VANG VIENG, Laos -- The Central Intelligence Agency's "secret war" in Laos ended 50 years ago, silencing Lima Site 6 and other isolated airstrips which helped the U.S. carpet bomb this tiny impoverished nation during the regional Vietnam War.

Lima Site 6, set among Vang Vieng's jagged karst mountain peaks, is now a deserted stretch of black asphalt speckled with squashed trash, 90 miles (150 kms) north of Laos' capital Vientiane.

Debris on the airstrip's gravelly surface includes empty plastic waterbottles, a dirt-stained cotton medical mask, and a faded Queen of Spades.

The strip resembles an empty urban parking lot stretched into the exaggerated rectangle which allowed Air America to land and take off amid the karst peaks.

During the 1961-1975 war, the CIA's Air America flew thousands of flights each day, lifting off from more than 200 scattered covert Lima Sites -- military code for unimproved "landing strips."

Those planes transported Americans, Thais, and U.S.-led minority tribal Hmong mercenaries alongside the dead and wounded, plus "hard rice" -- ammunition -- and refugees.

Small U.S.-piloted planes able to do short take-offs from the sites included Helio Couriers and Pilatus PC-6 Porters.

Flights from Lima Sites also supported U.S. long range patrol troops and the allied Royal Laos Army.

Communist Pathet Lao insurgents and North Vietnamese Army forces often shot them down.

Pilots depended on Lima Sites to launch Air America rescue and recovery flights.

Some Lima Sites included ground-based Tactical Air Navigation radar, orchestrating heavy U.S. aerial bombardments flying from bases across the Mekong River in neighboring Thailand.

U.S. Air Force personnel at those Lima Sites were deceptively "sheep dipped" in civilian clothes.

Fifty years later, Vang Vieng is no longer a small village alongside Lima Site 6's perimeter near the tumbling brown Song River.

The perimeter is ringed by new hotels, shops, restaurants, and apartments.

A short stroll away is Vang Vieng's tourist-packed Night Market offering handicrafts, snacks and clothes.

Vang Vieng has morphed into a dusty town of ramshackle buildings and new construction, initially attracting international backpackers lured by hedonistic "full moon parties" on the Song River.

About 10 years ago, the communist regime cracked down against illegal drugs and safety problems after several foreigners died from toxic moonshine drinks, or drowned while drunk, or on psychedelic "magic mushrooms."

A new demographic of Chinese, South Korean, Japanese and other tourists now includes elderly groups.

On a recent night on tiny Vang Vieng's dilapidated main street, ear-splitting off-key Mandarin karaoke singing punctuated an otherwise languid ambiance.

Apathetic-faced young women wearing heavy makeup waited for customers in neon-lit nightclubs next to food stalls, outdoor cafes, massage parlors, and tourist agencies offering visits to stalagmite and stalactite caves.

A few streets away, foreign backpackers clustered in Vang Vieng's breezy, laid-back, wood-and-cement restaurants eating Lao food, pizza, and mango milkshakes while gazing at nearby mountainous spikes of sheer and eroded limestone swathed in lush forests alongside the Song.

Shops and hotels offered hot air ballooning, kayaking, rides on pot-holed roads to touristy "blue lagoons," and inner tubes on the river for swimming.

"Para-motor gliding" involves a Mad Max-like contraption combining a big, open-air gasoline engine welded under a large parasail.

Metal bars extending downward support a seat for a helmeted customer to sit in the lap of a local pilot who accelerates the noisy engine behind himself, which spins a giant circular fan grafted onto the engine for propulsion.

After Pathet Lao guerrillas achieved victory in April 1975, newly united communist Vietnam propped up the hermetic regime in Vientiane.

Hanoi temporarily stationed 40,000 Vietnamese soldiers in Buddhist-majority Laos, influencing its defense, foreign, and other key ministries.

Deep-pocketed Chinese, Thais, and others have since moved into Laos, building hydroelectric dams on the Mekong and other rivers while Beijing and Bangkok try to stop Chinese gangs laundering money at Laos' casinos and smuggling drugs across its borders.

About 80 hydroelectric plants are in operation or being constructed.

Electricity is Laos' billion dollar, number one annual export.

Most of the hydroelectric power is sold to Thailand, Vietnam and China.

Laos, "the battery of Southeast Asia," needs just a few jolts of electricity because its scattered population is only seven million.

Laos attracts international investors by offering inexpensive real estate, low paid workers, loose regulatory enforcement, and special economic zones with financial sweeteners.

International corporations mine Laos' abundant minerals and are also involved in banking, irrigation, transportation and other sectors.

However, a low-educated workforce, complex bureaucracy, limited transportation routes, alleged corruption, and an inefficient legal system dismay many businesses.

In Vang Vieng, meanwhile, tourists arrive each day on glistening, high-speed, Chinese-financed electric trains.

The railway began in 2021 connecting southern China's Yunnan province through Boten, northern Laos' now-booming border town.

The railway line reaches Laos' capital Vientiane, stopping in Luang Prabang, Vang Vieng, and a few other Chinese-built stations.

