Biography Manophet Lone Buffalo Christopher Whitehouse

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1 Biography Manophet Lone Buffalo Christopher Whitehouse Photo courtesy of Boon Vong/Legacies of War Manophet was born in a hole in the ground during the rice planting season during the latter half of His family had had to abandon their home near Muang Khoun, which had been flattened by US bombers a few months earlier. His father, a soldier, was fighting with the Pathet Lao against the CIA-backed Royalist forces led by Vang Pao. His mother and older brothers and sisters had been on the run in the forest for several months, living off shoots and berries. Eventually, they reached a limestone cave in the Annamite mountains, where they took shelter. The following year, the whole family was airlifted out of the battle arena by the US Air Force, along with other villagers, and placed in a refugee camp on the outskirts of Vientiane, where two of Manophet s younger brothers were subsequently born. Here they remained until 1975, when the Pathet Lao finally took control of Vientiane, after which they were free to return home on foot to rebuild their lives. A tenth and final sibling was born in 1978, but only nine grew up together because one brother had been left for dead on the battlefield during the chaos caused by the bombing.

2 Unexploded ordnance was an ever-present hazard in Xieng Khouang province, of which Muang Khoun had been the capital before it was destroyed. More than a ton of bombs per capita had been dropped during the war, many of them cluster bombs that failed to detonate. Any sharp impact was liable set them off, and farmers regularly lost limbs or eyes as they hoed their rice fields. Manophet s most harrowing experience took place when one of his younger brothers disturbed a cluster bomb while they were out fishing together. The force of the explosion blew out part of his brother s intestines, but he survived the accident and went on to make a full recovery. Manophet spent a short time as a novice monk, as is traditional in Laos. After finishing at school, he followed his father into the army, training at the facility in Viengxay near the Vietnamese border. He was the only recruit in his year to be offered a prestigious transfer to Ban Penh, a military facility in Xieng Khouang, on completing the course. But he grew disillusioned with the Russian army instructors and, having attained the rank of Captain, moved to a unit in Pakse in the south of the country. Here he contracted malaria which, though a common experience for a soldier, left him weakened and probably played a part in his decision to surrender his army commission. He returned to the family home, where his parents used traditional medicine to purge the malaria from his bloodstream. An attempt was made to arrange a marriage for him, but Manophet vetoed the idea. He worked in the family s rice fields, spending long days ploughing furrows with only a buffalo for company. This may be how his self-styled nickname, Lone Buffalo came into being. He was now at his lowest ebb. His dream of making something of his life was going up in smoke. Because his heart was not in his work, it was frequently not up to scratch in the eyes of his brother-in-law, who was in charge of the rice fields, and the arrangement became increasingly untenable. At length, he could take no more of the traditional Lao lifestyle and found work as a janitor at the government-owned Phudoi hotel in Phonsavan, which had assumed the role of provincial capital following the destruction of Muang Khoun. This was a post that required him to work long hours mopping floors and performing other menial tasks in exchange for board and lodging. There was no salary. Ordnance disposal teams of diverse nationalities stayed at the hotel, conversing in English when they needed to communicate with one another. Manophet became interested in this universal language and, with assistance from one of the consultants, started teaching himself English from a Thai textbook. At about the same time, one of his older sisters, who had married and moved away to Phon Hong, a small town half way between Vientiane and Vang Vieng, was approached by a group of Hmong as she was minding her stall in the market. The Hmong had fought predominantly against the Pathet Lao during the war, and the rift between the ethnic Lao and the Hmong had still not fully healed. These Hmong, now US citizens, had returned to their home region to celebrate Hmong New Year. They showed Manophet s sister a photograph of a man. Did she by any chance recognise him? She was confused. The man had a Hmong name, and yet he seemed to bear a resemblance to one of her brothers the brother who had been left for dead on the battlefield. She started exchanging letters with the man in the photograph, fearful that she was on the wrong end of a CIA trick to smuggle him into the country under false pretences. His story was that a Hmong soldier had found him on the battlefield and taken him to a cave hospital. When, after many months, he had finally been restored to health, the soldier and his wife, who had no children of their own, had adopted him and given him a Hmong name. He had no memory of his early childhood. His adoptive parents had been killed while trying to cross

3 the Mekong in an attempt to escape from Laos, where the Hmong felt unwelcome under the communist regime. He himself had crossed safely at a later date, however, and had then spent months in limbo in a Thai refugee camp. Eventually, an American Lutheran had stepped forward to sponsor him, and he had been flown to Minneapolis, where he now had a good job as a hospital administrator. The Hmong who had approached her in the market were students from a dance class that he taught there. The reunion finally took place in 1997, twenty eight years after the separation, when Manophet s brother was allowed to return to Laos for a visit. He bore two distinguishing scars that allowed his family to be certain he was not an imposter, one on his back, where the shrapnel that had wounded him had struck, the other on his ear lobe, which his father had slashed before leaving him behind on the battlefield. It was traditional in Laos at that time to slash the ear lobe of any person on the cusp of death. If, as in this case, there was no blood flow, it was presumed they would not live. At a stroke, Manophet s brother had gone from being an orphan without a single relative in the world to a man with with two parents, nine siblings and too many aunts, uncles, nephews and nieces to count. The following year, Manophet left the Phudoi and went to work at a newly opened guest house belonging to his friend Kong Keo. This was a risky move, but one that appealed to his entrepreneurial spirit. Tourists were starting to trickle in to Phonsavan, and he judged correctly, as it turned out that he might stand a better chance of turning his life around if he made it his business to cater to them. English speakers were few and far between in Xieng Khouang at this time. He built on this advantage by becoming an authority on the vast megalithic urns that littered the Plain of Jars, an area to the south of Phonsavan, which were the region s principal tourist attraction, and began to establish a reputation as a tour guide. Over the years, Manophet had visited a number of the ethnic minority villages in the area as part of a personal crusade to warn the children who lived there few of whom had ever

