Why read Voices from the Plain of Jars?

Book cover of Voices from the Plain of Jars: Life Under an Air War

Book description

During the Vietnam War the United States government waged a massive, secret air war in neighbouring Laos. Fred Branfman, an educational advisor living in Laos at the time, interviewed over 1,000 Laotian survivors. Shocked by what he heard and saw, he urged them to record their experiences in essays, poems,…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Voices from the Plain of Jars as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Tom Vater

Author

During the CIA’s covert war in Laos between 1964 and 1973, the US dropped more than 2 million tons of bombs on the country, a planeload every 8 minutes for 9 years and makes Laos, along with Cambodia, which shared a similar fate, is the most bombed country in the world. To this day, countless people, many of them children, are maimed and killed by unexploded ordinance that remains hidden in the country’s soil. Fred Branfman, a young American stationed in Laos in the late 1960s, discovered the bombing and exposed the CIA’s covert campaign of terror.

Branfman not only…

From Tom's list on The best books about Laos and the CIA's covert war there.