Mapping A Secret History
By Jessica Pearce Rotondi, Chair, Legacies Library and author of What We Inherit: A Secret War and a Family’s Search for Answers
Walking into the Geography and Maps Reading Room in the Library of Congress is like walking into the multiverse; you can follow city streets as they existed hundreds of years in the past, long before pavement and power lines swooped overhead; globes from an era when most of the planet thought the Earth was flat; or slide open a drawer and see your hometown as your great-grandparents knew it. It’s a reminder of our world’s impermanence and the ebb and flow of history.
It struck me, as I walked past entire rooms of static maps, that the only maps I see these days are in constant flux. Google Maps, my go-to while driving, is constantly being updated, overwritten: road closure ahead, use alternate route. It’s a map for guiding motion that’s constantly in motion itself. Even the subway maps I used ten years ago to navigate cities have been replaced by apps that suggest the most efficient route from point A to point B; I never even have to know what lies in between.
I was thinking about all of this as I followed my Legacies of War teammates into the rare map room, where our docent had laid out maps of Laos she thought we would be interested in – including one that had just arrived that week, so new to the collection it hadn’t even been catalogued yet. It was labeled simply “Route 9” I felt a strange pulsing behind my eyes. Route 9 was the highway my uncle was bombing the night his AC-130 was shot down by a Russian Surface-to-Air Missile. Route 9 was a vital artery in the Ho Chi Minh Trail that the North Vietnamese used to transport men and troops through Laos to Vietnam.
The map before was drawn “by an anonymous Vietnamese mapmaker, presumably after the conclusion of the operation.” I looked at the date: 1971. My uncle Jack was shot down in March of 1972, on the eve of the Easter Offensive. The lettering on the map was in Vietnamese, a language I do not speak, but the brightly-colored arrows drawn directly over my uncle’s crash site – or the place that would become his crash site a few short months after this map was drawn – spoke volumes. “Areas of blue diagonal lines indicate U.S. forces, and yellow flags represent North Vietnamese forces.” The place where my uncle disappeared from history was ringed with yellow and drawings of weapons.
What I want to say, “Run. Go back to base. Stay away.”
What happened: He was told to fly over the target, disrupt those supply lines, attack.
My uncle’s plane was shot down a little after 3:00 AM on March 29, 1972, near a village named Sepon just off of Route 9. The fourteen men on board Spectre 13 never saw their families again.
Forty years after the shoot-down, I followed a map my mother had left me after her death. It led to a place she had never been but had often dreamed of seeing: A small Lao village just off of Route 9 called Sepon.
Only that village no longer exists. Today, there are two Sepons: “Old Sepon” and “New Sepon.” The old village had to be almost entirely rebuilt after U.S. bombs like the ones my uncle dropped flattened it. The villagers I spoke to had taken refuge in the nearby mountains for years, abandoning their fields and homes. Craters still pock front yards. The largest is the size of a football field and sits directly in front of the school.
We draw maps to make order out of the world. To travel, to lay claim, to plan a point of entry – or a point of attack. The map I stood over in the Library of Congress was of a world that no longer existed, but the borders and lines drawn on it shaped the history of countries and, on a much smaller scale, my family. Looking at that map, I saw history in a way I had not seen it before.
That’s why I am thrilled that Legacies Library is partnering with the Library of Congress to highlight astounding maps from their collection. It’s a way to see history in motion, from the air, to see battle lines as they were drawn that led to a new geography on the ground. These maps are deeply tied to our mission of removing the veil from this “secret” history and explaining how we got from point A to point B and why. Sharing behind-the-scenes documents like these presents a window into the decision makers and power players who made Laos the most heavily bombed country per capita in the world.
Images courtesy Legacies of War.
