The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (16 page)

The first written reference to the Meo is in a Chinese text more than four thousand years old. The Chinese called them Miao, which means ‘barbarians’ (the Meo returned the compliment by referring to the Chinese as ‘sons of dogs’). Revolt against imposed Chinese rule resulted in displays of the decapitated heads of the insurrectionary Meo leaders in wicker baskets. A large number of Meo moved into Laos in the mid-nineteenth century, driven south by competing Chinese opium farmers who destroyed their poppy fields. The Meo, who believed the world reached only as far as a man could walk, expanded their knowledge of the universe through these forced migrations.

The Meo inhabited only the mountaintops and, when forced to travel, moved through the lowland valley and plateaux without stopping. Obliged to move every ten to fifteen years because of their slash-and-burn style of agriculture, they edged slowly south, sweeping across the mountains like a blight. After first tasting the soil of a chosen site to see if it was sweet on the tongue - a test for lime content - the Meo were said to plow with fire and plant with the spear. By the time the Americans arrived in Laos, the Meo population - estimated to be between 300,000 and 500,000 - were burning four hundred square miles of land a year, a figure which experts calculated would destroy the country’s forests by the end of a century.

A Meo village is an authoritarian hierarchy, headed by the eldest male, although decisions are made after consultations with family heads. Their houses are primitive wooden structures, dark and airless, although tradition demands that a distant mountain be in view from the entrance. Meo women each wear several pounds of elaborately crafted silver, making them the most elegantly dressed but worst-housed people in the world. Babies wear silver necklaces after birth to indicate to the spirit world that they belong to a family and are not slaves.

The spirit world was enormously important to the Meo, who as animists believed that spirits -
phi -
lived in everything - mountains, rivers, animals, and people. Rainbows represent the spirit of the sky bending to drink; lightning occurs when the same spirit of the sky is angry. There were both good and bad phi, and a great deal of the Meo’s time was spent consoling them with gifts of rice and elaborate rituals and taboos.

Evil spirits could enter a man’s home in the form of a bird roosting in the roof or a pregnant woman of another clan. A provoked trail spirit could sprain ankles or break limbs. There were strong taboos to avoid offending the spirits, such as only bathing during certain times of the year and not wetting the body above the knees or below the shoulders at any other time lest enraged water
phi
cause sickness. All illness was the result of evil spirits luring the soul from the body, and death resulted when it failed to return. Any sickness demands an elaborate ritualistic ceremony of exorcism, in which a shaman, wearing a black mask over his head, gathers up friendly spirits to lead the lost soul back to its master’s body.

Magic apart, the Meo relied upon opium as medicine - accepted socially by the Meo only for use by the old and chronically infirm - and exotic substances traditionally associated with promoting health and long life: such as skin of
gaur
(wild buffalo), deer’s soft horn, marrow of tiger bone, gall of bear and python. As they had built up no resistance to drugs, the Meo responded to the smallest doses, and CIA medics reported that a single shot of penicillin brought results that were nothing less than miraculous. American medicine was so effective that even Band-Aids were revered, which the Meo thought were applied by Americans because they contained some magical power which drew out bad phi. (Meo fighter pilots would sometimes show up on the flight line after a heavy night with a Band-Aid firmly affixed to the middle of the forehead as a cure for the headache of a hangover.)

Most of the Meo have a deep, traditional loathing of the Vietnamese. ‘The Meo were not so much pro- or anti-French as against the Vietnamese,’ Trinquier explained. ‘They were the most undisciplined people in the world, against all authority. And the French thought it was best to let them handle things in their own way. We didn’t make them pay any taxes or do anything they didn’t want to. Naturally, they were against the Vietminh, who were trying to organize them. So the Meo were the best because they resented the Vietminh the most.’