The trains slice northern Laos with a north-south line linking Beijing and Bangkok -- via Vientiane -- which needs to finish a trackless gap across several miles on the capital's outskirts.

The multi-billion dollar, 570-mile (915-km) railway includes hefty Chinese loans to Laos which is reeling from the debt.

Operated by the Laos–China Railway Co., the trains are part of Beijing's financial and strategic Belt and Road Initiative.

Each spacious, immaculate, Chinese-built station is secured with CCTV surveillance and topped by a gigantic Lao-style, curved upsidedown V-shaped roof.

Photo identification is required when entering and departing the airconditioned stations. A machine scans luggage.

"Eating wild animals is equivalent to consuming diseases," a big sign warns in English, Chinese, and Thai below a photo of a lizard.

Traveling at speeds up to 100 miles per hour (160 kms per hour), the sleek Chinese trains mimic features of commercial passenger aircraft including, upon arrival at each station, an advisory in Lao, Chinese, and English to slide away food trays and put seats upright.

Young women in formal traditional Lao clothes inspect tickets and push snack carts down the aisle.

A sign showing what is "not allowed on train" includes "radioactive materials" and "smelly things."

During a journey 50 years ago in February 1975 -- two months before the war ended -- foreign civilians could visit only Vientiane and Luang Prabang, 210 miles (340 kms) north of the capital on Route 13's winding, bumpy, climbing road which passed near Site 6.

The U.S. Embassy posted warnings in Vientiane's shops advising international backpackers not to go to Luang Prabang because the two-day road trip was not protected from communist Pathet Lao who recently murdered several young travelers, no matter what passports they possessed.

Upon arrival, Luang Prabang appeared desolate, silent, and cheerless.

People in the small former French colonial outpost warned us not to go beyond a few short dirt lanes leading to the Mekong -- especially not to the river's other side -- because of the communists.

Backpackers could stay only one or two nights in a bleak cement room with well-worn cots.

Fifty years later, Luang Prabang is the most popular stop on the Lao-China railway, half-way between China and Thailand.

Luang Prabang became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1995, protecting its exquisite Buddhist temples alongside the Mekong.

Tourists marvel at restored 1930s French colonial architecture, gentrified cafes, traditional teak homes, jungle waterfalls, and riverboat trips to caves sheltering hundreds of small Buddha statues.

Mansions now punctuate Luang Prabang's side of the river for several miles, defending their eroding muddy fronts by dumping huge rocks as walls.

Piles of freshly sawed branches and lumber await extraction at cement stairway jetties.

Upriver, the Lao-Chinese train crosses the Mekong via a slender railway bridge.

"During the war, my parents were farmers near Luang Prabang," said a Lao translator, staring across the river at dense forests.

"They told me how they had to hide in caves and valleys because of the bombs."

Relations between the U.S. and Laos appear to be slowly improving, especially in the street.

When then-President Barack Obama visited Laos in 2016, he went to Vientiane and Luang Prabang.

His Laos trip was seen by some as Washington's international "pivot" to woo Southeast Asia away from China's embrace.

Mr. Obama cooled himself while sightseeing in Luang Prabang by drinking from a freshly chopped coconut at a cafe, resulting in photos of him wearing sunglasses, holding a big green coconut, and sipping it with a straw.

A lifesize cutout of the best photo is now wedged among two coconut trees as if he is sipping in front of the renamed Obama Coconut restaurant along the Mekong River.

Further south, the Mekong broadens and reaches the capital, Vientiane.

Wealthier Thailand's raucous nightlife flashes on the river's other side.

In February 1975, Vientiane's wide streets were nearly empty, circling defunct French-built fountains, while Laos braced for the communists' victory.

Baking in the heat, Vientiane was infamous among foreign backpackers who frequented its squalid opium dens.

Vientiane is now much bigger but still has a tranquil pace despite ambitious construction projects, modest airconditioned malls, and museums.

Shops sell imports from China and Thailand because Laos is mostly rural without an extensive manufacturing base.

Extravagant, French-style baroque mansions dot Vientiane's nondescript streets.

"Family members of the government live in those," said a Lao entrepreneur who asked not to be named because the regime punishes free speech.

"But I don't care, because my life is getting better. I'm making more money."

The capital's impressive Lao People's Army History Museum documents victories over French colonialists, "U.S. imperialists," and their allied "Thai invaders" who together manipulated a "Lao puppet military" and Vientiane's "henchman government."

Artifacts include a U.S. two-seat AD-5 Skyraider attack bomber made by Douglas Aircraft Co., used "to bomb the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos from 1965 to 1968."

A "skull of airplane" exhibit reveals charred wreckage of a U.S. F-4H Phantom II supersonic jet-fighter bomber, resting among the communists' Soviet MiG jets, a 1961 Soviet tank, and other weaponry.

Political life in the tropical former French colony is still often described as "sleepy" because the one-party regime remains hidden in opaque secrecy.

Red communist flags, each emblazoned with a yellow hammer-and-sickle, fly from many buildings in Vientiane, Vang Vieng, and Luang Prabang alongside the country's red-and-blue striped national flag which displays a large central white dot.

