by Jim Richards
‘OK, I’ll finish off my maps by hand. Then while I’m out on the next trip, you can convert them in whatever software you can learn in the shortest possible time. I won’t say anything; just get learning.’
‘It’s a deal, mate, thanks. I owe you,’ Carlo replied, relieved.
It was a rather dubious start to a lifelong friendship.
Carlo and I went out that night to check out the local action in Vientiane. We started off at Nam Phu (The Fountain). This was an open-air bar, with tables set around a large fountain. The night was warm and balmy, pleasant after the rigours of my trip. The local beer, Beer Lao, tasted good, and there were some pretty girls floating around, which lifted our spirits.
The surrounding buildings were a mix of attractive wooden French colonial and Russian brutalist concrete. There were a sprinkling of expats sitting around and the place had an atmosphere of intrigue, in a Cold War type of way.
We got talking to the guy at the next table. Jack was a thickset American with a military bearing. He was reading Soldier of Fortune magazine – and he was in it.
Jack checked us out first and then became surprisingly open about his business. He was assisting the insurgency across the border in Burma against an especially nasty military government. Privately raised funds from the USA paid him to ‘advise and liaise’ (provide weapons) with the Karen guerrillas in the jungles of eastern Burma. He was a middleman, spanning a big middle.
Jack showed us the article in Soldier of Fortune, which included a photo of him proudly standing with a bunch of Karen guerrillas. I told Jack about my own adventures on the Hmong ridge and he filled me in on the background to the conflict, of which I was quite ignorant.
During the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 70s, the Americans had befriended the Laotian and Vietnamese hill tribes as allies to fight against the communists. The Hmong, Yao, Khmu, Akha and other hill tribes had been armed and trained by the Americans and they had become firm friends.
The most potent hill-tribe fighters of all had been the Hmong. Their esteemed leader, General Vang Pao, had been a highly effective ally of the Americans during the fight against North Vietnam.
When the Americans left South-East Asia after the fall of Saigon in 1975, these hill tribes were abandoned to the tender mercy of the communists. It was a bloodbath, and hundreds of thousands were massacred or displaced.
The only hill tribe that managed to hold out militarily were the Hmong, partly protected by living on the remote, heavily forested and mountainous Hmong ridge. They were still fighting the communists in Laos some twenty years later when I turned up.
‘Jim, did you see any American-looking men during your trip?’ Jack asked me.
‘No, they were all locals. Why?’
‘There are a whole bunch of missing American prisoners from the Vietnam War, and Laos is the last hope some of the families have of anyone turning up. You’re working in areas no foreigner has been to since the war, so keep your eyes and ears open. There are some big rewards going back in the US if you can find and spring one of these guys,’ said Jack.
Our chat was interrupted by Alex, the eighteen-year-old daughter of the bar owner. She was friendly, gregarious, Swedish and very cute, and she joined us for more drinks as I picked Jack’s brain on the missing POWs.
We had an excellent French meal and finished up late-night drinking in a picturesque bar overlooking the Mekong River; I was going to like Vientiane.
The following day I began planning my next trip. I got Dao to find a Laotian army officer to brief me on the situation regarding the Hmong. A senior officer duly arrived, and brought with him a map that showed the various Hmong villages. The officer proudly informed us that these villages had been strewn with anti-personnel landmines dropped from the air by their military. He finished with a disturbing smile, adding that the villages were routinely strafed by the Laotian airforce.
The army had by now pretty much given up sending fighting patrols into these areas. The Hmong, on their home ground, would pick them off with snipers before melting back into the forest. The situation had reached an old-fashioned stalemate.
More recently, the army had also given up dropping the landmines, as the Hmong would retrieve them and then place them on the tracks into their areas to try to catch out the army on their way in. It was probably one of these that did for the local whom I had seen being taken out on the stretcher. We had thankfully missed these gifts by spending most of our time navigating the creeks.
As a result of all this information, I recommended to the Newmont management that the Hmong ridge be excised from the sampling area. The parts I had seen hadn’t looked prospective anyway and, when the stream samples I had taken came back dead for gold, management concurred.
My next trip was done with the help of an English-speaking Laotian geologist called Somsak. He had previously worked for the Americans in the 1970s as a military policeman. After the communists took over, Somsak was ‘re-educated’. This consisted of three years in the Pathet Laos military, fighting against the remaining royalists in the north of the country.
Somsak had good English, learned from the Americans. He was a small fellow with a keen sense of humour, who found swearing in English highly amusing. This was handy, as over the next two years I swore at him quite a lot.
We set off travelling north from Vientiane in an old Russian army truck, a GAZ-66. We stopped for lunch at Vang Vieng, a scenic and sleepy town that had a vast airfield the Americans had built thirty years before and had been the main base of the secretive Air America CIA operations during the war.
I noticed a local man in his mid-twenties who looked half Anglo-Saxon.
‘Somsak, see that half-white guy over there – are there westerners living here?’
‘No, Jim, he is one of the moon people – babies from girls the Americans left behind. They’re all over Laos, not quite outcasts but not fully accepted either,’ Somsak said.
‘Have you heard of any American POWs being held in a remote part of Laos, or maybe living here by choice?’
