Laos through my eyes – Michael Shaw

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.

I was the Second Secretary in the Embassy in Vientiane from early 1966 to late 1968. It was an interestng time as the extension of the Vietnam war lapped at our door. People we knew went out in a morning and never returned – for there were many air crashes in those days. Our DA was killed in one of them in early 1968 and our neighbour, a Lao Colonel, disappeared in his helicopter which must have crashed through the forest canopy and was never found. There was a Pathet Lao battalion in the city guarding Sot Petrasi the PL representative and on one occasion going to see him I got a PL bayonet in my ribs.

In 1966 there was very serious flooding as the Mekong broke its banks and flooded the city. The MIC site houses were deep under water.  The RAF sent up a Beverley transport plane and a helicopter from Singapore and the British Army a team of engineers to set up  a water treatment plant. Our house near That Luang and the embassy were on separate islands.  Many people drowned – on the way into the embassy by pirogue you passed bodies floating in the water. On a couple of occasions the RAF Helicopter winched me down home at the end of the day. An interesting but unpopular way of commuting as the downdraft blew away the turkeys we were fattening in the compound for Christmas and one set of my laundry disappeared over the wall too.

We had an RAF Single Engined Pioneer (SEP) attached to the Embassy. It was a plane which had been developed for the Malayan Emergency; very slow and incredibly noisy but it could land and take off from a football field. Flying up from Pakse into a headwind was a very lengthy experience. On one occasion it took so long that we arrived in Vientiane after dark and landed guided by smudge pots along the runway.

Our Third Secretary had his own much smarter faster quieter plane. On occasion when with him he would say “hello we have company” as a USAF Phantom on its way back from North Vietnam would drop down to see who we were.

In  October 1966  an internal dispute between General Thao Ma of the Air Force and the Army led to Lao pilots in their T28 planes attacking Army HQ. I drove the DA towards the events only to find the T28s diving to attack on a course right alongside us as we approached the HQ. We rushed round to my home, because it  was next door to the Army Commander’s villa, to find my wife and daughter under the stairs and the Vietnamese staff who knew all about these things taking down the china from the shelves in the kitchen.

The most notorious night club in Vientiane in those days was the White Rose (I do not think it is still there; I could not find it when we were back in Vientiane three years ago) and it would not be appropriate to go into details of the night the then British Ambassador and I got his personal car stuck in a storm drain just outside it. He did not appreciate my suggestion that we would have to wait until the following morning to get help to extricate it.  But the Tan Dao Vieng Restaurant is still there. That is where three of us gave a dinner for le tout Vientiane to celebrate the retirement of Trevor-Wilson our 1st Sec Information, one of the real old timers  of Indochina who had met Ho Chi Minh in 1945 and featured in the Quiet American (and more recently in the biography of Graham Greene).