Pics from a bike ride down the trail.  Pretty interesting.

Relic Pics

Article about the ride

Thanks.   Those are fascinating photos.   I'm not sure I'd use a bomb as a bell.  

Thanks for posting these. How about using an artillery shell for a blacksmith's anvil?

Amazing photos! Thanks for posting that.

It would be awesome to take that tour.

Fascinating and eerie at the same time. I just read about Igloo White. It actually worked - well the technology worked. But was very expensive and yet the supply lines were still going, so ultimately was a failure. Not sure how much smiling I would be doing on the tour.

Pretty cool trek.  I'm surprised the old, hot ordnance hasn't been harvested and sold to the Taliban or others.

"Fucking savages"
 

very cool find

Most likely it was harvested in the 60's-70's for use by the Viet kong.



 

... pretty cool website
 

Amazing photos.  Looks like a fun trip.  Its interesting to see how some of the scrap is being used today.

"262 meter Bamboo bridge at Ban Along over the Xe Lanong river, the villagers will charge you 20,000 kip to cross, a bargain at any price."

20,000 kip = $2.50

Damn, that picture of the rear end/half the Jolly Green..... I'd like to know that story.

Great links.  

"That was a worthy adversary."

Why would the Taliban go all the way to Laos when Afghanistan is a weapons black market crossroads and the Soviets left plenty of ordnance behind?

Holy shit, that's not my cup of tea....using unexploded ordnance for homes and shit!

Just sent that to a bunch of buddies who had an intimate relationship with Trail back in the late '60s and early '70s.  Good thread, OP.
 

He really should mark the location of that F4 engine on a map. Very well could be MIA remains nearby. Lots of guys still missing.

Just fucking amazing, things like that make me want to go and take the wife unit on a history trip ...

Neat!

I remember the stories of SF's and LRRPS mining the trail, it took balls to ride thru an active mined area

varmint Kong...

I would like to have a couple of old  and rusty  bombs for garden ornaments. Cool pics

I'm sure a lot of the items on display would classify as UXO.   I would keep my distance and not juggle it.

Thanks for sharing the link, very cool history to look through in those pics.

I'd be more worried about coming across a snake crawling through one of those tanks.

Jesus... all that UXO and he's just monkey fucking around with it.... to hell with that.

Great Read, Thanks

From the article...

"Even today, almost 40 years after the last bomb was dropped, UXO is a deadly legacy of the war and still kills around 200 people a year."

It's amazing how much stuff is just sitting around waiting to be found, and how they find alternative uses for all that stuff. Thanks!

Interesting! Not long ago I was doing image searches of abandoned/destroyed equipment from the Vietnam war.

Thank you OP.

Thanks for that link.  Really cool.

As an ex- EOD type and Vietnam war buff, I would love to do a tour of "the Trail".

Some of the ordnance they show was REALLY bad news back in the day. Especailly the "Quickstrike" mines (actually MK 36 Destructors) he was posing with in one of the pics. They were acoustic. magnetic influence, and seismic fused. They started out as shallow water naval mines, but someone figured out they worked really well on land too.

Nice photos. Thanks

The article is dated August of this year.  I would bet they know the area.  Still, anyone how anyone at JPAC?  Looks like the dude kept good records of his trip.

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The name of that province?district? comes up at least once on google in an interesting .gov archive.

40+ years later and they are using scraps of our old ordnance for housing material. Looks like communism really worked out well for them.

What spectacularly beautiful country.

That's as much a characteristic of their rural riverine life style IMO.  Those are some pretty remote areas.

very cool link
 

Interesting
 

cool

...says the guy in a nation where people in equally remote areas use plywood, blue tarps, and corrugated metal sheets to build their dwellings.  Except we call them "rednecks".

Pretty cool, and that had to be one hell of a march.

Thank You very much for this.  Having read a ton of work about the trail, to see this, somehow brings it alive.  I wish the V.A. would sponsor trips like yours for vets that want to go back.  There would be alot of healing.

Glad its not a foreign concept to you. It will be so much easier for you to adjust to life after Obama is done with us

Has the US officially acknowledge our operations in Laos yet?

They can build anything out of bamboo

Nice link OP-thanks for that.  I would love to go there and see it.

My BIL was a USAF intel officer.  He was assigned to a joint service command at NAS Barbers Point, HI that looked for U.S. MIA remains in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam.  He worked with a Vietnamese official from Hanoi named Mr. Dik to find those remains based on conducting interviews with locals that had seen U.S. aircraft crash during the war.

He would fly into South Vietnam at an old US airbase, then travel up Hwy 1 through Hue City (still heavily damaged at the time), across the old DMZ, and up into what had been North Vietnam.  He said he saw a lot of the heavy labor of road work being done by the women, while the men operated road construction equipment.  

On a few occasions, he even stayed in Hanoi at an old hotel.  The command would issue MREs for them to eat, as the local food was thought unsafe to eat.

He said that yes, the rats really were as big as cats.

He told me that Hanoi looked like it had been caught in a time-warp.  No new growth since the French had pulled out of Indochina.  Of course, this was 1989-1992, so maybe things have changed now.  

He worked for a USN Admiral, and reported to a US Army Col. that was convinced that American POWs were still alive in SEA and being held captive.  My BIL disagreed.  He even briefed Gen. Colin Powell at one point when he visited.

They did find the remains of an Air Force captain that had crashed in his F4 (in Laos or Cambodia-can't remember).  They found the rubber soles of his flight suit, a captain rank insignia, and a couple of teeth.  That's it.  The captains teeth were collected, and flown back to the U.S. in a C5 that carried his flag-draped casket.

My wife's son is married to a gal from what used to be called Saigon.  She goes back now and again.  She's been up north near Keh Sahn.  I've seen the pics-very lush country.  There are more westerners in the country now that trade has been opened up, and she would often get asked to translate for people once they found out she spoke engrish.  The locals are also very interested in what America is like, and will talk to her for as long as she's willing to answer their question.