A Thousand Ways to Die

It seems apparent that death comes easy in the "Land of a Million Elephants" and it really does.  It is not just the bullets, hand grenades and booby traps you have to survive, but the the terrain, the weather, the diseases, the flora and fauna, and a whole lot of other things.  One of the very first lessons I learned was that you have to be a lot more vigilant on back trails as they are the ones most often booby trapped.  The main trails the villagers use along with enemy soldiers are watched for the most part, so in almost every case, they are not booby trapped.  Moving down the main trails in daylight is a guarantee for capture or death.  But at night, the villagers and enemy soldiers tend to stay in their compounds and houses or encampments. You can move, if you are very careful, down the main trails with some success.  A lot of times the soldiers watching the trails fall asleep or are otherwise occupied.  

Using the back trails is sometimes necessary, but must be done carefully.  Some areas are not booby trapped at all, others are heavily so.  Vigilance is the key here.  Looking for things out of place...things just not right.  Dead falls, punji pits, trip lines, etc., were all menaces of the back trails.  It was not normal for Bailey or myself to endure a lot of this because we usually just did the insertion and extraction duties, not make the humps with SF SOG guys.  Later on, some real hard core combat controllers were embedded with the SOG teams, but not at this particular time.  Now that I have said that, let me clarify a little.  We never knew what the other air force personnel in the panhandle and southern Laos were doing.  Some were with the Butterfly program and others could have done work with the SOG teams along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.  Someone else would have to furnish that information. We only knew about our part of the Laotian War as we only operated in Northern Laos from Vientiane north to Chinese border and east to the North Vietnamese border. 

 

The flora and fauna could be a menace as well.  There were many kinds of poisonous plants, razor grass, and thorn bushes that would rip the clothes right off of you if you walked just a few hundred yards in them not to mention what they did to you body.  You certainly didn't want to try and run through them. 

Snakes were another problem altogether.  There were a lot of snakes.  This was the land of snakes. Leave them alone and they would probably leave you alone.  There was at least four kinds of Cobras. The Monocled cobra was the most prevalent of the Cobra family.....also the most aggressive.   The King Cobra was a big poisonous snake.  However, left alone it was pretty docile.  I saw several of these while in Laos.  For me the Russell's Viper was as dangerous a snake as there was.  It is almost invisible in the jungle, it packs a lot of venom and it tends to be aggressive.  More people die from Russell's Viper bites than from any other poisonous snake  in S.E. Asia.  There was a statistic provided by the Australian embassy that 37 out of every 100 poisonous snake bites ended up in death.  With Russell's Vipers, it was much higher.  The reason that 63 people did not die from poisonous snake bites is they probably did not get envenomed by the bite.  A great many times people were bitten but it was a defensive strike and the snake did not inject venom.  But if you sustained a real bite, there was not much help if you were out in the boonies.  The only real infirmary was in the Australian Embassy in Vientiane.  If you were close enough to aircraft, you might be flown to somewhere in Europe or Japan where you could receive treatment, but even then you had to be awfully lucky to survive.  The other dangerous snake (just because it likes to live near humans) is the Common Krait shown in the left picture.  The Russell's viper is on the right.  The Kraits venom is ten times more powerful than a King Cobra.

.

Then there were the insects.  Scorpions as big as your hand (not deadly but very painful) and foot long centipedes head the list.  I have been stung by both and neither is a pleasant experience.  There were other biting bugs and stinging ants in plentiful supply.  But the one insect that would drive you nuts was the mosquitoes.  They could, at times, descend on you like a moving cloud.  Sometimes you could use a repellent supplied by the military, but out in the bush, the enemy could smell it a mile away so you didn't use it very often if at all.  

Next for me as a miserable creature were the leeches.  They were everywhere during the rainy season.  I was familiar with leeches because I had dealt with them when I was a kid.  We had a creek we swam in that at times had leeches in it.  My grandmother would put salt on them and they would then fall off.  In Laos, it was almost impossible not to have them attach themselves to you.  And once you removed them, or they got the meal they wanted and fell off, you bled like a stuck pig for hours.  Not dangerous but a nuisance of an unbelievable nature and you looked just like you felt, a bloody mess.

Then there were tigers, elephants, leopards, black bears, and a host of other mammals to contend with in the jungles and mountains of Laos.  I saw several tigers while in N.E. Laos and had personal encounters with two.   I heard a lot more of them at night in the mountains as they roared looking for a mate or after a kill.     I also did see some that hunters had killed for the skins and internal organs which had some perceived medicinal value to the Chinese.  Never saw a bear in the wild, but did see two leopards.  However, some villagers used elephants and did see a few of them, never in the wild however.  Someone asked about crocodiles.  I don't think that there was any large crocodiles left in northern Laos by the time I got there.  I saw some three to six footers, but never a big one.  There could have been some further south, but never saw a large on up north.  They were pretty well hunted out in the 1950's. 

Then there were the inevitable aircraft crashes.  Whether from mechanical trouble or from ground fire, many Laotian and Air America aircraft and helicopters made hard landings.  Sometimes the aircrews walked away from the crashes, sometimes they didn't.  The UH-34 helicopter was made in part from magnesium which when set on fire went up like a giant sparkler.  If it got hit just right, even if you managed to get it on the ground, you could still be burned alive from the fire before you could get out.  SAR (Search and Rescue) missions were run by Air America when it came to Laotian and Air America aircraft downings.  At some point MACV and the USAF ran SAR for USAF aircraft, but at times the only SAR available were the Air America aircrews.  One of the times that the helicopter I was riding in went down was when we were on an SAR mission looking for a downed C-123 out of Savannakhet in the panhandle of Laos which caused an SAR mission to retrieve us.  There was a lot of ground fire going on but we never saw or heard anything that would indicate we had been hit, but that's sometimes the case.

 

Anyway, this is just a few of the many ways to die in Laos.