sickle flag representing socialism, not communism.

As I’m sure it would you, Lao choreography often amuses me. Here the LPRP (Lao People’s Revolutionary Party) is working a bit of fiction. There were even dance numbers with construction workers wearing yellow hard hats jumping around like charmed gazelles. Shades of New York City’s "The Village People"? A sort of tilting-at-windmills collectivization is the norm in public. Individuals almost never appear on stage. But famous singers exist, appear solo, and are eventually joined by a cast of thousands. I seriously doubt the LPRP is fooling anybody, yet everybody watches this sort of program when it appears on TV because Lao audiences know many of the songs by heart. Even I’ve been known to hum along on the traditional stuff and the national anthem to boot. It isn’t a case of agreeing or disagreeing. Balalaika music is catchy. The throbbing beat of national anthems appeals to the romantic element in everybody. (By the way, one of my sources for such information told me that the musicians in the orchestra pit trained in China.)

Before the movie, I briefly watched (tuned in without knowing what to expect) a program of old black-and-white newsreels, some of which contained fleeting glimpses of the late king, the RLG (Royal Lao Government) flag (with the three-headed elephant) draped in the center of the wall behind sitting or standing dignitaries. Other clips showed one delegation after another being greeted, or seen off, at Wattay in a variety of US and Soviet planes. Earlier mentioned, the movie with the drunk RLA colonel at one point sported a Sikorsky H-34 with, on the tail, a disk containing a three-headed elephant. Later, a Helio-Courier with a "split" back window showed up, the fuselage marked "Air Laos." Russian civilians, by the way, often wore flashy sharkskin suits--remember those? They also sported sideburns, which made them look deceptive when maybe it wasn’t their fault (after all, they couldn’t choose who their mothers and fathers were). The only Russians looking normal and clean-cut like us were those wearing military uniforms.

However, tuning in late doesn’t matter. Lao TV features all of the above every year come National Day. I‘ve seen it all before. Even the drunk colonel. And the longer I live here the more truth I see in the propaganda. Not that it’s totally accurate. But as I said to Khamphou, my Lao associate whose stepfather is the older brother of Khamtay Siphandone, the Lao president, "What bothers me isn’t so much how the LPRP justifies or even explains itself to the people. What bothers me is how America failed to explain itself to Laotian peasants. Even now, how many people mosey over from Washington and take any interest in this place? Zero. The longer I live here the more infuriated I get at the DC-centricness of politicians." More often than not, Capitol Hill delegations buzz up and back from Don Muang, Bangkok’s international airport, in a single day.

I didn’t ask. The information was volunteered by a visitor who had lived here in the 1960s and 70s. "It seems like initiative isn’t being taken by our embassy to make things better," he said. He said exactly the same thing a year later when he reappeared. "You know," I said, "I’ve come to feel the same way. But blaming our ambassador is maybe blaming the messenger. Modern communication being what it is, diplomats act terribly like puppets. They’ve got no autonomy the way William Sullivan [former ambassador to Laos] did. They behave like long-distance babysitters on behalf of State. My British friend who’s retired from Shell complains that the last decade of his assignment in Vientiane was like London had a robotic eye looking over his shoulder, including when he used the lavatory--‘Mike, don’t be too long. Mind the balance sheet!’ "

Speaking of initiative, isn’t that what all of us took over here three decades ago? Michael Herr got it generally right in Dispatches: "There was such a dense concentration of American energy there, American and essentially adolescent, if that energy could have been channeled into anything more than noise, waste and pain it would have lighted up Indochina for a thousand years."

Yours in revolutionary solidarity (just joking with this classic souvenir of Lao political correctness),

Jim

Clark, PI (64-65)
Torii Station, Okinawa (65)
II Corps, RVN (66-67)
Vientiane, Lao PDR (92-present)

Postscript

In a memo to Robert McNamara dated 18-19 January 1966 from John McNaughton, Assistant Secretary of Defense.

"Despite our armed reconnaissance efforts and strikes of railroads, roads, bridges, storage centers, training bases, and other key links in their lines of communications, it is estimated that they are capable of generating in the North and infiltrating to the South 4,500 men a month and between 50 and 300 tons a day depending on the season. We have in Vietnam the ingredients of an enormous miscalculation."

Postscript(2)