(They also resented, to a lesser degree, the lowland Lao, who, like the Chinese, looked down upon them. A minority of the Meo, hostile to the traditional leadership mostly because of clan rivalries, fought on the Communist side throughout the war.)
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Trinquier himself was an unconventional officer, a scholarly warrior of peasant stock, and he knew and understood the Meo after spending six years in the 1930s in command of an outpost in the wildest and most isolated part of the Sino-Tonkinese border region, known without exaggeration as One Hundred Thousand Mountains. Initially, he recruited two thousand
maquisards
but within eighteen months he had a force of twenty thousand. Each unit of a thousand men was commanded by a French officer, each one a bachelor to enable him to marry a local girl to secure good relations. (Trinquier married the daughter of a regional chief - ‘a highborn girl, not a whore. She was the go-between. I went to all the weddings and the holidays, and she told me how to behave.’)

These early efforts were crowned with success, and team after team was dropped into enemy territory, where they lived off the land and fought a guerrilla war. The CIA took an early interest in Trinquier’s force, and after he gave the Agency’s then director, Allen Dulles, a complete report, the Americans provided a generous amount of weapons and assigned a case officer to him. The rapid growth of the program led to enormous logistical problems in feeding this army of
maquisards
.

In order to raise cash, Trinquier instigated an ingenious scheme, called Operation X, involving the Meo cash crop - opium. French intelligence had reported that the Vietminh were financing the arms for a division a year from the profits made from the Meo’s opium. The intention of Operation X was for the French to deny the Vietminh the opium by buying it themselves, and to use the profits to finance
their
war.

Unknown to the government in Paris, or even the French authorities in Hanoi, Trinquier bought the entire Meo opium crop and transported it to Saigon at eight hundred kilos a time and sold it to the Emperor Bao Dai for fifty thousand francs a kilo. The profits were used to finance the
maquisards
’ war. ‘It was strictly controlled,’ Trinquier said, ‘even though it was outlawed.’

Later, the Americans chose to turn a pragmatic blind eye to the opium trade - never illegal within the borders of Laos itself - instead of becoming directly involved as had the French, which meant they lost control to a group of high-ranking Laotian military officers who became immensely rich international drug peddlers. Early efforts to contain the trade, by attempting to limit the high command’s use of aircraft, was a failure, as was a later clampdown, and the actual outlawing of the trade in 1971 after intense U.S. pressure. In Laos opium was an inescapable fact of life.
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As the
maquisards
grew under the French, Touby Lyfoung - the nominal head of the Meo, known to foreigners as the ‘king’ of the Meo - presented twenty young men to Colonel Trinquier whom he considered exceptional. Among them was Vang Pao. ‘And he was the best,’ Trinquier said. Vang Pao was sent for officer training to the French military school of Cap St. Jacques, near Saigon, where he earned a commission in the regular French Army. Vang Pao, whose original home was the 4,500-foot-high plateau of Nong Het, had been at war since the age of thirteen, when he acted as interpreter to a small group of Free French officers and men who had parachuted onto the Plain of Jars to stir up resistance against the Japanese. His first experience of actual battle came after the Japanese surrender when local Vietnamese residents tried to gain control of Xieng Khouang Province before French occupation troops arrived. Battle followed battle; the young Vang Pao helped clear Chinese Nationalist troops out of one province, and fought continually in harassing actions against the Vietminh in the mountains of northern Laos.

Perpetual war turned the stocky five-foot-four peasant into the natural leader of the Meo. His power grew out of the early support of the French, but he also commanded the respect of the Laotian leadership, under whom he quickly rose to the rank of major. No Meo had ever reached such a high rank in the Royal Lao Armed Forces before. The massive resources later put at his disposal by the Americans enhanced his prestige among his own people, while his ability to supply rice and medical supplies at will, move villagers by helicopter on command, and control U.S. air power gave him the status of a minor deity. But mostly his leadership rested on the force of his own personality, which was energetic, volatile, direct, and fearless. He carefully chose each of his six wives from large, prestigious families, so that he might cement or extend his influence among the various Meo clans.

