I had the privilege to be able to visit this place a few years ago. I rented a motorcycle and drove around to the 3 largest jar sites. What this article fails to mention is that the surrounding area is one of the most bombed places on earth.
American bombers would drop their unused payloads here after bombing runs over Hanoi during the American/Vietnam war. Many of the bombs were not armed prior to the drop, they just couldn't land with the extra weight and sometimes clouds prevented them from hitting Hanoi.
As a result there are millions of unexploded ordinances still in the fields here. Certain areas are marked as safe and going off trail at the jar sites is highly discouraged. Some NGOs are working in the area but the USA govt never offered to help clean it up.
The Unexploded ordinance teams (UXO) do an amazing job. I was there backpacking in 2004 on a bus and was stopped in a traffic jam on a remote mountain side, loads of army looking people about. I had no idea what was going on and the locals couldn't explain... then a huge blast went off up the hill. What was striking was 1. how close the thing was to a village, 2. How dense the jungle was around the area for these things to hide and 3. How normal this process seemed to the locals looking at their reactions.
In the video you can see the old bomb craters and some jars are scarred or broken by the bombing. The entire country is battle-scarred and an amazing place to visit.
I don't know what it's like these days but a couple of decades ago the Plain of Jars was one of the strangest historical sites I've visited. Partly as it's one of the few attractions where there were no other tourists to be seen there or in the surrounding towns.
Agree. I remember distinctly meeting exactly one other tourist the whole time I was there, though to be fair it was cold and the off season. Still one of the coolest and weirdest places I have ever been.
> Between May 1964 and the summer of 1969, the Plain of Jars was heavily bombed by the U.S. Air Force (USAF) (see Secret War) operating against North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao communist forces.[6] The USAF dropped more bombs on Laos, primarily the Plain of Jars, than it dropped during the whole of World War II. This included 262 million anti-personnel cluster bombs. An estimated 80 million of these did not explode and remain a deadly threat to the population.
The plain of jars area specifically was a dump site for bombers that could not drop their bombs over Hanoi due to weather. I believe that's partly why so many did not explode, they were not armed/activated prior to the drop. There are other parts of Laos where the USA essentially abandoned their Hmong alles in Laos leaving them to be slaughtered. There are generations of fighters living in the jungle to this day.
We started our involvement in the “secret war” under President Eisenhower.
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“In early 1955, a United States Operation Mission was set up in Laos. Its primary purpose was supply of military defense materials to the Royal Lao Government; 80% of its budget was dedicated to this purpose.[42] The United States paid 100% of the Lao military budget.
President Eisenhower pioneered the use of the CIA to perform coups. During the same period the CIA created and armed rebel groups in Indonesia to overthrow Sukarno. They even bombed ships and ports to destabilize the economy. A total of over 4 million people were killed to achieve the removal of Sukarno and installation of Suharto. 3 before Suharto and over 1 million killed after Suharto took over.
This overthrow and political cleansing method was considered a major success and was subsequently named the Jakarta method. JFK then went on to employing the Jakarta Method everywhere he could.
Title can be interpreted like the recent post, "Inheritance was invented as a performance hack"[0] where a user assumed it was going to be about money. And here, the joke about maven.
For some period written history on this little known empire from the perspective of the Chinese, see Manshu which I have been translating on Wikisource https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:Manshu
American bombers would drop their unused payloads here after bombing runs over Hanoi during the American/Vietnam war. Many of the bombs were not armed prior to the drop, they just couldn't land with the extra weight and sometimes clouds prevented them from hitting Hanoi.
As a result there are millions of unexploded ordinances still in the fields here. Certain areas are marked as safe and going off trail at the jar sites is highly discouraged. Some NGOs are working in the area but the USA govt never offered to help clean it up.