There was an American in Loas who was still his own man, and not just a cog in the war machine. He was not particularly good
at his job, but he had been a founder of the CIA's Laos war, and the usual standards did not fully apply.
In the six remote military backwater of the far northwest Tony Poe had about six thousand irregulars. He had Lao Theung
units--his best fighters-- and Lahu, Meo, Shan, Wa, and T'ai Dam units; plus odds and ends of lowland Lao, Thai Paru, and
Thai special forces. His largest single ethnic group was The Yao, or Mien, whose women wore a sort of red yarn ruff on the
collars of their blouses.The Yao soldiers sat in their bases in their uniforms, collected their paychecks, and did as little as
possible.
In the near-absence of combat with the enemy, Poe's main job was to keep his own tribal groups, Thais, and Lao from fighting
with one another. When Operation Unity--as the program was wistfully called--failed to minimize the ethnic quarreling and the
occasional knife stabbings, he built each group its own mess hall in his main base, Nam Yu. He tried to cut down on the
supplies and the weapons that vanished and reappeared on the black market, but he didn't have much luck with that, either.
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All in all, Poe had an army whose ethnic groups were on the verge of fighting one another more then they fought the enemy. He
had a hand in intelligence operations that others had started and nobody paid much attention to. He had cases of beer and
wiskey on the floor of his office near the big radio and no rules against drinking them. He had believed for many years that his
country was going to lose in Loas and South Vietnam, and he could feel, smell, and taste the failure of the whole enterprise. So
why not drink? He could find no reason.
The addiction of alcohol, the cravingthat is supposed to override free will, had no meaning to him. He was engaged in a sort of
voyage of self-actualization, finding himself through booze, even though whatever he gained he lost by the next morning and had
to start all over again. He drank because he wanted to, because he was bright and bored and wanted to see how close he
could get to the edge.
Once a month he visited his Meo wife and her children, who had moved to Udorn. More often Poe took a plane to Ban Houei
Sai, the nearest town on the Mekong, and from there to cities in northern Thailand like Chiang Rai, where if he was sober
enough and his fellow Americans hadn't locked him inside his hotel room to keep him out of bar fights, he brought five or six
whores back to his hotel room to prove his virility. The morning after generally found him bleary-eyed and unshaven near the
USAID warehouse in Ban Houei Sai. If there wasn't a plane flight back to his base at Nam Yu right away, the Americans
working there laid him down on a stretcher in the shade. They joked about "reversed medevacs" while Tony just lay there
appearing to sleep. But the next time Poe saw them, he repeated their conversations word for word.
Poe became legendary in the northwest for his drinking, for his crude behavior toward women, and for interfering with pilots by
grabbing the controls or else by simply passing out and slumping over onto the instrucment panel. The bar stories about him
multiplies--how Tony had conducted a serious conversation in a calm level voice while strangling a cat with one hand. How
when he didn't have bombs he dropped smooth river stones out of a Pilatus Porter onto an enemy position. How he carried
brass knuckles and rubber boxing mouthpiece in his pockets when he went into bars. How he kept enemy heads in a jar in his
house in Nam Yu.
In later years, Poe dismissed most of the stories as being exaggerated or untrue. He insisted that he had never collected enemy
heads and pickled them in whiskey. Or even hung them from the rafters. He allowed the he might have spent evenings with his
T'ai Dam troops, men tattooed from the waist up, who themselves had cut off enemy heads, stuck them on stakes, and thrown
stones at them while dancing around the campfire--but that was traditional for the T'ai Dam, he insisted. They'd been doing it
for centuries. Ears were another matter. He paid a bounty for enemy kills. "I used to collect ears, you know," Poe admitted
cheerfully. "I had a big, green, reinforced cellophane bag as you walked up my steps. I'd tell my people to put 'em in and then
I'd staple 'em to this five-thousand kip notice that this was paid for already and put 'em in the bag and send them to Vientiane
with the report.
"Sent 'em only once or twice, and then the goddamn office girls were sick for a week. Putrid when they opened up the
envelope, you know. Some guy in the office, he told me, 'Jeez, don't ever do that again. These goddamn women don't know
anything about this shit, and they throw up all over the place.'
"I still collected 'em, until one day I went out on an inspection trip with my Lao Theung and I saw this little kid out there, he's
only about twelve and he had no ears. And I asked, 'What the hell happened to this guy?'
"Someone said, 'Tony, he heard you were paying for ears. His daddy cut his ears off. For the five thousand kip.'
"I said, 'That's the end of this program, right now. It's supposed to be enemy ears, not this little guy.' And I reached in and gave
this little guy ten or fifteen thousand kip. Oh, that pissed me off." But the corruption of his bounty system angered Poe at least
so much as the injury to the boy.
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The Laotians were far less threatening to Poe. In the northwest there were no tribal leaders as powerful and charismatic as Van
Pao was in the northeast. The Yao, or Mien, were led by two brothers, Chao Mai and Chao La, who wore gold surrounds on
their front teeth as signs of their prosperity.