He could also act like a warlord: one of his officers, caught selling Air America rice to the Pathet Lao, was found dead with a bullet between the eyes, and prisoners were often executed. As the war continued, without any apparent end in sight, the loss of life among the Meo led to some resistance to his leadership, and certain village headmen refused to fill their quotas of young men for the army. Vang Pao could respond ruthlessly by cutting off such villages from American rice drops, and would not hesitate to order his own T-28s to bomb and strafe villages that collaborated with the enemy. (At the same time, by Meo custom, Vang Pao became responsible for the widows and orphans created by the war, doling out money and favors to those who approached him.)

Despite his commitment to the war he was also dedicated to the progress of his people. A visit to the States in the late 1960s had turned him into something of a visionary. He saw the automobile factories in Detroit and the Saturn rocket at Cape Kennedy, but was most inspired when he visited the section of Williamsburg, Virginia, which was preserved in its original colonial state. He noticed that even the Americans had used wooden plows and weaved on hand looms - and that their muskets were inferior to those used by the Meo (beautiful copies, which took two years to make, of the guns first supplied by the Jesuits to the Chinese). If the Americans had used such primitive tools only two hundred years before, and were now putting men on the moon, what might the Meo achieve in the next two hundred years?

He attempted to curb his people’s poetic but superstitious view of the world by holding seminars in Vientiane for hill tribe leaders in which they were given talks on technical subjects, medicine, and history. He deplored his people’s primitive methods of slash-and-burn agriculture. ‘In one year a single family will chop down and burn trees worth six thousand dollars and grow a rice crop worth two hundred and forty dollars. Our people must come down from the mountains. We must demand our share of fertile, irrigated land.’
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By Meo standards, Vang Pao was a wealthy man. This was partly as a result of his control of his people’s opium crop - although even by 1972 a Meo farmer received only fifty dollars a kilo for opium that would retail in New York, as refined heroin, for twenty thousand dollars. His wealth also stemmed from the unlimited funds at his disposal from his American patrons. This has led to charges of corruption.
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But personal gain was not a priority for Vang Pao, who never shirked the dangers of the battlefield for long and also put what he perceived to be the best interests of his people first. Besides, his ability to enrich himself was admired by his followers, and the exterior signs of his advancement merely proved to the Meo the high regard in which he was held by the Laotian leadership and the United States.

At the beginning of 1953, Vang Pao was part of a hopelessly inadequate force of French and Laotian troops facing an invading army of Vietnamese, which was not only numerically superior but better armed and organized. The Royal Lao Army numbered no more than ten thousand men, while there were less than three thousand French troops in the country, many of whom were not combat personnel. Pitted against them was an army almost the size of the Japanese forces that invaded Burma in 1942. Four infantry divisions of the Vietnamese People’s Army crossed into Laos, each ten thousand strong and equipped with heavy mortars and recoilless cannon. Each division was also supported by fifteen thousand civilian porters carrying ammunition and supplies. In addition, there were three thousand Pathet Lao troops. And this formidable force was personally led by the brilliant Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap.

The general’s plan of attack was the blueprint for all subsequent invasions of Laos. One division advanced in a wide arc over the top of Indochina in order to strike against the royal capital of Luang Prabang; the main force, consisting of two divisions, moved to conquer the central Plain of Jars, thus directly threatening Vientiane; the remaining division penetrated deeply into central Laos and attempted to reach the Mekong.

The French and Laotians were badly mauled, but by fighting fierce rearguard actions - sometimes defending outposts to the last man - they slowed down the Communist advance sufficiently to allow a vast airlift of reinforcements and supplies onto the Plain of Jars. The plain was held and the provincial capital of Xieng Khouang recaptured from the Communists. Bitter fighting in the Laotian panhandle similarly succeeded in blunting the Communist thrust there. But the royal capital was still in danger, and on April 23,1953, Gen. Raoul Salan, the commander in chief of all French forces in Indochina, personally visited Luang Prabang to inform the king of Laos, Sisavang Vong, that the city could not be held and would have to be evacuated. The king, at that time the oldest reigning monarch in the world and descended from an almost unbroken line since the fourteenth century, refused to go. ‘The Vietnamese did not succeed in taking Luang Prabang when they attacked us in 1479. Neither will they succeed this time.’
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