This affecting story exemplifies the complexities of the mahout-elephant bond in wartime. Xuan perhaps intuited that the chance to mate with this amorous wild female was one of the few benefits Pak Chan could expect out of his service in the terrible conditions of the war. To kill the female, who was possibly already carrying the kernel of Pak Chan’s future offspring, was therefore out of the question. Nonetheless, from the human perspective, the two elephants’ “honeymoon” period had to come to an end, for Pak Chan was needed to bring supplies through the forest to soldiers at the front.
And what of Pak Chan’s side of the negotiation—why didn’t he ultimately follow the female? Several deliberations were perhaps at play. One, he likely anticipated that the wild herd wouldn’t easily accept him, since he was a male in his prime. Two, Xuan possibly managed to confront him at a brief moment of postcoital disinterest in the wild female. Three, perhaps at some level, Pak Chan grasped that though his odds of surviving this war were bleak, they were somewhat better with Xuan at his side—and that anyway, marching up and down the Ho Chi Minh Trail gave him opportunity to mate with females in different wild herds. If these mates then headed away from the fighting, toward the west, the odds of his offspring surviving would go up.
As the war progressed, Pak Chan became one of the most capable transport elephants along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. His skill wasn’t just in moving the war matériel—the food, clothes, medicine, ammunition, fuel barrels, tires, and so on—but in helping the platoon detect danger ahead and stay clear of it. With his huge, sensitive ears, he could hear all kinds of noises from afar. He knew that the sound of propellers in the wind meant he should dash under the forest canopy, for this was the sound of a reconnaissance plane. The sound of a jet engine meant he had to get to a ravine for cover as quickly as possible, for a jet meant bombs or napalm. He also knew that the sound of a truck engine meant that no sudden evasive action was needed at all, for this was almost certainly the motor vehicle of a friendly battalion. The other elephants would imitate Pak Chan, and the elephant corps remained relatively safe.9
ANOTHER STORY comes to us from the Ho Chi Minh Trail. A Vietcong platoon was crossing through the rainforest along the base of the Truong Son Mountains. Like many platoons along this route, they had with them a few elephants to carry heavy baggage. But no sooner had they left the camp than one of their elephants became trapped in quicksand.
The soldiers tried for two hours to save the unhappy creature. It was suggested that the elephant should be shot, so the platoon could take its tusks and distribute the meat to the surrounding villages. “But,” one soldier recalled later, “we felt we couldn’t do that: these elephants had done a lot for the regiment.”
Seeing the huge animal sink, sorrowfully, deeper and deeper into the mire, the soldiers lost hope of saving it. But the commander of the unit, a man named Thuan, refused to leave the elephant to die. He ordered his men to cut trees down and drag them into the swamp. Watching them, “the elephant quickly understood: it grabbed hold of the logs with its forelegs and trunk and gradually pulled itself from the mud and out of danger.” The soldiers were overjoyed and set off immediately. Later in their journey, the platoon crossed through an open area, and this same commander, attuned to the value of the elephants for making hidden movements across the dangerous landscape, told the soldiers to “hide behind the large ears of their elephants.”10
Stories like this one, as well as the story of Pak Chan and Xuan, give us a sense of the strong culture of forest mahoutship that existed in the Vietnamese highlands up through the war—a culture that is, sadly, all but extinct in that region today. The elephant-domesticating hill peoples in the vicinity of the Truong Son are in some ways analogous to mahouts we’ve met in the Trans-Patkai region, or to the Karens along the Thai-Burmese border. The Truong Son mahouts mostly hailed from a diffuse group loosely referred to as the Kha people, a kind of ethnonymic blanket term. In effect a set of “fugitive” groups, the Khas of the Truong Son had been driven from the Annam and Mekong coastal plains by warfare around 100 B.C. Retreating into the mountains, they ultimately learned to practice swidden agriculture and to catch and ride elephants. Kha elephant skills persisted across the generations. Even today, a Kha group in Laos called the Khamus domesticates elephants.11
