VANG VIENG, Laos -- The Central Intelligence Agency's "secret war" in Laos ended 50 years ago, silencing Lima Site 6 and other isolated airstrips which helped the U.S. carpet bomb this tiny impoverished nation during the regional Vietnam War.

Lima Site 6, set among Vang Vieng's jagged karst mountain peaks, is now a deserted stretch of black asphalt speckled with squashed trash, 90 miles (150 kms) north of Laos' capital Vientiane.

Debris on the airstrip's gravelly surface includes empty plastic waterbottles, a dirt-stained cotton medical mask, and a faded Queen of Spades.

The strip resembles an empty urban parking lot stretched into the exaggerated rectangle which allowed Air America to land and take off amid the karst peaks.

During the 1961-1975 war, the CIA's Air America flew thousands of flights each day, lifting off from more than 200 scattered covert Lima Sites -- military code for unimproved "landing strips."

Those planes transported Americans, Thais, and U.S.-led minority tribal Hmong mercenaries alongside the dead and wounded, plus "hard rice" -- ammunition -- and refugees.

Several veterans and other U.S.

Thursday, October 2, 2025, 5:30 – 7:30 PM
Columbus Metropolitan Library, Auditorium, 96 South Grant Avenue Columbus, OH 43215

Join this free film screening followed by a panel and Q&A, hosted in collaboration with multiple local organizations.

Gaza: Doctors Under Attack is a 2025 documentary on doctors working during the Gaza war, detailing the killings and torture of healthcare workers and attacks on hospitals by the Israel Defense Forces. This film screening and panel addresses the healthcare infrastructure and features different healthcare professionals with lived experience in Palestine. Baladna: Palestine Society of Columbus. 

Words fail me – but they’re all I have, or so it seems as I sit here at a table in my new apartment. They ain’t enough! Not as I read the news and feel . . . something . . . rise, politically and socially, and presume to be the American future.

Is this the rise of fascism? I use this word with uncertainty. I have never lived within its brutal purview and do not live within it now, as I write about the increasingly bizarre – and terrifying – presidency of Donald Trump. I feel no constraint as I write, no need to be cautious with my words. I feel no eyes on me, ever-assessing the loyalty of  the opinions I express. I feel no fear, only outrage, as the snarky and bumbling “supreme leader” wannabe tells us who our enemies are. Can’t someone shut this fool up?

But then I read the news and, often enough, learn there’s a further Trump transgression today, a further grab for authoritarian dominance. And I have to look deeply at this freedom I think I have and acknowledge that it’s vulnerable. If others – other Americans, other human beings – can lose it, so can I. I can become the enemy.