What happened in Laos?

The U.S. bombing of Laos (1964-1973) was part of a covert attempt by the CIA to wrest power from the communist Pathet Lao, a group allied with North Vietnam and the Soviet Union during the Vietnam War. … Today, Laos is the most heavily bombed nation in history. Here are facts about the so-called secret war in Laos.

The Laotian Civil War (1959–1975) was a civil war in Laos which was waged between the Communist Pathet Lao (including many North Vietnamese of Lao ancestry) and the Royal Lao Government from 23 May 1959 to 2 December 1975.

The CIA was responsible for directing natives of Laos to fight the North Vietnamese. Although such efforts were ended at the signing the Paris Peace Accords, the CIA believed it a success as it managed to fight the enemy to a standstill and combat the communist threat. They saw it as a victory and as an accomplishment.

The Secret War began about the time the United States became actively involved in the Vietnam War. Two years after the U.S. withdrawal from South Vietnam, the Kingdom of Laos was overthrown by communist troops supported by the North Vietnamese Army.

In March 1969, President Richard Nixon authorized secret bombing raids in Cambodia, a move that escalated opposition to the Vietnam War in Ohio and across the United States. … He hoped that bombing supply routes in Cambodia would weaken the United States’ enemies. The bombing of Cambodia lasted until August 1973.

The Vietnam Conflict Extract Data File of the Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS) Extract Files contains records of 58,220 U.S. military fatal casualties of the Vietnam War.

The Lao kingdom of Lan Xang included all of northeastern Thailand as recently as the early 18th century. … Thailand’s northeastern region, Isan, has particularly strong Lao roots.

In the late 1960s, when the Vietnam War spread into Laos, the United States recruited the Hmong to fight against communism. Wanting to hold on to their land and the independence they had maintained for thousands of years, the Hmong saw communism as a threat to their autonomy.

The CIA’s mission in Saigon was to directly assess the nationalist politicians. The primary cause and motivation behind the intervention of the U.S. and CIA through 1954 was to gather intelligence, and provide interpretations of the events that occurred in Indochina through an American perspective.

The bombings were part of the U.S. Secret War in Laos to support the Royal Lao Government against the Pathet Lao and to interdict traffic along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The bombings destroyed many villages and displaced hundreds of thousands of Lao civilians during the nine-year period.

A post-independence civil war began, which saw the communist resistance, supported by the Soviet Union, fight against the monarchy that later came under influence of military regimes supported by the United States. After the Vietnam War ended in 1975, the communist Pathet Lao came to power, ending the civil war.

The Socialist Republic of Vietnam is a one-party state. A new state constitution was approved in April 1992, replacing the 1975 version. The central role of the Communist Party was reasserted in all organs of government, politics and society.

Lao is the language of the country, Laos, a neighbour to Thailand. … Lao and Thai languages are very similar to each other. In fact, the two languages are linguistically similar, though their writing script varies a bit. Thai is the native language of Thailand and is spoken in minority in Cambodia.

Lao is truly fascinating language to learn. … The main areas of difficulty are going to be the tonal nature of the language the complexity of the writing system. Vocabulary – Laos has a number of loanwords from Pali and Sanskrit. There has also been a lot of language exchange between Lao, Thai and Khmer.

Lao does not take really long to learn (compared to other languages that might take many years or decades). … Both Lao and Thai are from the Tai-kadai language class, so by learning Lao first as the foundation, you’ll be able to understand a variety of Lao regional dialects and Thai quicker.

No. Maybe in the past but Laos is currently a full puppet of China along with Cambodia. … The Laotian People’s Revolutionary Party is a Communist-influenced from Vietnamese Communist Party. Both of them are ruling two countries, respectively.

The U.S. was motivated by the desire to buy time for its withdrawal from Southeast Asia, to protect its ally in South Vietnam, and to prevent the spread of communism to Cambodia. American and both South and North Vietnamese forces directly participated (at one time or another) in the fighting.

Impact. The Pentagon Papers revealed that the United States had expanded its war with the bombing of Cambodia and Laos, coastal raids on North Vietnam, and Marine Corps attacks, none of which had been reported by the American media.

The last US ground troops left Vietnam in March 1973, after which the peace talks once again broke down. Fighting resumed and South Vietnam eventually surrendered to the forces of North Vietnam in April 1975. Approximately 2,700,000 American men and women served in Vietnam.

America “lost” South Vietnam because it was an artificial construct created in the wake of the French loss of Indochina. Because there never was an “organic” nation of South Vietnam, when the U.S. discontinued to invest military assets into that construct, it eventually ceased to exist.

CampaignDeadMissingWest until May 31, 194466,2663,218

The modern nation-state Laos emerged from the French Colonial Empire as an independent country in 1953. Laos exists in truncated form from the thirteenth century Lao kingdom of Lan Xang. … The borders of the modern state of Laos were established by the French colonial government in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Laos is known as “The Land of Million Elephants” for years. But unfortunately, Laos doesn’t have that many elephants anymore. Through the long history, Laos used to be called “Lane Xang”, which can be translate to be “The Land of Million Elephants”. It was named as “Lan Xang” by the King Fa Ngum in 1354.

Laos use to be known as the Kingdom of Lan Xang (1354 to 1707), which translates to “Land of a Million Elephants”. As Laos had extensive forests and sparse human population, wild herds of elephants roamed all over. … Elephants continue to be considered a sacred animal, which Lao people believe will bring them prosperity.

Laos was founded in the 14th century with the kingdom of Lan Xang, which means “Land of a Million Elephants.” The kingdom ruled until the 18th century, after which Laos came under Siamese (Thai) rule. After a period of French rule, Laos gained its independence in 1949.

Laos: a landlocked country in Southeast Asia with some of the shortest people in the world! Laos is also famous for having the tallest treehouse in the world, the oldest human fossil in Southeast Asia, and is considered one of the fastest-growing economies in all of Asia.

Communist Laos (1975–1991)

Definition of Hmong 1 : a member of a mountain-dwelling people inhabiting southeastern China and the northern parts of Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand. 2 : the language of the Hmong people.

The Hmong are members of an ethnic group that have not had a country of their own. For thousands of years, the Hmong lived in southwestern China. But when the Chinese began limiting their freedom in the mid-1600s, many migrated to Laos, Thailand and other neighboring countries.

In the two worst years of the both the American War in Vietnam and the Secret War in Laos, 18,000 Hmong soldiers were killed in combat, in addition to thousands more civilian casualties.

The People’s Public Security of Vietnam (Vietnamese: Công an Nhân dân Việt Nam) is the main police and security force of Vietnam, under control of the Ministry of Public Security. It is a part of the Vietnam People’s Armed Forces and under the de facto control of Communist Party of Vietnam.

Though the Hmong had no desire to play political roles for other nations, they loved freedom and know that there would be little freedom under Communism. They were threatened by the intrusion of North Vietnamese troops into Laos, so the U.S. then encouraged them to fight and provided training and weapons.

They sent intelligence reports to OSS agents stationed in China. The team provided training, medical and logistical assistance to Hồ Chí Minh and the Việt Minh in 1945.

About one third of Laos remains contaminated with UXO left behind from the Vietnam War, including about 80 million cluster munitions.

Between 1965 and 1975, the United States and its allies dropped more than 7.5 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia—double the amount dropped on Europe and Asia during World War II. Pound for pound, it remains the largest aerial bombardment in human history.