An unusual piece of writing from Vietnam during the 1970s, The Story of a Mahout and His War Elephant, describes Kha resistance on elephant-back during the First Indochinese War, against the French, following the conclusion of World War II. The book is peculiar in that it is semifictional, yet it was clearly written by someone with extensive knowledge of Kha elephant domesticating cultures in the Truong Son Mountains. It’s unclear how the book’s author, Vu Hung, came by this knowledge. The level of detail is striking. Kha elephant command terms (most with Tai etymology) are quoted throughout the text. Hung also describes the Kha training and initiation rituals, for both elephants and mahouts. In an early scene in the book, the old mahouts of an elephant village test the boy Dik, a teenage mahout-in-training and the book’s main protagonist, in his knowledge of elephants’ diseases. Dik is brought a sickly elephant and asked to diagnose what’s wrong. After studying the animal, Dik determines that the elephant has swallowed several jungle leeches. He mixes some medicinal wild herbs with fruit and pours a jar of the remedy down the elephant’s throat. The elephant is cured!12 Elsewhere in the book, Dik must desensitize his elephant, Lumluong, to gunfire so that the tusker can tolerate passing by battlefields. This account too appears to be based on actual wartime elephant training.13
The book is also noteworthy for the Exodus-like narrative themes and imagery that appear throughout—curiously similar to S. Farrant Russell’s Muddy Exodus, where Russell tells his own story of escaping from Burma during World War II, riding Maggie the elephant. When war with the French breaks out, the elders of Dik’s village decide it will be best to flee into the hills. The villagers evacuate, their possessions carried by elephants ridden by “grim and silent” mahouts. Hung continues: “Neither did the elephants show any unwillingness to take the unusually heavy loads. They seemed to know something was amiss. . . . The exodus began.”14
The fleeing villagers become lost, cut off and disoriented by new water channels opened up by monsoon storms. Their elephants crash a path through the unexpected barriers. In the animals’ wake, “the refugees trudged on,” a crossing recalling the ancient Hebrews’ passage across the Red Sea. As a “promised land” takes form in the Kha refugees’ minds, they stumble through the territories of hostile hunter-gatherer tribes deep in the hills, a kind of Wilderness of Zin.15
Here the thematic parallels with the Book of Exodus break off. Dik decides to stop fleeing, and he and his elephant Lumluong return to the lowlands, to join a liberation army fighting the French. Lumluong becomes a transport elephant, much like Pak Chan. The rest of Dik’s village proceeds with their elephants “for where the sun was setting”—likely to the westernmost forests of former French Indochina, in Sayaboury province of modern-day Laos. Today Sayaboury contains Laos’s largest concentration of domesticated elephants. Though semifictional, Vu Hung’s tale gives us a sense of two different migrations of Vietnamese domesticated elephants during the period of anticolonial struggle: either eastward to the coast, to supply the liberation soldiers, or westward to jungle refuges, in flight from the war.
Very recently, in 2018, an incident took place that echoes this narrative. The incident occurred not in Vietnam but in northern Burma. Here, fighting between the Kachin rebel army and the Burmese central military, or Tatmadaw, reached the small forest village of Awng Lawt, which is nestled deep in the Hukawng Valley. In May, hundreds of villagers fled the violence, seeking a displaced persons camp in Tanai. They took their elephants with them, about ten giants overall. The large refugee party marched through the jungle and came upon a river called the Mau Hka. Some had smartphones with them, and their astonishing photographs and video footage show the elephants carrying the elderly, the youn
g, and many people’s possessions across the river and through the surrounding forest.16 Like Vu Hung’s story, and like the stories of the elephant-mounted rescues during World War II, this episode conveys the significance elephants can hold for people in flight.
NEAR THE END of the conflict with America, Xuan Thieu the Vietcong mahout was still working along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. One day he thought of his old commander and mentor, Kien, the maritimer who had first recruited him to the elephant brigade. He remembered how Kien had brushed aside Xuan’s initial fears of becoming a mahout. Over the ensuing years, Pak Chan the elephant had proven Kien right. Now, if Xuan were asked to be transferred to a mechanized transport unit or a boat transport unit, he knew he would refuse, so profound had his bond with the brigade elephants grown.
