The Secret War: Tragedy at Tham Piew

“Though it has a king, a government and an army, and can be found on a map, Laos does not really exist. Many of its estimated 2,000,000 people would be astonished to be called Laotians, since they know themselves to be Meo (Hmong) or Black Thai (Tai) or Khalom (unidentifiable ethnicity) tribesmen. It is a land without a railroad, a single paved highway or a newspaper. Its chief cash crop is opium.”"Laos: The Four Phases of Nonexistence", Time magazine, 1962

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On May 25, 1964, a squadron of U.S. Air Force (USAF) T-28D ground-attack aircraft with Royal Laos Air Force markings took off from Udon Royal Thai Air Force Base in eastern Thailand and flew eastward over the churning brown current of the Mekong River into Laos airspace. The Air America pilots climbed above the rice paddies and karst cliffs that characterize countryside of Khammouane province, then banked north toward the highlands of Xieng Khouang province, the frontlines of the Laos civil war, marking the first sortie of what would come to be the known as the Secret War.O

Only two years earlier, the United States, Soviet Union, China and 11 other countries signed the International Agreement on the Neutrality of Laos in Geneva, which was intended to prevent any nation from engaging in direct or indirect interference in the internal affairs of Laos, forming military alliances with Laos, or establishing military bases in the fledgling eight-year-old nation-state. The agreement was a symbol farce. It was well-known that the U.S. had been providing military aid to the Royal Laos Army since the mid-1950s, while North Vietnam, China, and the Soviet Union were supplying Pathet Lao forces with military, economic and logistical support. Far from an armistice, the terms of the agreement set the stage for a clandestine war that would need to be hidden from the public eye. To that end, the U.S. hired “civilian” air corps to operate missions out of a network of secret airstrips and refueling stations known as “Lima sites” strategically located across the remote highlands of Laos and recruited Hmong and other hill-tribe mercenaries and trained them in guerrilla warfare. Black-ops were in part funded through the Golden Triangle opium trade.

Operation Barrel Roll was initiated in August 1964 by U.S. Pacific Command in Hawaii with two primary objectives: provide air support for Vang Pao’s Hmong army in the strategic strongholds of Xieng Khouang and disrupt the Ho Chi Minh Trail supply lines that North Vietnamese forces (PAVN) were using to circumvent the bombed-out no-man’s land that separated North and South Vietnam, known as the demilitarized zone (DMZ). The Ho Chi Minh Trail was a labyrinth of jungle paths and dirt roads developed by Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodia resistance fighters during the First Indochine War against France. By the time the Americans arrived, it had evolved into a warren of undetectable paths, shielded almost entirely by jungle canopy, spanning hundreds of miles across the frontiers of three wartorn Southeast Asian countries.

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© Somsanouk Inthongsai

On April 11, 1967, B-52 Stratofortress bombers flying out of U-Tapao Royal Thai Airfield southeast of Bangkok dropped the first payloads of cluster bombs on eastern Laos, violating both the Geneva accords and the agreement between the USAF and Royal Thai Navy. It mattered little, the USAF war machine had been unleashed. Wave after wave of B-52s carrying up to 50 two-meter-long, five-hundred pound cluster bombs scraped the Laotian skies at 50,000 feet. Each bomb casing opened in mid-air and released around 150 bomblets that fanned out over an area the size of a football field during descent. Upon impact, each bomblet decimated a radius of up to a 150 meters with shrapnel and ball bearings.

Between 1964 and 1973, cluster bombs rained down upon Laos in a deluge of iron and fire. On average, U.S. planes dropped one bomb every eight minutes for nine years. In November of 1968 alone, U.S. bombing missions over the Ho Chi Minh Trail reached 12,800. In total, 580,000 bombing missions were carried out on Laos and more than two million tons of cluster bombs were deployed on an ostensibly neutral country with a population of less than 3 million people. The covert U.S. air campaign left Laos the most heavily-bombed place on earth.

Those in targeted regions did what humans have done to survive war for millennia––they fled to the forests and hid in caves. All but the most defiant among the villagers of Ban Bouam Long, Ban Nasavang, Ban Namuen, and Ban Faay in Xieng Khouang province left their homes, their crops, and their cattle for the relative safety of Tham Piew cave. In the dark recesses, encased in limestone, they listened for the distant, low rolling thunder of B-52s that foreshadowed the coming storms.

Classroom in Tham PIew Cave. © Somsanouk Inthongsai

Over the next four years, the refugees undertook the Herculean task of transforming Tham Piew into a village. In the “rooms” extending off the 300-meter-long main corridor of the cave, teams of village carpenters furnished the communal living quarters with bunk beds and a classroom with wooden tables and a chalkboard. A communications center was built, as well as a hospital, where a handful of nurses and doctors provided medical care for wounded soldiers, the elderly, and the few women who gave birth. A fresh water spring flowed beneath the rock floor and the communal kitchen ensured no one went hungry. Buddhist monks built a shrine consecrated with statues of Buddha in one of the deepest rooms.

The cave dwellers of Tham Piew ventured out into the forest only at night. And then, only to gather food, dig for potatoes, or hunt for small game with bow and arrow. Occasionally, a few brave souls would tempt fate and return home to harvest crops from their now-unkempt, bomb-cratered fields. Then, on November 24, 1968 everything changed: a U.S. reconnaissance plane detected activity near the cave.

One of the few survivors, Nang Boua, who was just 13-year-old at the time, remembers: “One night I heard a terribly loud explosion far from my village. I knew there were some people who had refused to leave their homes and were still living in their villages. My grandfather was one of them. The next day, bad news arrived: our village had been bombed and our old house was on fire. My grandfather was severely injured. My auntie rushed back to our village to check on him, so I went with her. We had spent three nights in our burning village when the worst news came.”

