Quotes About Laos

Since the civil war in Laos was resumed in earnest in 1963, American participation has been veiled in secrecy.

Laos is a deeply Buddhist country, and my visit included a traditional Tak Bat ceremony, in which you get up at sunrise and make offerings to Buddhist monks.

When I arrived in Laos and found young Americans living there, out of free choice, I was surprised. After only a week, I began to have a sense of the appeal of the country and its people - along with despair about its future.

Richard Nixon had made a fatal error in ignoring the politico-meteorological dimension when he announced the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia on April 30, 1970. The invasion of Laos, on the other hand, happened in February 1971, and the campuses were quiet. Who wants to stage a walkout in February?

July 23, 1962: The United States joins thirteen other nations at Geneva in signing the "Declaration on the Neutrality of Laos." CIA and Pentagon opponents regard Kennedy's negotiation of the Laotian agreement as surrender to the Communists. They undermine it by supporting General Phoumi's violations of the cease-fire.

Beginning in 1968, China also sent 110,000 troops to Laos to fight the war.

In early 1961 a new president, John F. Kennedy, was told by military leaders and civilian officials that the Kingdom of Laos - of no conceivable strategic importance to the U.S. - required the presence of American troops and perhaps even tactical nuclear weapons. Why? Because if Laos fell, Asia would go red from Thailand to Indonesia.

It doesn't take long to become aware of the presence of the CIA in Laos.

The river passes through our mountains, changing its name to Mekong where China, Laos, and Burma meet, before flowing through Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, and eventually to the South China Sea. "Yes! It is called the Danube of the East.

The American escalation of the war in Laos provoked a response by the Communist forces, which now control more of Laos than ever before.

I learned so much in Laos. I learned that fried silkworm larvae are delicious. I learned how to make ant-egg salad.

I went to Ft Bragg and learned that Delta was indeed gearing up for the rescue. Still I was concerned the Reagan staff would not be willing to take the risk of sending an official military force into Laos.

I was on the Mekong River between the border of Thailand and Laos. I was there to find the elusive Mekong giant catfish but the border police were suspicious. Along with my film, they confiscated my passport and started making accusations about my political allegiances.

In 1965, Johnson commented sanctimoniously that the problem of Laos is the refusal of the Communist forces to honor the Geneva Accords, What he failed to mention was that his own country wasn't honoring them either; it was just doing a better job of keeping its violations secret.

An estimated 30 percent of the bombs dropped on Laos failed to detonate. These and other UXOs [unexploded ordinances] remain in the ground and continue to take lives and limbs.

Plain of Jars is a collection of thousands of massive limestone cups whose origins remain unknown, scattered over a wide area of Laos's Xiangkhoang Province.

As I now see it, America had no business involving itself in a series of distant convulsions where the ideas, variously interpreted, of a long-dead German economist were bringing biblical calamity to China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

There are still thousands of people dying every year in Laos, mostly children and farmers, from unexploded anti-personnel ordnance that the U.S. simply saturated much of the land with, especially in the Plain of Jars. There actually is a British engineering team trying to remove some of these things, which are much worse than land mines.

In the most heavily bombed part of the country—a high, strategically located plateau in the middle of Laos, called the Plain of Jars, the American bombing runs almost never paused. Of the roughly 150,000 people who lived on the Plain of Jars before the 1960s, only about 9,000 remained at the end of the decade.37 After the war, one-third of the bombs dropped on Laos remained in the ground and undetonated.

The CIA found in Laos a country where it already had amassed influence, in the heart of a Cold War battlefield, and which had been largely ignored by the American military. These CIA leaders saw that an inexpensive—in American money and lives, at least—proxy war could be a template for fights in other places around the world, at a time when presidents were looking for ways to continue the Cold War without going through Congress or committing ground troops.

A critical part of our relationship with Laos involves addressing the legacy of war.

Laos is the ghost of American military interventions past.

Henry Kissinger is the greatest living war criminal in the world today, with the blood of millions of people in Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos and Chile and East Timor on his hands. He will never appear in a court or be behind bars.

When then President Barack Obama visited Laos in September 2016, he reminded us that America had dropped more than two million tons of bombs here in Laos—more than we dropped on Germany and Japan combined during all of World War II. It made Laos, per person, the most heavily bombed country in history.