MIND-BLOWING MEKONG
Imagine a flight of US jet bombers zooming in low over your village and dropping their payload of devastating 500lb bombs. Now imagine one of those lands right on your entire extended family — brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, your grandparents — and obliterates every one of them along with your family home.
Mr Si Pan doesn’t have to imagine, because he watched the entire drama unfold from behind the meagre protection of a large tree, through his nine-year-old eyes. Those same eyes now well with moisture as he relates the event from 50 years ago in far northeastern Laos.
“ZooooooOOOOOMMMM! BAM!!!” he chokes on his words. “I still feel it, same like yesterday.”
Which is why 23,000 Lao villagers, and indeed the whole Pathet Lao politburo, moved into the karst limestone caves from 1964 to 1973 in Vieng Xay while American fury rained down on them. Si Pan’s classroom was in