‘No, it would be hard to keep that quiet. It’s an American myth I think.’
He was probably right too. I never saw any evidence of missing POWs in the two years I crawled over the place. In a small country, people tended to know one another’s business; it was hard to imagine a piece of information like that remaining a secret. My path to riches and glory would have to be via the more conventional route of gold mining.
We drove on the whole day through forested hills and mountains until we linked up with the Mekong River at the sprawling town of Tha Deua. We spent a comfortable night on a riverboat, which Newmont had hired. At first light the boat set off downstream, a freshly cooked breakfast of scrambled eggs reinforcing the feeling of travelling in style.
That was until I needed the toilet. This small room was situated at the back of the boat and had a drop hole directly into the river. Rectangles of split bamboo were thoughtfully provided: the local alternative to toilet paper. While balancing over the hole, on a moving boat, the bamboo trick proved too much for me, and I never quite mastered the art.
As we proceeded, the mountains on either side of the Mekong loomed ominously larger and the riverbanks became steeper. I nervously reviewed my maps as I took in the scale of the terrain we were taking on.
The boat captain was a third-generation river man and expertly negotiated the rock bars, helped by the high water from recent rains. In the mid-afternoon we reached our destination at a remote village on the bank of the river. Somsak and I went to see the pho ban to discuss our trip. He knew a route and also organised four village porters for the start of the journey.
The following morning we loaded up the expedition onto five smaller craft provided by the village and set off up a tributary on the western side of the Mekong, outboard engines blasting away behind each boat. After three hairy hours of navigating rocks and pushing the boats over fallen trees, we disembarked onto a muddy bank.
We set off
, walking on a narrow track that led high into the mountains, sampling as we went. Late that afternoon, we reached a hill-tribe longhouse of the Yao people. The longhouse was a wooden rectangular building about 10 by 30 metres, with a thatched roof.
We were warmly welcomed. I was the first white person they had seen since the Vietnam War, and they were curious. The headman was bilingual in Yao and Pasa Lao, and there were a lot of questions; Somsak acted as translator.
The women made and wore exquisite, fine embroidery, which was how they spent their evenings. I took photos of them, and they were fastidious about preparing themselves for these pictures, which I found touching. Several of the men seemed to spend their entire time smoking opium in an outside hut.
We slept in the longhouse, and the following morning the men from the Mekong village returned and in their place we hired some of the Yao men (we always used locals whenever we could), including the longhouse pho ban, and continued our sampling trip.
We walked over large areas of old rice fields, which now hosted secondary forest. The remains of several abandoned villages were pointed out to me by the Yao men. When we stopped to camp that evening, the pho ban explained through Somsak what had happened.
‘When the Americans left, the Pathet Laos and Vietnamese flew over our villages firing guns and bombing. They followed up with foot soldiers, hunting us down, killing us and burning our houses. We fled into the forest, many of our people died and some escaped to Thailand.
‘A drawn-out war ensued. After several years, the Yao and other hill tribes – all except the Hmong – made peace with the communists and were allowed to live undisturbed. By then only a few villages remained in the area out of a once much larger Yao population,’ the pho ban said.
There was a deep sadness to this man and, indeed, to the whole village. I tried to imagine what kinds of atrocities must have taken place to force an entire people to depart.
I was shocked by his story, but having just walked over a sizeable area of obviously abandoned, previously inhabited terrain, it was totally believable. And why would this man lie to me? I had no agenda here for him to lobby. I spent the rest of the trip in sombre contemplation.
Throughout this expedition and other subsequent ones to the hill-tribe areas, I was told the same story. When Laos fell to the communists in 1975, there had been a systematic slaughter of the hill tribes that had supported the Americans in the war.
The whole scenario brought to mind unsettling reminders of Joseph Conrad’s classic novel Heart of Darkness, with its descriptions of the gross atrocities visited upon native Africans in the remote jungles of the Congo in the 1890s.
As the Vietnam and Laotian civil wars had played out through the 1970s, a multitude of western intellectuals and students had expressed their support for the North Vietnamese war leader Ho Chi Minh. ‘Ho Chi Minh, Ho Chi Minh, Ho Chi Minh is going to win’ was their chant. From the safety of the West, these people had backed the communists responsible for the atrocities and genocide I was having described to me by witnesses.
Many Laotians and South Vietnamese still believe that if the Americans had stayed and fought on with their local allies, they would have prevailed and won. I came to find this view persuasive.
Admittedly, the South Vietnamese government at the time was seriously flawed, but it was not implementing genocide on its own people, as the communists subsequently did. America’s prosecution of the war also alienated a lot of locals. It was complicated.
These observations opened up for me a moral dilemma that I never truly reconciled. I was supporting this detestable communist regime with my work, but I was also assisting its people in direct employment and, I hoped, in economic development in the long term. It was a tough one.
Landmines were not the only hazard. Next on the list were dogs. For some reason dogs, similar to bullies, seek out someone who is different. I was different: I was white, and Laotian dogs didn’t like that.
I countered this menace (rabies was endemic) by always walking with a large stick while going through a village. I never used it: the dogs could see I was armed and meant business, so they left me alone.
