Laos through my eyes – Colin Butters

This article is part of a series of guest blogs contributed by Brits who have lived and worked in Laos, or who have other interesting links to Laos. 

The British Embassy plane, a de Havilland Beaver piloted by Major Alan Calder, Assistant Military Attaché, delivered me to Pakse in September 1972, together with my motor bike. As a volunteer with VSO, my job was to oversee the technical running of the Lao National Radio station in Pakse, and to continue the training of the Lao technicians.

Sitting at the confluence of the Se Done and Mekong rivers, Pakse gave the impression of a frontier town. The still sizeable French population were mainly teachers at the lycée, and the town continued its existence as a fading outpost of French colonialism, but now being usurped by the large USAID base near the airport. The only “aid” I ever saw being delivered by the Americans however was the re-housing of refugees displaced by the bombing of their villages.

It was hot, dusty and extremely noisy. The front dividing the Pathet Lao/ North Vietnamese forces and the Lao Government/Thai mercenary forces was 22 kilometres away on the Paksong road. Every day there were sorties of Lao Air Force T28 fighter/bombers to and from the front, and a lot of helicopter traffic.

Artillery exchanges could be heard day and night, and just occasionally I would be woken up at night by the enormous explosion of a B52 bombing strike. Regular truck-loads of Thai mercenary soldiers would pass through the town, firing their rifles into the air, on their way to the front.

I lived in a village on the edge of the town, in a house on stilts, shared with another VSO. We were a short walk from the Mekong, and in the evening in the dry season often used to walk down to the river to swim with the villagers. In the summer for a few weeks the whole village was flooded, and we went in and out by boat.

Working with the Lao technicians was a delight. I continued and expanded the maintenance programme established by my predecessor; I ran technical courses, and a basic English course. I spoke passable Lao for most of this, supplemented by English and French, and I felt part of a small family. And we kept the radio transmitters working!

The hospitality extended to me was tremendous, and I was invited to parties, weddings – and funerals. Some weekends I travelled into the countryside, sleeping in villages and even in a farmer’s hut in the rice-fields, the tranquillity contrasting with the bedlam of the town.

The road to Champassak remained open, and we regularly went down to Wat Phu by motorbike at weekends. The other towns in the south – Saravane, Attapeu, Paksong – were off-limits. I remember visiting Kong Sedone a few days after it had been bombed by the US Air Force. Nothing was left standing, except the sad concrete pillars of a few houses. Hundreds of people were displaced, but that didn’t seem to matter; the town had been liberated from the communists.

In February 1973 a cease fire in the war was declared, and Pakse suddenly became quiet. Otherwise there were no overt changes, and life in the town continued much the same. The complete takeover of the country by the Pathet Lao was to take another two and a half years.

When my VSO year was up, I was offered a contract to stay with the project, but working in Vientiane. This I accepted gladly, and stayed in Laos until July 1975 – a time that saw momentous political change in the country.

In recent years I have returned to Pakse twice. There is now a bridge across the river, connecting to Thailand; coffee plantations have been re-established on the Paksong road; more hotels have been built and, helped by the regular bus service from Vientiane, tourism is increasing.

I re-established contact with some of my former colleagues, now mostly retired, at the radio station. What was extremely pleasing to see was that, despite the privations of the years 1976 to 1992, they had somehow managed to keep the station on the air.