Xuan wrote a letter to his old commander, who had long since left for the coast. He wrote of his many adventures with Pak Chan along the Trail. “Each animal is special and has his own character,” the mahout reflected.
“Dear Brother Kien,” Xuan continued, “this is the sad news I had to tell you”: Pak Chan was dead. Nobody knew the cause for sure—maybe an old battle wound, or maybe something else. “For me, nothing can replace my life as a mahout with our elephants, and I hope I shall never have to part with them,” wrote Xuan. “We transport goods to the front by whatever means available, primitive or modern, but ours has a life and feeling of its own.”17
The American war in Vietnam was calamitous for the elephant population there, doing vastly more damage than World War II had done to the elephants of Burma and northeastern India. During World War II, it had not occurred to either the Allied or the Japanese side to declare war on the forest itself, whereas the American strategy in Vietnam hinged upon the use of napalm and defoliating agents like Agent Orange to eradicate forest cover. The ecological damage was not a side effect but the very goal.
At least during certain stages of the war, the U.S. air command (like the British Royal Air Force during World War II) appears to have had a policy of specifically targeting elephants, with gunfire or rockets. Fred Locke, a former helicopter pilot, recalled being under order to fire on elephants, on the grounds that they might be with the Vietcong. But the South Vietnamese army had elephants of its own, and during one briefing a commanding officer “casually admonished the chopper pilots to be sure not to ask for air strikes against friendly elephants.” Locke, a flight leader, inquired how they were supposed to tell the “friendly elephants from the enemy ones.” The briefer explained: “the ‘enemy’ elephants would have their bellies tinged red from the clay mud of The Trail,” that is, the Ho Chi Minh Trail. As Locke recalled, in subsequent flights, “I’ll be doggone if we didn’t see a whole bunch of elephants and, they did. . . . The ‘pink elephants’: there they were, right in front of me!”18
Robert Mason, another American helicopter pilot, recalled overhearing a radio conversation where a U.S. gunship ordered a vehicle code-named Raven Six (likely an armed helicopter) to shoot elephants. The bullets weren’t effective, so the gunship ordered Raven Six to use rockets instead. Mason and his copilot listened to this radio exchange dumbfounded. “Elephants?” Mason wondered. “We’re killing fucking elephants?” Then they heard Raven Six say someone should “go down and get the tusks.” “I’m sick,” Mason’s copilot said, listening to this exchange. “Killing elephants is like blasting your grandmother.”
Like the British Royal Air Force pilots who protested orders to target elephants in the Burma theater, many American soldiers considered such directives beyond the pale. Back at the company’s camp, Mason recalled, there was “general outrage” that the ivory had indeed been recovered from the jungle and delivered to the division headquarters.19
The total number of elephants purposefully killed in air strikes is not clear. The elephant conservationist Richard Lair has noted that in one town, Nhan Hoa of Gia Lai province, more than twenty-eight local work elephants were killed from the air. In another village, Dak Lak, many owners fled with their elephants to Cambodia to avoid being strafed and bombed.
The use of forest-destroying weaponry, the scattering of land mines, and the U.S. air command’s policy of purposefully targeting elephants—all this combined to effectively eradicate Vietnam’s elephant population. Elephants in the country before the war seem to have numbered in the thousands. Afterward, the number had plummeted to just a few hundred. Today the number seems to be lower still, due to deforestation caused by postwar economic development.20
And yet there might be another way to look at the loss of elephants in Vietnam. Just as the collapse in the number of registered logging elephants in Burma during World War II likely reflected a partial exodus of domestic elephants into the wild, it is also possible that a significant number of elephants escaped Vietnam and went into the highlands of Laos—following the path of those displaced Kha mahouts in Vu Hung’s tale. Some aspects of the present-day geography of elephants in former French Indochina lend credibility to this theory. The elephant population of Laos is estimated at somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500, some two-thirds of which are domesticated. Much of the domesticated population is concentrated in the far west of the country, in Sayaboury, likely as the result of two distinct recent mass movements of wild and domestic elephants: out of northern Thailand, as agricultural development there has erased forestland, and from Vietnam, fleeing fighting and deforestation.21 So perhaps somewhere in Sayaboury, Pak Chan’s children roam the forest.
