"This is our place, I recognise the bomb".
Pierre's calmly delivered understatement sliced through
whatever conversation Gregory and I were having and we all
quickly descended into laughter. He hadn't intended it to be funny,
it was just a helpful comment to remind us that we had arrived home,
but it's calm delivery made it clear that we were all beginning to take
some of the odd sights in Phonsavan for granted. Our home, the
Vieng Thong guesthouse, was an unimposing one-storey wooden
building with a bomb the size of a barrel outside. Unexploded of course,
defused? I hope! Sitting plump and rusty against the end of the front
porch it was an inspiring example of rehabilitation. It was nice to know
that even the nastiest of war toys can take up retirement as harmless
street furniture.
Mr Vieng Thong, the guesthouse owner, had been collecting war relics ever since the US airforce began dropping on him in the late sixties. He had an impressive array of retired mortars, antipersonnel 'bombis', mines, shell casings, even the nose cone of a jet, and they lined the walls of his livingroom looking no more out-of-place than a couple of candlesticks or three flying ducks might have in a house back home. There's so much of this spent ordinance around Phonsavan and the rest of Xieng Khuan province that people use it to build their houses and their bridges and what they don't use they export to other provinces.
The dark side to all this story of course is that there are still many unexploded devices buried in the ground. Gradual erosion in the rainy season and the forest clearance efforts of farmers brings a lot of them to the surface, sometimes with tragic consequences. Though the numbers have been dropping, there are still seventy or so people a year killed in Laos from these weapons and many more are injured. More than half of the casualties are caused by 'tampering'. Explosives have many peacetime uses: destroying tree stumps and clearing boulders, and many old-timers have become a dab hand at splitting open mines with a machete to extract the explosive within. It's a hazardous occupation with very few retirement possibilities as you can imagine.
Even now, only thirty years after the war, it is hard to imagine why the most powerful nation on Earth sould have dropped more bombs on this little agrarian country than it did on Hitler's Germany. The bombs, their craters and the tangled pieces of metal forged thousands of miles away just don't seem to belong here. Long after the last mine has been cleared and when the Indochinese war has been abbreviated to a one-line footnote in the history of mankinds first dozen millenia AD, these inert metal artifacts will still litter the landscape to delight and puzzle archaeologists of the future. It's an uncanny repetition of history because scattered between the bomb craters and the metal pots and pans of the cold war are Phonsavans unique and puzzling pre-historic stone jars - themselves the relics of a forgotten ancient civilisation. Carved from granite or conglomerate, some decorated with squiggly inscriptions, a few with lids lying by their sides, these one or two meter tall stone jars have no known purpose. Whether they were rolled here, floated here or dropped here by low-flying stone aged aircraft, nobody knows. Whether they contained cremated remains, food for the gods, or wickedly strong whiskey from history's biggest drinking binge remains a mystery. What is clear though, is that we will never know the full truth of their origin. Whether they are wartime or peacetime artifacts we will probably never deduce more than the tiniest part of their relationship with the inhabitants of this land millenia ago. The chance discovery of an intelligible inscription may someday give us a picture of a monarch, a general or a priest in whose name the jars were fashioned, but just as with Phonsavan's more recent artifacts, the effects these jars had on the incidental occupants of ancient Laos may never be known.
It would be a shame to think that the same could happen, over time, to our record of recent events. That the footnote in mankind's far future history should record the Indochinese war as 'One theater in the late second millenium's transition from colonial to global society', rather than 'yet another example of how some people's lives suffered for the sake of other people's ideologies' followed maybe by a biography of one of the incidental people of Laos. In 1830, in the wake of Napeleon's ravages in Europe, Thomas Carlyle wrote that 'History is the essence of innumerable biographies'. His theory has been dismissed by critics who argue that it takes more than a Napoleon, or indeed a Nixon, to make History. Rightly so, but they have disregarded Carlyle's use of the word 'innumerable'. The relics of Phonsavan which litter this landscape and decorate the villages have left unseen scars on innumerable lives over the millenia which in fairness to the incidental people of Laos, should not be forgotten.