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When Poe arrived, a complex power struggle was already under way between the brothers, who were more interested in war
profits than in military gains. Poe found that the leaders were not only taking their customary cut of their troops' salaries, but
selling their equipment on the black market, usually to Burmese opium traders.
In April 1967, the military leader and older of the brothers, Chao Mai, died of a heart attack. Poe claimed he caused the heart
attack by confronting Chao Mai publicly with accusations of his graft. Few other knowledgeable Americans supported this
claim, but they were almost unanimous in agreeing that Poe wrecked the indigenous leadership structure. When Poe upped his
demands for reform, Chao La, the civilian leader, simply pulled out his base at Nam Thouei and moved to a village on the
Mekong River a short distance downstream from the point where Laos, Thailand, and Burma meet. Chao La did not renounce
his role as civilian leader, but he spent most of his time running a private sawmill and a series of refineries that transformed raw
opium into purer derivations, first a high grade of smoking opium and eventually heroin.
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Large economic forces were at work, and Poe had neither the power nor the inclination to stop them.
His employees normally avoided collecting information on the drug trade. (At the time that was a job for the Bureau of
Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, or BNDD, a predecessor of the Drug Enforcement Administration.) In Laos, the CIA's old
hands believed that the trade in unrefined opium was a local economic reality predating the war, a stand of the locals' economic
reality that couldn't be removed without unraveling everything else. You could have a war against the communists or a war
against the drug traders, they said, but you couldn't have both.
Being married to a tribeswoman who had traded in opium earlier in life, Poe had a special sympathy for the hill people who
grew and used the stuff themselves. He had seen the land-clearing fires set toward the end of the dry season--by day the air
thick with smoke, by night the fires glowing on distant mountainsides like red snakes. Normally the poppies were planted as a
secong crop between the stalks of corn and bloomed after the corn harvest. When the petals dropped from the poppy flowers,
the tribal women scored the remaining seedpods with a special three-bladed knife and scraped off the milky sap that seeped
out. "It's almost like latex, brown and pliable." Poe recalled. "A Meo or Yao man would take a ball of this putty wrapped in
something like banana leaves, put it in his pack, and take his donkey down to town and buy everything he needed for a year
with that one ball of opium sap. It's a mean of exchange. Every store has a scale and you take a chunk of that ball and put it on.
They had these goddamn beautiful little weights, shaped like ducks and other animals. Weigh 'em out and give 'em the goods.
The tribesman would put everything on his donkey and go back to the farm, and he'd have enough to last for a whole year."
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The American soldiers bought legal intoxicants like liquor and beer, and marijuana grown in South Vietnam and Cambodia. In
the mid-sixties, they began tp buy smoking opium in the shantytowns outside the military bases, followed by low-price,
high-quality heroin. Most of the opium from which the heroin was refined had been grown in Burma, but the rest was from
Laos, and almost all of it was transshipped through Laos by America's so-called military allies.
In Laos itself the key player was Gen. Ouane Rattikone, the royalist commander in chief. He and others like him made no
particular distinction between making money from drugs and making money from skimming payrolls, selling military equipment,
granting monopolies and favors, and other kinds of graft. They belonged to power pyramids, where those at the top needed
income to spread around to their subordinates, so their subordinates would have reason to support the man at the top.
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The Opium War of 1967, as the newspapers dubbed the incident, was one of the few times that drug transactions emerged into
the open. It resulted in sensationalist and inaccurate reporting, and later in some serious studies.
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At some point after the Opium War, Poe was asked to report on the higher levels of the drug trade in addition to carrying out
his regular duties. He wasn't really sober enough, or analytically minded enough, to do a comprehensive job of if himself. The
trade was far too large and shifting for any one man to understand completely. From poppy to powder, the opium and heroin
trade covered a thousand miles of territory, from northern Burma through Laos and then forking into South Vietnam and
Thailand for shipping overseas.
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The main target of Poe's boozy reporting in the northwest was General Ouane. Rumors and folklore notwithstanding, Ouane
was genuinely the big man of the Laotien drug trade, the chief of a cabal that met monthly to straighten the accounts. The center
logistical activity was the airport at Ban Houei Sai in the far northwest, where Burmese drugs in various stages of chemical
refinement were stored prior to reshipment.
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Poe kept a loose eye on the man the U.S embassy had no intention of arresting. They played host for each other at parties,
during which Ouane discreetly discussed business deals out of Poe's hearing. Later they went off carousing together.
"I'd take him to Chiang Rai to get laid. I'd get him some real beautiful women." remembered Poe. Sometimes they took a gang
of Thai, Lao, and American colleagues along, traveling by Air America helicopter, Ouane thinking he was hoodwinking Poe,
Poe keeping an eye on Ouane's drug trade activities, and the two of them and their pals going off to the bars and whorehouses
together, as the war ground on.