It is geographically unfortunate that no further forest corridor links Laos’s Sayaboury Province, with its significant elephant population, with the Kachin Hills and the Trans-Patkai region, where there are even more elephants. Such a link would enable a much-needed genetic transfer and diversification within the species. Blocking the way is the Shan Plateau. In Sayaboury and the Trans-Patkai, the coalition of human groups dependent on the forest has thus far counteracted the deforestation pressures associated with agricultural development. But the forests in the Shan area aren’t as abundant in valuable timbers, and there’s less bamboo. The diminished severity of monsoon flooding here also tends to make it attractive for irrigation-based farming, which entails permanent clearance of forestland.22 All this swings power away from forest-based economies and toward paddy farming and regularized agriculture. Though the geographic distinction between the regions is subtle, and the Shan Plateau still has plenty of remaining forest cover, during the past half-century the balance here has “tipped” in the direction of local farming interests, rather than local forest interests. By contrast, the Trans-Patkai and Sayaboury remain, for now, forest-centric economies with large numbers of elephants.
Chapter 6
STRANGE BEHAVIORS
THE DUAL WORLD IN WHICH ASIAN WORK ELEPHANTS live—as members of a human community by day and of a wild ecosystem by night—can lead to some strange elephant behaviors. Some elephants can become difficult.
I met the mahout Mong Cho, and his tusker Neh Ong, at a tiny logging camp nestled in a glen in the southwestern hills of Kachin State. Far below lay Hpakant, the jade-mining area, and next to it was a huge placid blue lake, Indawgyi, the largest in Burma. The bumpy ascent by motorcycle to Mong Cho’s hill camp had taken half an hour, the vehicle scurrying goatlike up the rockface along a route that could barely be called a footpath but that the motorcyclist had somehow mastered. I clung to his back. The driver was a Hkamti, like Mong Cho. In the motorcycle following us was J., a Kachin American spending her year after college graduation teaching English in Myitkyina. J. had helped arrange to get me to this spot.
We arrived at the camp, one of the smaller ones I saw during my travels. It contained a small group of six elephants: a large adult tusker, two adult females, two juveniles who were already taller at the shoulder than their mahouts, and one baby just a few years old. The youngest followed his mother around all day, observing her as she did light tasks. Usually the other adult female would attend to the calf as well, acting as an “auntie”—an arrangement bo
rrowed from the family structure of wild elephants, where an infant is often raised and protected by two adult females. The older juveniles at the camp, around ten years in age, were able to do modest tasks like hauling smaller logs or piles of bamboo. Work elephants hit their prime at around twenty to twenty-five years of age and remain robust workers for about two decades.1
Mong Cho was the head mahout and owner of all the elephants here. There were three other mahouts to assist him: another Hkamti and two ethnic Burmese. The elephants were lounging under a grove of trees, munching on leaves. The three adults were tethered, while the young elephants were free to roam. The mahouts weren’t paying close attention and trusted that the younger generation wouldn’t wander too far from the adults. Next to the elephants was a small shelter for the mahouts, a green canvas roof suspended by several well-placed bamboo poles. A radio played traditional Burmese country music. The tinkling of the wooden bells worn by the adult elephants also filled the air. The camp would have been entirely secluded in the tree shade, but a small landslide from the rains had recently denuded a side of the glen, letting in streams of sunlight. A brook wound its way alongside the canvas tent, and the mahouts had built a kind of aqueduct for themselves, made of rubber and bamboo, transferring some of the running water into a basin. Next to the basin were also several smaller shelters protecting pots and pans from the rain and sunlight. The grounds looked comfortably lived in.
“He’s looking at us so skeptically,” J. remarked of the big male elephant. She called across the camp to Mong Cho, and then said to me, “The big one is Neh Ong. And that one there is his mate, Pwa Oo. They’re both about thirty-seven years old.”
Up until now Mong Cho had been on the other side of the camp with one of the juveniles, reciting command terms in a gentle voice and rewarding the elephant with cooked rice when it performed the right action. Now he approached us to talk. One of the other mahouts was readying equipment for the workday, which had been delayed to make time for my visit. The others were smoking and eating in the main tent.
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