Word: branfman
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Preface, by FRED BRANFMAN...
...Fred Branfman writes about is the U.S. bombing campaign in Laos, hardly an overworked subject, and the "voices" he records have rarely been heard. They come from the ground beneath the air war, and they belong to peasants who lived on the Plain of Jars in Laos' verdant Xieng Khouang province, one of the secret battlefields of the war. Eight years ago, the U.S. Mission in Laos designated their farms and villages part of a new Communist "social and economic infrastructure"; in the years since, the Air Force has bombed them with increasing intensity...
Over the years some 60% of the population of the Plain of Jars has been evacuated to refugee camps elsewhere in Laos. Branfman, a former International Volunteer Services education adviser and Lao-speaking freelance journalist, visited more than a dozen camps around the capital of Vientiane between September 1969 and February 1971, when he was abruptly expelled from Laos, he believes at the request of the CIA. Before he left, Branfman was able to interview more than 1,000 refugees. He collected folk songs and poems about the air raids, as well as 30 handwritten eyewitness accounts, 16 of which...
...Force. Despite inevitable repetition, and the primitiveness of their writings and drawings, the peasants make that point far more vividly than Western antiwar critics with all their articulate and occasionally overwrought outrage - Author Branfman included...
...Fred Branfman interviewed over 1000 refugees in government centers during 1970. Branfman reported that "each, without exception, said that his village had been totally levelled by bombing. Each, without exception, said that he had spent months or even years on end hiding in holes or trenches dug in foothills...