4 attended school about the dangers of picking up cluster bombs. When it became apparent that many tourists were more interested in the recent history of the Plain of Jars than the ancient relics from which it took its name, he knew where to take them. He could readily locate villages where 500-lb bomb casings were in use as seed planters or as structural supports for rice barns. He knew of villages where war tourists could watch war scrap being beaten into spoons, and could show them bomb craters that had been converted into fishponds. He discovered that they were fascinated by the story of his brother s return from the dead, and would invariably recount it. Realising that an ability to speak English was liable to become increasingly useful, Manophet began holding English classes for a handful of children in the front room of the house in which he was living. The project snowballed, and soon he had a school on his hands, which he christened the English Development School (EDS). By day, he was now a dedicated tour guide, with responsibility for looking after sizeable groups brought in by western adventure holiday companies, so he taught his students for an hour before work in the morning, and an hour after coming home in the evening. Scheduling soon became an issue, and on one occasion he was obliged to ask a tour group that had arrived late to sit in on his evening class. So popular was the experiment both with the tourists and the students that a visit to Mr Manophet s school quickly became one of the highlights on the tour companies itineraries. From the outset, the school was open to children of all backgrounds Lao, Hmong, Khmu. Manophet charged a nominal sum to help cover his costs, but was always happy to waive the fee if a student could not afford it, provided he or she was prepared to work hard. He was often asked to accept chickens, vegetables or knitted vests and the like in lieu of cash. Many pupils lived in far-flung villages and had to walk long distances each day to be present, or arrange to stay with relatives or friends in Phonsavan. One of these, a promising Hmong student was unable to attend classes regularly because living in Phonsavan for extended periods was too expensive. Influenced by the vital role played by the Hmong in his older brother s story, Manophet decided that the best way to solve this problem was to invite the student to live in his house as his son and give him a Lao name. In due course, he invited two of the student s brothers to join him on the same basis, and also formally adopted a boy from a separate, severely impoverished Hmong family, giving him four Hmong sons in all.

5 Manophet was a raconteur par excellence, a man of great charisma, and his reputation as a tour guide grew by leaps and bounds. He was particularly adept at understanding the way westerners thought, even though this was quite alien to the culture in which he had been raised. The Manophet Show, as one western tour guide mischievously described his routine, was invariably the high point of a trip to Laos as far as the clients of companies offering adventure holidays were concerned, and his remit was extended to cover the whole of the northeast of the country, including Luang Prabang. In 2004, he was mentioned by name in the Lonely Planet Guide, Southeast Asia on a Shoestring. One of the illustrious visitors that he guided was the late Ernie Brace, the longest-held civilian POW from the Vietnam War, who was captured in Laos and marched through to Vietnam, and who returned almost forty years later to retrace his steps. The school grew rapidly, to the point where Manophet was teaching for four hours a day. He added soccer to the curriculum with the stipulation that players could only speak in English while they were on the pitch and a capable team began to take shape. However, the school s future was suddenly thrown into jeopardy when he was informed by the authorities that the house in which he was living and teaching must be pulled down to allow the main highway through Phonsavan to be widened. By way of recompense, he was offered a nearby piece of land on which to build a replacement school. Two generous American tourists volunteered to donate the necessary funds, throwing in a minibus for good measure, in which the school s soccer team could travel to away fixtures. Manophet took up the offer to act as an interpreter for one of the organisations responsible for the clearance of unexploded ordnance in Xieng Khouang, work that brought in a steadier income stream than tourism. He worked with bomb disposal teams in the field, translating the Hmong or Lao spoken by the operatives into English, so that the consultants (who were typically Japanese or German), could understand what they were saying, and vice versa. He was hospitalised for three weeks after an unidentified gas started leaking from a bomb while it was being made safe, and it has been speculated that the after-effects of this experience hastened his untimely demise, though this is unproven. He became friends with the late Fred Branfman after Branfman visited Laos as part of a delegation sent by the American organisation, Legacies of War. Branfman played a key role

6 in bringing about the US Administration s admission that it had been bombing northern Laos for five years in spite of repeated claims to the contrary. Manophet knew of Branfman through his publication, Voices from the Plain of Jars, a collection of reminiscences and drawings that he had gathered from refugees as they languished in camps outside Vientiane after being airlifted off the Plain of Jars. This had long been Manophet s favourite book, as it provided unique insights into the impact of the bombing. Branfman, for his part, had only briefly set foot on the Plain of Jars, and was planning to pay Manophet an extended visit at the end of 2010 so that he could become better acquainted with the region. In 2008, the EDS soccer team carried off the National Day Cup, Laos s premier soccer prize, in Vientiane. This achievement captured the attention of a British tourist, who had the idea of flying the team to the junior world cup also known as the Gothia Cup in Sweden in Using the school s remarkable story as inspiration, and the knowledge that this would be the first time a team from Laos had played anywhere outside southeast Asia, he was able to persuade a group of corporate sponsors to put up the cash to pay for their travel and accommodation. The team duly flew to Sweden where it progressed to the latter stages of the competition and also won the fair-play award. Manophet was as excited as his students by the prospect of travelling overseas, having all his life been denied a passport by the Lao authorities, a handicap that had not prevented him gaining admirers in countries across the globe. Tragically, he was not there to watch his pupils distinguish themselves, however. He had died suddenly of a cardiovascular condition just two months before the tournament, at the age of forty. Christopher Whitehouse 2014 Christopher s novel Lone Buffalo is a fictionalised account of the life of Manophet. Click to order Order Lone Buffalo by Christopher Whitehouse