When Ambassador [to Laos from USA] William Sullivan assumed his post in Vientiane near the end of 1964, his assignment was to wage war while maintaining the fiction of the Geneva Accords, which he had personally helped to negotiate. He came to the Lao capital aware of US plans for Operation Rolling Thunder – a sustained carpet-bombing campaign against North Vietnamese designed to go “after the manure pile” rather than simply swatting flies, as the Commander of the US Air Force, General Curtis Le May, eloquently put it. Even before the Vietnam operation began, Sullivan established his own programs for Laos, called Operation Barrel Roll in the north and Operation Steel Tiger in the south.
Sullivan set the tone for the US campaign in Laos – ground troops were kept out (apart from reconnaissance missions and raids on the Ho Chi Minh Trail area) and military planes had to take off in complete secrecy. As British journalist Christopher Robbines wrote in The Ravens, based on interviews with pilots who fought in “the Other Theather”, “There was another war even nastier than the one in Vietnam, and so secret that the location of the country in which it was being fought was classified …. The men who chose to fight in it where handpicked volunteers, and anyone accepted for a tour seemed to disappear as if from the face of the earth.”
From 1964 until the ceasefire of February 1973, United States plans flew 580,944 sorties – or 177 a day – over Laos and dropped 2,093,100 tonnes of bombs – equivalent to one planeload of bombs every eight minutes around the clock for nine years – making Laos the most heavily bombed country per-capita in the history of warfare.
- The Rough Guide To Laos
very interesting lukas. I’d love to hear more!!