Washington's financial aid helps the debt-strapped regime, and U.S. forensic investigators receive cooperation while searching the rugged countryside for American servicemen missing from the war.

In 2024, the U.S. Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) announced discovery of U.S. Air Force Sgt. David Price's remains amid forest-covered karst peaks at Lima Site 85.

Sgt. Price was operating the airstrip's navigation beacon when he was killed in 1968, aged 26.

"The few Air Force technicians -- who were listed as Lockheed employees during the mission -- wore civilian clothes, had little to no combat training, and were supposed to be unarmed though they had brought a cache of rifles and grenades," Task & Purpose military news reported.

During the war, the CIA recruited more than 27,000 mostly illiterate, animist, highland Hmong and other tribesmen.

Americans and Thais taught the Hmong to be soldiers led by Hmong Gen. Vang Pao against communist Pathet Lao and intervening cross-border North Vietnamese troops.

While working for the CIA, Gen. Vang Pao allegedly abused Lima Sites to smuggle heroin on Air America's planes, which Langley denied knowing about.

Much of that Lao heroin was "ultimately for (American) G.I. addicts in Vietnam," according to Wisconsin–Madison University history professor Alfred McCoy's book, "The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia."

Vang Pao died, aged 81, in California in 2010.

Washington was haunted by its failure to destroy North Vietnam's legendary, cross-border, jungle-hidden Ho Chi Minh Trail.

The Trail's multiple routes carried Hanoi's military supplies south through Laos, dodging Lima Sites' monitoring, to reach Vietnamese fighters attacking U.S.-occupied South Vietnam.

In response, Lima Sites multiplied, expanded, and became increasingly busy across the landlocked country bordered by Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, China, and Myanmar.

"After a year of recruiting and training agents, William Young [a CIA paramilitary commander] had begun sending the first Lahu and Yao [tribal] teams into China in 1963," from Nam Yu's Lima Site 118 Alternate in northwest Laos, said Mr. McCoy.

From 1962-1966 the CIA's clandestine headquarters was in Long Tieng, known as Lima Site 20 Alternate.

"The CIA would expand Long Tieng's airstrip into a mile-long, asphalt, all-weather runway...becoming by the mid-1960's one of the largest American military installations on foreign soil," wrote Keith Quincy, Eastern Washington University's chair of the department of government.

"Toward the end of the war, air traffic at the CIA base was heavier than at Chicago's O'Hare International airport," Mr. Quincy said.

"Eventually, Long Tieng would outgrow its original design as a secret CIA paramilitary training center. By war's end, Long Cheng had a population of nearly 50,000, making it the second largest city in Laos," Mr. Quincy wrote in his book, "Harvesting Pa Chay’s Wheat: The Hmong & America's Secret War In Laos."

To limit American casualties, U.S. Special Forces trained 4,000 Thai "Tiger Soldiers" (Tahan Sua Pran), and flew them from Thailand to various Lima Sites.

Meanwhile, in a failed bid to obliterate the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the U.S. dropped on Laos the equivalent of the total bombardment on Europe during World War Two.

"From 1964 to 1973, the Lao Peoples' Democratic Republic suffered protracted and intense ground battles, as well as some of the heaviest [U.S.] aerial bombardment in world history," The U.S. Embassy in Laos said.

"It is estimated that during this period more than two million tons of ordnance fell on Lao territory," the embassy concluded.

Laos is the size of Utah.

Two million tons was equivalent to one ton of explosives for every person in Laos, then populated by two million people.

CIA paramilitary officer Anthony Poshepny flew in and out of Lima Site 20 Alternate leading his Hmong fighters.

Mr. Poshepny eventually demanded they bring him dead Laotian communists' ears and chopped-off heads to prove they were killing the enemy.

Popularly known as Tony Poe, Mr. Poshepny described during our 2001 interview how he dropped a couple of those human heads onto his Laotian enemies in northwest Laos while flying over the targets.

Mr. Poshepny boasted about impaling Laotian communists' heads on spikes in the jungles, and joining his Hmong in celebratory tribal dances around the dead heads.

Mr. Poshepny also talked about filling a diplomatic bag with human ears and sending it from his Lima Site to the American Embassy in Vientiane after U.S. officials denounced his Hmong as ineffectual.

"People questioned that whether he [Poshepny] was killing as many Pathet Lao as he said," James Lilley, 1965-1967 deputy CIA station chief in Laos, said.

"And so he did this thing with cutting off their ears and sending us a bag with their ears," Mr. Lilley said in a documentary film about Lima Site 20 Alternate titled, "The Most Secret Place on Earth" by Marc Eberele and Tom Vater.

***

Richard S. Ehrlich is a Bangkok-based American foreign correspondent reporting from Asia since 1978, and winner of Columbia University's Foreign Correspondents' Award. Excerpts from his two new nonfiction books, "Rituals. Killers. Wars. & Sex. -- Tibet, India, Nepal, Laos, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka & New York" and "Apocalyptic Tribes, Smugglers & Freaks" are available at
https://asia-correspondent.tumblr.com