Until They Are Home: Bringing Back the MIAs from Vietnam, a Personal Memoir

7. Vientiane and Phnom Penh

 IHAD TO FLY TO LAOS for a few days to do some business with Johnny Strain, the affable Special Forces lieutenant colonel who commanded Detachment 3 in Vientiane, the capital of Laos. Since we were not supposed to fly Lao Air, I had Mrs. Hoa specifically book a ticket on Vietnam Air. I asked the counter agent whether the flight was Vietnam Air, and, of course, it was, just as the ticket said. When I got to the bottom of the ramp, I could see the blue tail with the champa flower and leaf logo of Lao Air, not the white tail and golden lotus blossom I was expecting. It was, however, a new Airbus, which appeared to be in good condition, and the pilots were either Australians or New Zealanders. Since the flight took only an hour or so, it was daylight, the weather was good, and there were no more flights that day, I boarded—and hoped for the best. Over the rugged, unexpectedly high mountains of western Laos I drank my green tea while taking in the remoteness below. Although Laos is a oneparty Communist state, at the airport the authorities seemed rather uninterested in the arrival of foreigners. I was met by Johnny Strain’s Lao driver, who, palms together, greeted me with a bow and a gentle “Sabbai dee,” and whisked me pasted his customs buddy, who stamped my diplomatic passport and issued a visa on the spot. I was still in baggage claim when my cell phone rang; the caller was a radio reporter from Washington, D.C., who wanted an interview about the MIA mission. Since the Public Affairs Office at headquarters had not given me a heads-up, I knew she had bypassed the entire Department of Defense media chain. She had gotten my number from an AP reporter friend of mine Chapter 7 VIENTIANE AND PHNOM PENH  Chapter 7 in Hanoi. It was three am in Washington, D.C., so I said if she was crazy enough to stay up all night to get an interview, and since I had never done a radio interview from a cell phone in Laos, it would be just dandy to chat with her. We talked as I rode through the city. Vientiane did not seem like much of a city, just a large sleepy town on the upper Mekong River. Its true name is Viang Chan, which means Rampart of Sandalwood, after the sixteenth-century city fortifications, but the tortured French pronunciation became “Vien Chin” when Laos became a French colony at the end of the nineteenth century. Along the remarkably peaceful streets dozens of orange-robed Buddhists monks strolled with their gold-colored umbrellas. At first I could not figure out what was wrong, but then it dawned on me that I was missing the continuous Hanoi symphony of honking horns and whizzing motorbikes. An integral element of Vietnamese driving is honking every five seconds. The Lao, however, think this is just plain rude. There were certainly more cars in little Vientiane than in all of big Hanoi, but the Lao do not honk. The driving rules, or lack thereof, were about the same, but the Lao are much more patient than the Vietnamese. The Lao driver that Det 3 had arranged for me said that the only people who ever have wrecks in Vientiane are Vietnamese tourists. He suspected that people crashed into them just to stop their honking. At the same time, the Vietnamese considered the Lao to be crude, backwoods , unrefined country cousins. While this is mostly true—the Lao are Another golden Buddha, Vientiane, Laos. VIENTIANE AND PHNOM PENH  hardheaded and neither handsome, graceful, refined, nor sophisticated, unlike the Vietnamese—at least they do not honk. There were no taxis in Vientiane, but instead people moved about on three-wheeled, colorful motorbikes and minibuses with an open back, like Jeepnies in the Philippines, but much smaller. The ones with little wheels were called tuk-tuk; the shorter ones with big wheels were jumbos. I do not think I had ever seen so many golden pagodas, called wat, in one place, not even in Hong Kong. Everywhere you turned there was an incredibly beautiful temple or wall. Lan Xang Avenue was dominated by the Patuxai Victory Gate, a massive Asian version of Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, an Jumbo on the...