Talking Crap about the Ho Chi Minh Trail at Pattaya City Expats Club

July 10, 2013

Surveillance Device fashioned as animal excrement

That's what I'll be doing this Sunday, 14th July, as I give a talk on the Ho Chi Minh Trail during the Vietnam War and as it is now, which is the subject of my novel BACK.

Russian anti aircraft gun protecting the Trail

Russian anti aircraft guns used to protect the Trail

I just spent a day going through a lot of great photos for the slide show I will use to illustrate my talk, including the headline photo, which is actually a movement sensor shaped like a turd that was dropped by the US onto the Ho Chi Minh Trail to pick up movement along it.

B-52 strike seen from the air

Other photos I plan to use is the one above, illustrating a B-52 strike on the Trail, as well as the one below to show the aftermath of these bombings.

The Ho Chi Minh Trail in southern Laos

The North Vietnamese were tenacious in repairing the Trail after bombings such as these, and in the end the US had no answer to it, as ever-increasing amounts of material, food and soldiers moved down it from North Vietnam, through Laos and Cambodia and into South Vietnam to fight the US and the South Vietnamese armies.

The Ho Chi Minh Trail has rightly been described as one of the greatest feats of military engineering ever undertaken.

Cluster bombs on the Trail in Attapeu

Nowadays it is littered with unexploded ordnance (UXO) of all kinds, making it a hazardous place to wander without a guide, and I will be showing some slides of this ordnance and of the UXO Lao people going about their dangerous work in the jungles and rivers along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

POWs/MIAs Left Behind in Laos

I'll also be talking about the POW and MIA issue in Laos, and visits to some notorious and remote areas in Laos where POWs were reported as being held long after the war had ended.

Preparing cluster bombs for detonation

I'll be giving the talk at the Tavern By The Sea Restaurant (formerly Henry J Bean's) at the north end of Pattaya Beach Road. Breakfast starts at 9am.