Part of the cave that collapsed after the missile strike. © Somsanuk Inthongsai

While Nang Boua was hiding with her aunt and wounded grandfather next to the smoldering ruins of their family home, Tham Piew had been discovered. She only heard the plane. What she didn’t know at the time was that the first missile went off target and hit the side of the mountain. The second hit the mouth of the cave opening and gave the pilot a clear view of the inner chamber. The third entered the long tunnel and exploded deep inside the living quarters, killing hundreds of people in a flash of fire, flesh, rock and bone. “The last missile caused the cave to collapse and killed everyone I knew,” remembers Nang Boua. Twelve families were wiped from the earth that day.

Grandfather Wat was born in 1950 and grew up during the hostilities of the “Three Princes” era, when the leftist “Red Prince” Souphanouvong, neutral Prince Souvanna Phouma, and right-wing royalist Prince Boun Oum were in the throes of a power struggle following independence from France. By the time he turned 14 years old, Young Wat had already joined the communist party and was serving as a village soldier for the Pathet Lao.

“I served my village by guarding and protecting it from the enemy. During 1964, the US was bombing all over our country, especially in Xieng Khouang province. The villagers couldn’t stay in their homes; they all fled and hid in Tham Piew cave. In the cave there were mostly elders, women and children. The men had joined the army, aside from a few young, healthy adults whose job it was to find food in the jungle due to the bombing raids.”

On November 24, 1968 at 13:30 p.m. an American pilot shot a missile into Tham Piew cave and killed 374 innocent lives … After the cave collapsed, the Muang Kham district governor assigned village guards and soldiers to bring the dead bodies from Tham Piew cave to be buried. It took them four days because they had to bury the bodies between 7 p.m. and sunrise. The [rescue teams] dug seven huge graves out of bomb craters near the cave because it was faster to bury them that way, although they dug some of the graves near the entrance to the cave.

After the Vientiane Treaty was signed on February 7, 1973, which marked the end of the nine-year-long U.S. Secret War in Laos, Grandfather Wat stayed near Tham Piew and worked for the Xieng Khouang Ministry of Agriculture until he retired in 1986. Since then, the 71-year-old has served as information secretary at Tham Piew museum.

“Many years later, in 1999, authorities from the local Muang Kham district announced that Tham Piew had been designated a historic site by the central government. And on November 24, 2001, the 33rd anniversary of the massacre, Tham Piew was declared a national memorial site dedicated to the innocent lives lost during the Secret War. A ceremony was held and the presiding holy monks chanted for the lost lives.”

The hospital located deep inside Tham Piew cave was reduced to rubble. © Somsanouk Inthongsai.

Though his fate is to tend an flame of remembrance, he confesses: “It has been hard for me, for all of us who fought against the U.S. during the war. I’d like people to visit Tham Piew to learn about this history and the damage caused by the U.S. bombings.”

Noudaeng was a 29-year-old soldier patrolling a jungle path one morning in 1972 near Xieng Khouang province, not far from the Vietnamese border, when he stepped on a landmine. “The explosion nearly blew my leg off, and the force of the blast hurled my body into the forest.” He was rushed to a nearby hospital in Vietnam, where surgeons managed to save his life but had to amputate his leg. “When I came home,” remembers the now 78-year-old Noudaeng, “I felt trapped. I couldn’t walk. I had to use crutches. But it’s really difficult to plow the land and follow the buffalo with crutches! Then I had an idea. I fabricated a homemade leg with bamboo.” He laughs, “I thought I was the first man to invent a prosthetic leg!”

With every passing monsoon the landmines and unexploded ordnance (UXOs) left behind from the Secret War settle deeper into the soil. Of the 80-90 million bombs dropped on Laos that did not detonate upon impact, only around 1 percent have been cleared. In one nine-square-kilometer tract of land during 2020, Mines Advisory Group (MAG) Laos specialists cleared more than 20,000 unexploded ordnances. That is roughly the number of people who have been killed in Laos by bombs since the end of the war. And there's still no light at the end of the tunnel. According to the U.S. government's congressional research service, it could take 100 years or more, at the current pace, to clear all the remaining UXOs.

Cratered paddies in Khammoune Province southern Laos. © Somsanouk Inthongsai

Sarah Goring, Public Information Manager at MAG Laos, recalls visiting a village in Xieng Khouang, where she watched MAG clearance teams remove 65 bombs from one schoolyard. Some of the rusted explosives were discovered in the dirt beneath the playground. “Teachers and kids were going about their normal routine, despite the fear.”

Between 1993 and 2016 the United States allocated around $100 million to clearing unexploded bombs and landmines in Laos, which equates to around 1/500th of the nearly $50 billion spent on the Secret War. When Obama became the first sitting U.S. president to visit independent Laos in late 2016, he pledged $90 million over three years to escalate the clearance missions, publicly stating what Laotians have been saying for decades: “The United States has a moral obligation to help Laos heal.”

The Secret War is an appropriate name. Few Americans are aware of that their country instigated a nine-year-long covert reign of terror in Laos during the Vietnam War, and no mention of the incident at Tham Piew can be found in wartime news reports. Only Grandfather Wat, Nang Boua, and a handful of witnesses and rescue team members can speak to the tragedy with any real authority. Their generation will go to their graves with some solace, knowing their sacrifices and enduring traumas helped create a nation. Victory will remain bittersweet, however, and the obligation of the U.S. will remain unmet, until the remaining tens of millions of UXOs are eradicated from the soils of Laos.

*Interviews have been edited for brevity and clarity.