PHONE HONG, Laos -- Nightmares about the most intense air bombardment in history have brought American war veteran Lee Thorn back to bygone battlefields of Indochina -- this time to help heal a still-suffering people, and himself.
Almost every night for three decades, Lee Thorn says, he dreamed of straddling a bomb that screamed toward earth and a group of children and animals it was about to kill. Bombs like those he once loaded onto Navy warplanes.Then the 56-year-old veteran came to Laos and Vietnam, to places he helped destroy, and the nightmares vanished. For the first time in 31 years, Thorn was able to sleep until dawn.
"You know, Laos isn't even mentioned in American high school history books," Thorn says, entering one of 10 derelict hospitals he has stocked with vitally needed medical supplies. "Yet what happened here was the worst of war horrors."
The last American bomb fell on Laos 27 years ago and the communists celebrate the 25th anniversary of their victory this year, but Thorn says reconciliation is far from complete and suffering from the war persists.
Unexploded U.S. ordnance, particularly small anti-personnel devices, continues to kill and maim hundreds in the Laotian countryside, especially on the Plain of Jars, the birthplace of Thorn's close associate Boonthanh Phommasathit.
As a young girl, Boonthanh fled the bombardment and several years after the Communist victory became a refugee for the second time when she, her husband and two babies escaped to neighboring Thailand. They later found asylum in the United States.
A social worker in Etna, Ohio, Boonthanh visited her homeland in 1991, finding wretched health conditions and poverty in Phone Hong, a town 70 miles north of the capital Vientiane, where her parents lived.
Nobody responded to her pleas for aid until she established contact with Thorn in 1997. In the 1960s, he had returned from Southeast Asia to become a prominent anti-war organizer and management consultant in San Francisco. He also suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, battling alcoholism, marital problems and insomnia.
Laos, Thorn says, preyed on his mind. It was the forgotten place of the Vietnam War and it needed help. One of the poorest countries on earth, Laos has among Asia's highest infant mortality rates, and life expectancy is 53 years. The health budget for Vientiane Province, where Thorn decided to work, comes to 50 cents per person a year.
In early 1998 Thorn and childhood friend Richard Stoll, a San Francisco attorney, hauled 200 pounds of medical supplies in duffel bags to Phone Hong. Boonthanh brought others.
Working alongside local doctors, teachers and authorities, Project Hearts and Minds-Laos will this year focus on providing water, sanitation and health education to poor village schools.
Assistance, Thorn says, comes from conservative Christians, Laotian communists, Vietnam War veterans and the U.S. Air Force, which recently flew in his latest aid package -- 10 tons of medical supplies worth $1 million -- free of charge.
Trying for more self-sufficiency, Thorn has launched the export of superb Laotian "Arabica typica" coffee to the United States, with profits to be put into the projects.
"What we are trying to do is the opposite of war," says Thorn, a soft-spoken man with a trim gray beard and middle-age spread. "Ours is a reconciliation project."
Thorn recalls that he didn't initially question America's involvement in Indochina when serving on an aircraft carrier off the coast of North Vietnam in 1966.
Many of the carrier's planes would unleash their cargo over the Plain of Jars, where U.S.-backed forces were attempting to stop Laotian communists and their North Vietnamese allies. The United States would eventually drop 2 million tons of bombs on Laos, more than was used by its forces during all of World War II.
What turned him against the war and set off his traumas, Thorn says, was a raid on the oil refinery in the North Vietnamese port of Haiphong. An intense firestorm was ignited that raged through surrounding residential areas.
The young navyman was tasked with screening post-operation footage of the airstrike -- three times.
Thorn points to a mural on the wall of a Buddhist temple near Phone Hong depicting a vision of hell: men speared, boiled and butchered like animals; women chained and raped.
He first came to this quiet, ancient sanctuary during his 1998 trip to Laos and Vietnam, and it's become a special place, the place where his nightmares stopped.
"To me this painting is war and it's set right next to images of great peace," Thorn says. "I began to understand that the villagers here, who have suffered so much, could accept such horror as a part of life, that they could still lead normal, daily lives.
"I had been blessed. I began to get a perspective on my own history," Thorn says as monks and village elders gather around him. "I began to understand that you can't bury evil."