Over time and with much study, my Laotian language (Pasa Lao) started to improve. I found children’s alphabet books very useful. Only when you could read the language could you begin to correctly use the pronunciation, which was critical to being understood.
Pasa Lao is a fiendishly difficult language to learn. It is tonal, with no real reference points to western languages. Mastering the tones was excruciating, and word ambiguity led to many a linguistic faux pas on my part that had the Laotians in stitches.
For instance, I got stung by a scorpion in one of our camps. As I rested up I kept asking our field assistant for the medicine pack we carried. All I got was the offer of a cigarette. The Pasa Lao word for medicine (yaa) is the same as for cigarette. No wonder everyone smoked. Bit by bit I got there, and after my first year I could operate in workable Pasa Lao.
My language skills also had another benefit. A Swedish bakery had opened up beside Nam Phu, and Carlo and I would go in there to try and pick up some of the more intrepid female backpackers that by 1995 were beginning to appear.
I would spurt out my order in well-rehearsed and impressive-sounding Pasa Lao (impressive to a non-Laotian speaker, that is). Then I would turn to a western girl at the nearest table and exclaim: ‘Hey, didn’t I see you in Luang Prabang?’
Given that Luang Prabang was the only town that tourists were allowed into at that time, it always elicited one of two responses: ‘No, but I’m going there soon, what can you tell me?’ Or: ‘I just got back from there so quite possibly. Did you like it?’
This opening gambit often led to a night out in pleasant company. My only problem was that I would organise the girl(s), but Carlo was smoother in the follow through and would often end up with the girl(s). Life is never fair.
On one of these evenings, Carlo and I went out with Mitch, the Canadian geologist who specialised in quick handovers. Mitch was in his late thirties and had been knocking around South-East Asia for a while, and his personal life had become somewhat dissipated.
‘Every time I go back to see my girlfriend in Bangkok, she’s sold all the furniture and electrical goods in our flat and I have to go and buy everything back again,’ Mitch complained.
‘Where did you meet her?’ I asked, somewhat baffled.
‘In a bar on Patpong Road,’ he replied, referring to Bangkok’s notorious red-light district.
‘So, Mitch, what kind of girls do you like?’ Carlo asked, trying to move the conversation along.
‘Well, after ten years in Patpong, I find it hard to get excited anymore, but I do really like lactating amputees,’ Mitch said. ‘That’s about the only thing that does it for me these days.’
I felt a gag reflex in my throat, not helped by Mitch then elaborating on the obscure fetish markets in Bangkok.
‘Hey, you guys should come and do Patpong with me sometime,’ he said. ‘I could really show you around.’
‘Thanks, mate, but all of my leave dates are planned in Australia,’ I said hastily.
The expat scene in Vientiane consisted of a small group of foreigners working for multinational companies, members of the diplomatic corps who just seemed to spy on each other, and their bored, semi-alcoholic wives. There were also a few desperadoes pursuing insane business missions.
One of the latter was Chris Crash, an Australian who’d gained this moniker by having frequent high-speed motorcycle accidents. Chris fixed the air conditioners and plumbing at our office and was terrific fun to hang out with. He had left Australia under questionable circumstances.
Chris had a stunning-looking Laotian wife, a petite and friendly woman who spoke good English. However, whenever she found out about one of Chris’s many girlfriends, she would go into a violent rage and beat him with whatever came to hand.
It was hard to tell with Chris whether his injuries were from motorcycle accidents or
domestic violence. If you ever travel to Vientiane, watch out for local people of mixed race born in the 1990s. There’s a good chance that Chris is the father.
The more gregarious members of the expat community would get together every week for the Hash House Harriers run. This involved expats and locals running around a part of town and ending up at someone’s house to get plastered. There were well-educated local girls in the Hash, which made it worth putting up with the banal drinking games.
It all made for an eclectic social group in Vientiane, spiced up in 1996 with the arrival of a pair of Thai ladyboys, who cut through the jaded expat male population like a knife through butter.
After about a year working for Newmont, I had panned for gold in almost every creek in the Golden Triangle of Laos, which covered our northerly concession area. We had found a number of modest alluvial gold occurrences and taken numerous samples. Then, when we moved on to the southern tenement area, things got really interesting.
Some weeks into the southern sampling program, we spent a night in a small village beside a rough road south of the town of Ban Done, 100 kilometres north-east of Vientiane. In the morning we prepared for a straightforward one-day sampling foray. The surrounding areas had so far shown some reasonable gold in a few streams, so we were optimistic we might find something.
We set off in single file following the local tracks. A villager led the way. He had a horribly scarred face, which Somsak had discovered was a souvenir from fighting the Hmong some twenty years earlier; there were a lot of disfigured men in Laos. I followed this character, and behind me walked our trusted Newmont field assistant, Oum; another two village porters followed, and Somsak was tail-end Charlie. We didn’t need any soldiers in this area.
After an hour moving south, slogging and sweating through muddy, humid paddy fields, we started to climb into steep and hilly terrain. This area was fully forested with mature trees. It was considerably cooler under the wooded canopy and the villagers now became alert to any foraging opportunities.
